voting with your genitals: part 1

Last updated on: March 3, 2016 at 2:49 pm by Rebecca Bratten Weiss

voting with your genitals: part 1 2016-03-03T14:49:44-04:00 Rebecca Bratten Weiss

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I would love to have a woman for president, but am not supporting Hillary Clinton. This is not because she is a democrat; nor because she seems awkward and cold; nor is it even because she is pro-choice. Party affiliation runs counter to my loyalty to Christ, as well as my freedom as an intellectual. And, as a woman whose profession involves public speaking (hours a week in the classroom) I ran very early on into the gender prejudices that make women feel as though we are tangled in a perpetual contradiction: we’re expected to be warm, empathetic, pretty, and feminine (but then are criticized for being weak or emotional) – and we’re also expected to be authoritarian, rational, professional, and genderless (but then are criticized for “trying to be men”). So it’s understandable that Clinton would often seem awkward and cold, given that she’s being asked to walk a fine line (and in high heels, too). And lastly, while I am pretty radically pro-life, I think the present political distinction between pro-life and pro-choice candidates is vague, simplistic, and largely irrelevant to actual numbers when it comes to abortions (see my earlier piece on why we need to look differently at abortion causes). If I thought Clinton promoted policies that would result in the least number of abortions happening, I would consider supporting her.

I promote candidates whose policies are good for persons – or, if there’s no one I can legitimately promote, I will at least give qualified support to those whose policies lead to the least harm. And I do not think Clinton’s policies are good for persons, and I know from her record that her policies do harm. But that’s not the main topic of this piece.

While I disagree with Clinton supporters, I am not going to accuse them of “voting with their vaginas.” This is a gendered insult implying that women are incapable of thinking objectively about politics, that women are “hysterical” (also a gendered insult, since “hysteria” comes from the Greek word for “uterus”). It also implies that the vagina is unreliable, emotional, irrational, as though the penis truly were some towering monolith of logical thought. Jacques Derrida coined the term “phallogocentrism” to designate the privileged place of the male / masculine (phallos) in the construction of meaning (logos), and when women are accused of voting with their vaginas, this privilege is very much at work.

It’s also a rather ironic criticism, since for the majority of western history all the voting was done by men, for men. Were these men all voting with their penises? And if so, were they doing it in a logical, rational manner? Does our history present us with a glorious parade of prudent and virtuous rulers, up until the time that women got involved?

I am not one of those naive feminists who believes that women would do things better, and I am sure there are many Clinton supporters out there who fall into the trap of thinking that she’s preferable simply because she’s female – but keep in mind, for centuries, men thought other men were preferable to women simply because they were male. There are many who still choose political favorites on the basis of their maleness, and who think women are incapable of leadership.

Most of us, male and female, often feel obligated to play some predetermined societal roles and thus recapitulate biases about sexual / gender identity. Sometimes we assume different roles for different contexts. Maybe if we think more about how to act as persons, and less about how to imitate types, we can have a healthier political discourse?

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