What the hell is WRONG with people?: March 2008 Archives
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.
