And I'm not sure that the rest of us -- from Ensler to me to the audience to a nation's worth of female voters -- aren't being used, perhaps even mocked, in similar ways. It's like all this attention to us girls is a way of making fun of us that we don't quite get -- like American Idol William Hung. We think they are taking us seriously. And yes, they should be. But if we think this is going to last, we're crazy, because after Nov. 2, "women" as a demographic and voting bloc will stop being important to politicians. We have problems that go well beyond getting into voting booths for this election. If we care about ourselves, we have to find a way to put issues like equal pay and universal day care and labor rights and reproductive safety and freedom on the table in a meaningful way, every day, when there is no election coming up.

Maybe that's why women like Fonda and Steinem look so great in comparison to Ensler and the Vagina Warriors -- because they have been there. They have fought and been forgotten and abused and mocked and had to think rigorously and argue vociferously and been forced to base their arguments on more than writhing vulvic ecstasy. And as a result they have given us more.

Although Fonda did not appear onstage, Steinem did. At 70 years old, she walked with grace and spoke with a gravity that electrified the crowd. She joked about how as a child in Toledo she dreamed of "tap-dancing my way out of the Midwest and into the hearts of the American people" on the amateur stage of the Apollo. She soon realized, she acknowledged, that she was maybe not the Apollo type and that she was not a good tap dancer. But, she said, "if a crazy white girl from Toledo can make it to the stage of the Apollo, then we can win this fucking election."

Steinem's clipped deployment of the F-bomb was more galvanizing and shocking than the preceding three hours of clitorises and orgasms. She then read a witty top-10 list of reasons she'll be voting in November, including George Bush's failure ever to go to the Apollo, her suspicion that he has never been above 96th Street in Manhattan, and his inability to find time to meet with the black caucus in his four years as president despite three meetings with the pope. "I don't want to vote for someone I wouldn't hire," Steinem continued dryly, noting that the president "was a cheerleader with a low C average" who "couldn't find any oil in Texas." She noted Bush's federal judge appointments, his privatization of the prison system, his poor environmental record, and the fact that "he's never met an NRA demand he doesn't like." Mostly, she said, she'll be voting because "the suffrage and abolitionist movements gave their lives for the vote."

In short, Steinem spoke to the crowd as if we were educated adults. And it felt great. So crisp in comparison to the rest of the night, the rest of the media-fueled frenzy over wooing women. Steinem seemed to know how to strike the only tone that might carry this energy past the election. Because if we reduce everything to the flaccid vagina T-shirts and reductionist, sex-positive one-liners, we are doing our best to ensure a fate I already fear: that as soon as this election is over, we will be forgotten again.

In fact, I was so moved by Steinem and her eloquent, hard-edged comments that it made it all the more difficult to return to Ensler's final explosion, in which she read the dictionary on the spelling of VOTE: "Voracious! Vociferous! Vitamin! Vehement!" "Oppose! Out of office! Overcome, overflow, orgasm!" "Talented! Tantalizing! Turn out! Texas!" Mysteriously, she didn't shout any e-words, instead returning to her favorite letter, and yelping in alphabetic ecstasy, "Vulva! Vulva! Vulva! Vote!"

Oh. My. God. Make it stop. Talk to me about healthcare and the war and labor laws and Mideast politics and the threat of nuclear force in North Korea and job outsourcing and the price of education and how we're going to take all this money being spent on big shows at the Apollo and use it to revive a serious multiracial, multigenerational coalition of people dedicated to exploring gender equality. By all means talk to me about sex -- about men and women and love and violence and gender representation and body image and safety and issues of intimacy.

But please, please stop telling my vagina to vote.

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