As a young, female twenty-something, financially stable and privileged enough to attend a college university, I already have access to more amenities than most of my counterparts around the world. I have rights and freedoms that many would (and do) kill for. As a woman, these rights become complicated when they enter the arena of American politics.
Recently, Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle said on air that young women don’t have the “life experience” or knowledge of politics required of them to be able to cast an intelligent vote at the polls. She said, “They’re like healthy and hot and running around without a care in the world,” adding later that young women should be excused from jury duty so that they can, “go back on Tinder and Match.com.”
While I personally take every fantastical Fox News remark with a grain of salt, this comment left me feeling especially baffled. The fact that a fellow female (albeit a staunch conservative) could claim her junior kin ignorant of the gravity of voting (or effecting political change) and in the same breath deny them the right to educate themselves in that right and on matters that affect them politically, financially and socially, is downright disgusting. It is a slap in the face to women regardless of their age, and a big, pejorative middle finger to the women who fought so arduously for the passing of the 19th Amendment. It is possible that the 43-year-old Guilfoyle forgot about her ancestors who fought against the patriarchal ideal that ALL women were incompetent in matters of politics, and should therefore keep their noses out of male affairs. Less than one hundred years ago, Guilfoyle would undoubtedly be missing from the anchor chair, for employing the very same logic used to deny her female counterparts their rights, pre-1920.
Straying from the sheer outlandishness of Guifoyle’s comments, it is interesting to examine the rationale for her ignorant outburst. Generally speaking, Democrats have used social media as a platform for scraping up young American voters and sending them to the polls. Though they do not use social media to discourage young Republicans from voting Republican, the transparency of their efforts to reach young people by promoting voting (for either party) works its magic all the same. Young Americans will tend to vote Democrat, because the Democrats have driven the extra mile to reach them, and attend to their political needs. Conversely, Guilfoyle, and the Republican party as a whole, take the road less traveled. Instead of encouraging all to vote, they discourage certain factions of the American public from voting, in order to secure a win for their party. Democrats and Republicans alike have different means for the same end. Politics now seems like one catastrophic illusion, guaranteed to leave Americans questioning who is behind the curtain, and what it all means to be a Democratic-Republic so uniformly divided on every trivial issue.
Regardless of the partisan-politics employed by both sides, Guilfoyle’s comments angered me to action, and inspired me to take a closer look at the candidates running for the senate seat. I wasn’t pleased with what I saw in our female representative.
But now it is too late, the ballots have been cast and the vote is in. Joni Ernst, Iowa’s newly elected Senator will commit an even more heinous crime than Guilfoyle, as she attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, prohibit state funding for abortions, and enact the Personhood Amendment (granting legal protections to a fertilized egg). In essence, Ernst would like us to go back to the 1950’s, to an almost comical era of female repression and forced social and sexual “modesty.” Historical proponents of the Woman’s Suffrage movement (and activists like Margaret Sanger of the 20th century Birth Control movement) are undoubtedly rolling over in their graves. The paradoxical idea that women have come so far to become active political members (on television and in Congress), yet their female constituents should allow those fellow female mavericks to take away their right to make decisions about their bodies and futures, is vexing. Women have come so far, to fall so short. After these midterm elections, I am left feeling discouraged and underrepresented, as a young voting woman, and as an intellectually inclined American. I feel as though the country is being taken on a twisted time-machine ride, where the journey ends at the beginning, and all previously repressed persons inevitably relinquish their freedoms once more.