Gender Politics

Wendy McElroy writes about the recent "Vaginas Vote, Chicks Rock" event:

"Are there are any registered vaginas in the house?"
"Step into your vaginas and get the vagina vote out!"

These were some of the comments shouted at the celebrity-packed "Vaginas Vote, Chicks Rock" night in New York City this September. Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem were among the laudables at the event that urged women to register to vote in order to promote "women's issues."

McElroy points out the idiocy of trying to encourage a group of voters whose only point of commonality is their sexual organs to somehow come to the polls and vote as a bloc:

Only if you advocate group rights and reject individual ones does it make sense to cry out for sexual solidarity in voting. Ironically, such a call reverses the political trend that secured the vote to women in the first place. Namely, the demand for inclusion in human rights. The demand by women to have their rights equally recognized so they were no longer in a separate legal category "with lunatics, idiots and criminals."

The early feminists who fought for true equality did not speak of "special interests." They spoke of human rights. The call for women to "step into their vaginas" dishonors the brave women who refused to define themselves as body parts and longed, instead, to participate fully in the richness of a broader humanity.