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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Yes, we know. Women are going to decide this election. But why do activists have to resort to gyno-talk to get our attention?
Sep 15, 2004 | I have just about had it with the voting vaginas.
That was the sentiment running through my head -- for nearly three hours -- on Monday night, during the Vaginas Vote, Chicks Rock concert held at Harlem's Apollo Theater. The event was planned and sponsored by Rock the Vote, Planned Parenthood, the White House Project and of course V-Day, that vulva-licious organization headed up by Eve Ensler and her blessed freaking vagina.
My fidgety exasperation was emblematic of my growing ambivalence about this political season's mass pander to the women's rights movement. In case you've been holed up in PBS's Colonial House, here's the story: A very tight presidential election is upon the United States, and some rocket scientist-pollsters have stumbled upon the fact that American women feel alienated from the country's male-dominated, combat-heavy, healthcare-light political agenda. If we voted in huge numbers -- which we've been allowed to do for 84 years but have sort of given up on in recent decades -- women could decide the election.
The results of this discovery have prompted both parties to bombard us with enough statistics, action-plans, celebrity spokespeople and revolting "You Go Girl!" sloganeering to choke an aging riot grrrl. We've been addressed by the earnest Kerry girls and the giggly Bush colts, bland Laura and spicy Teresa. Sarah Jessica Parker wears an in-joke "Kerry" nameplate necklace, while Angie Harmon totally intends to vote. The Republican "W Stands for Women" campaign rests on the theory that because George Bush is pussy-whipped by a wife and two daughters, he understands women's issues better than his opponent.
And here at the Apollo, the argument seemed to hinge on a bunch of women slithering around the stage with swaths of red fabric doing interpretive dances about their hooches and saying things like "It's not a voting box, it's a cauldron ... stir it well, sister." That's what Ensler's Vagina Warriors were doing Monday night: undulating and moaning darkly about places to bury their daughters' afterbirths and imagining a world in which they are "forever unafraid of being raped by the clean-cutting bulldozers of capitalism." "I have no more tears to weep," said one of the dancers.
I could not agree more. Except that my frustrated, disappointed, fearful tears are not just about the way the world is being run into the ground by the current administration, but about the way my sisters have decided to respond. Maybe it's just overexposure: I've heard so much about the 22 million single women who didn't vote in the last election and the 50 million eligible gals who are still not registered that all the numbers are blurring. And so are the celebrity faces. I can't tell Rosario Dawson from Kathleen Turner, Toni Childs from Julia Stiles.
But that's not good news. Because I am a young woman, a single young urban woman, I am the person who must be reached, who must be inspired to go out and cast my ballot. They shouldn't even have to work that hard to get me, since as Julia Roberts once reassured Richard Gere, "I'm a sure thing." Long steeped in feminism, engaged in politics, I spent my youth wishing for the kind of cohesive feminist movement that had preceded me. Women need to vote -- this year and every year. Enfranchisement is a process that needs to be worked on, worked out, hammered into us. Women's rights are so powerfully under-attended to, so frequently ignored, that it really does sometimes make me want to weep. Since the sixth grade I have bristled every time one of my classmates or colleagues has begun a sentence with the words "I'm not a feminist, but..."
