Meet the Vagina Voters
Have you ever read a more squirm-inducing sentence than that? It appeared in a pro-Hillary piece in Dame magazine, written by a person with a vagina who intends to vote for Clinton because she also has a vagina. Let's leave aside the unfortunate image conjured up by that sentence ("You can hold a pencil with that thing?!") The bigger problem with such unabashed declarations of "vagina voting" is that they confirm the descent of feminism into the cesspool of identity politics, even biologism, and its abandonment of the idea that women should be valued more for their minds than their anatomy. Kate Harding, the vagina voter in question, isn't only going to vote with her vag—she's also going to tell everyone about it. "I intend to vote with my vagina. Unapologetically. Enthusiastically... And I intend to talk about it," she wrote in Dame. She thinks Hillary would be a great president because she "knows what it's like to menstruate, be pregnant, [and] give birth." So you're going to pick your leader on the basis of her biological functions, the fact she's experienced the same bodily stuff as you? Imagine if a man did that. "I'm voting for Ted Cruz because he knows what it's like to spunk off. And he knows the pain of being kicked in the balls." We'd think that was a very sad dude indeed. Why is it any better for a female commentator to wax lyrical about voting on the basis of her biological similarity to a candidate rather than any shared political outlook? The point of Harding's pussy politics, as I think we should call this biologism among some in the Hillary camp, is to say that it would be a brilliant, symbolic breakthrough if the U.S. were to have its first-ever female president. It would be "enormously important," she says. "American women have been bleeding for over 200 years"—again with the blood!—"and a lot of us have arrived at the point where we just want someone with a visceral, not abstract, concept of what that means." There's something profoundly sexist in this. Hillary is valued, not for her ability to think abstractly, which is the very essence of politics, but for what she represents viscerally—the visceral being, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, the bowels, "the seat of emotion." https://reason.com/archives/2015/05/03/meet-the-vagina-voters |
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