This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Emerson chapter.
I’m not the first to admit that I’m not crazy about any of the presidential candidates for the upcoming 2016 election. There are plenty of things to worry about. For one, Hillary’s secrecy and her relationship with Wall Street is extremely concerning. Bernie, although he has the catchiest slogan, his foreign policy, especially around the Israel Palestine conflict has never sat well with me. Forget about any Republican candidate who is strongly opposed to Planned Parenthood, and therefore opposed to women healthcare. And Trump, well we all know that story. So, basically, I have no one to stand behind and support.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t care, though. I publicly support Hillary Clinton and have no doubt I will vote for her in November. Beside the fact that most candidates, other than Clinton, do not understand the need of Planned Parenthood, I know that she is the most qualified. I have my reasons for supporting her. It’s disheartening, however, when I hear other women talk about women who support Hillary.
I’ve heard:
“You’re not a feminist if you vote for her.”
“You’re uneducated in politics if you vote for her.”
“You’ll ruin the country if you help her win the election.”
The most disturbing thing I’ve heard, however, is:
“You are only voting for her because she has a vagina.”
I’ve seen several articles about this phenomenon, but never truly believed it until seeing it first hand. Now, when I scroll through my Twitter feed, I start to see the problems.
What’s the problem? It’s telling women to stop being stupid and actually think before supporting a candidate, their candidate. I’m not saying that people aren’t entitled to their opinions, but the “voting with your vagina” argument just opens up a whole other can of worms.
Sure, there are plenty of women who support Hillary in the hopes of getting a woman in the White House, but does that really mean that we should assume they don’t have their reasons? Think about women’s reactions in the 2008 election to Sarah Palin. Wouldn’t these vagina voters adore her, based on the sheer fact that she is also a woman? Needless to say this argument is already flawed on the fact that Sarah Palin didn’t end up in the White House.
The next step would be that women don’t support Republicans, especially female Republicans who are still manipulated under the patriarchy umbrella. This is also not fair. So many women have written—quite frankly—rude articles toward women who support Republicans. This is just as bad. Why are women attacking each other as if their personal beliefs are an injustice to the movement against the patriarchy? Sure, I don’t agree with any of the Republican platforms, but I still have to respect the opinions of others.
All these offensive assumptions are rooted somewhere. Maybe it lies in the fact that Hillary is not as “revolutionary” as some women wanted her to be. She has been described as a man and a nutcracker: The candidate without a penis. Would this even be an argument to not vote for someone if there were other female candidates, as there should be? Absolutely not! How can any women get into politics when they see how difficult it is to break away from your gender when trying to run for office? Whatever your opinions may be of Hillary, she’s a great example of how hard it is to be a woman in politics these days. Perhaps it is time that women understand this hardship and realize that if we stopped placing the worth of a vote on gender, and instead focused on things that really matter, maybe we would have more female representation in politics.
Vote for who you want to vote for. Support who you want to support. But stop telling yourself you are not those “bandwagon uneducated women who understands politics unlike the rest of them.” It doesn’t make you sound smart. It makes you sound foolish.