Note to Everyone: Grow Up.
So I read this article and the 500-odd Comments Of Outrage following. Good grief. Do we have to have this conversation again?
Disclaimer: men and women both play into gender stereotypes. Alert the freaking media--oh, wait. That's why I'm writing this. I think the Allen article loses focus halfway through and so the larger point that I think can be made here--that if you want to be taken seriously as a voter you should act serious about voting, particularly if you're female (and it doesn't matter whether or not that perception is fair, because apparently the perception of women voters as unserious persists)--gets lost in her digression into statistics about women drivers. And the whole thing devolves from there into Outraged Comments and Proclamations of Self-Hating Misogyny and Armchair Psychiatry! Whatever.
Here's my take: if you're voting for someone because they make you swoon, that's your right as an American citizen. However, don't be surprised if, after you proclaim your undying love for the candidate what makes your tiny heart go pitter-pat, you hear a faint buzzing sound coming from the direction of Susan B. Anthony's grave. Because I'm thinking that after hearing your vapid nonsense, the corpse of our most famous suffragette has launched into a truly epic fit of spinning.
Let's see. We have a woman who fought valiantly to prove that women weren't too addle-pated or easily swayed by emotion to handle the serious responsibility of weighing issues and voting for our country's leader; and now, less than a century later, we have the Tiger Beat crowd shrieking and passing out at political rallies.
Awesome. On behalf of the sisterhood, might I suggest that you people grow the hell up? Or, if you insist on empowering yourselves by acting like 14-year-olds at a boy band concert, then might I suggest that you save your outrage concerning the inevitable articles bemoaning the unseriousness of women voters? 'Cause you're loading those guns yourselves, ladies.
I find it interesting that the choices are between Sens Clinton and Obama. What happened to those women who are conservative/Republican?
That said, I was pretty appalled at some of the implications of the article when I read it - there ARE actual differences between men and women, and only a fool would say otherwise. The study of what those differences are and how they manifest is interesting stuff, although there's a lot more anecdote than science there right now. However, the article takes the approach that men are superior to women, and this too seems obviously stupid.
thegameiam -
Yeah, that's where the whole essay goes off the rails. I mean, I can understand being annoyed with the focus on fundamentally unserious reasons for picking a particular candidate--I think the focus is on Clinton/Obama b/c that's where the real race is now during primary season--but one irritating thing is no reason to toss your entire gender under the bus.
I'd like to say something vile here.
Most women (60%, the news magazine non-watchers) vote like men. And they all realize that the price of this vote is that a huge bloc of moron women also vote.
It's too late to repeal women's suffrage. But perhaps some self-awareness and ridicule ought to be tried in the magazine shows, to try to get the percentages down.
The root cause is that men's and women's interests are different, which leads to differences in how time is spent totally absorbed in what. From which stereotypes develop.
Derrida (_Choreographies_) suggests that the proper employment of women's urge to complexity has not been found ; when it is found, then it will be taken seriously, and feminism will finally have found its place.
I know any number of women who voted for Bill Clinton because (these are their literal words) "he's soo cute!".
A beautiful woman may make a man do crazy things, but you'll never hear a man say "Kathy Ireland's a real hot babe, let's put her finger on the big red button".
I think these gals have the right idea about voting...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uPcthZL2RE