Women Voters Aren’t Contestants on The Bachelorette
In the wake of the contraception debacle, the punditry has been vigorously debating which presidential candidate women are likely to vote for, and what GOP candidates should do to get the “women’s vote.”
In the process, columnists and headline writers have been vastly enjoying a metaphor that uses language to describe women’s opinions about male candidates that implies dating rather than voting in an election.
In some cases, the metaphor is subtle, like an ABC News article that says that a “thrice married Newt Gingrich,” was “resoundingly rejected, in particular, by women,” or an article on CNN.com that says, “Romney is headed for defeat because his party is unattractive to women.” Or the utterly too common-as-of-late headlines about how various presidential candidates have to “woo women.”
In other cases it’s far from subtle, like two Washington Post opinion articles that clearly compare women voting in elections to dating.
Last week, Kathleen Parker wrote an op-ed with the headline, “Are women just not that into Mitt?”
She writes:
Recent polls show single women under 50 scrambling back into the warm embrace of Barack Obama after a brief flirtation with the Republican boy band - Mitt, Rick, Ron, and Newt.
Then on Monday Michael Gleason in another op-ed for the Washington Post titled, “How Romney can solve his woman problem” he writes:
The composite Republican candidate - reflecting the party’s ideological mean - has been harsh on immigration, confrontational on social issues, simplistic in condemning government and silent on the struggles of the poor. How many women would find this profile appealing on eHarmoney?
Whether subtle or overt, this metaphor is extremely damaging to women. It implies that women make their decisions about the presidential candidate they will vote for based on who they find more “attractive” instead of who they believe would do a better job running their country. Furthermore, this metaphor is not applied to male constituents.
We doubt that columnists would write that a woman running for office needs to “woo men” or whether men consider what female candidate’s eHarmoney profiles would look like. (And please don’t take this as a suggestion to start!) We just ask that columnists and other writers treat women voters with a tad more respect than turning them into metaphorical contestants on The Bachelorette.
Published by Kate McCarthy on 04/11/2012