Objectify This

Well, I have to admit it: I’m kinda angry. Or to put it less originally, MY VAGINA’S ANGRY!

“Whoa,” you are saying as you back out of the room, “easy there, cowgirl.” I mean, really, that’s a joke: I feel my anger in my brain — you know, that pea-sized appendage. That’s also where I can feel the WASPs in the crowd cringing with my WASPy sense every time I use the word “vagina,” so I’d better stop and explain myself.

WASPs, please come back. I am a rational blogger. What I resent is hearing, over and over again, the concern and the real theorization that women are going to vote “with their vaginas,” as if we’ve reverted to some proto-Freudian universe where the uterus is still a guerrilla organ that floats around inside the body, attacking other organs.

I’m not going to lie: it would be pretty cool to have a woman in charge. The misogyny revealed during Hillary’s campaign was real, and it’s why so many of her followers are still pissed off. It’s clear that the old feminist maxim is real: the personal is political, and all of the cultural adages about gender that we accept and even laugh at are not, actually, going away.

Yet at the same time, while all vaginae are created equal, their politics are not. It’s clear that Palin is no Hillary Rodham Clinton, and her convenient possession of a vagina is simply meant, as Bob Herbert of the NYTimes points out, to be “the latest G.O.P. distraction. She’s meant to shift attention away from the real issue of this campaign — the awful state of the nation after eight years of Republican rule. The Republicans are brilliant at distractions. Willie Horton was a distraction. The chatter about gays, guns and God has been a long-running distraction. And we all remember the Swift-boat campaign.

“If you want a real issue, forget all of the above and revisit Monday’s front page of The New York Times. Hundreds of families are being forced out of their homes each month in Louisville, Ky., because of mortgage foreclosures. With record numbers of poor and homeless students, the public schools are struggling.

“The crisis has only been made worse by fiscal difficulties facing the schools. Higher energy and other costs, combined with a $43 million cut in state aid, have left the school system in a sorry state.

The reason this should be high on the presidential campaign agendas is that the problems in Louisville are widespread. As Sam Dillon of The Times reported: “As 50 million children return to classes across the nation, crippling increases in the price of fuel and food, coupled with the economic downturn, have left schools from California to Florida to Maine cutting costs.”

Right. I mean, when you’re given a choice between The Man with One Red Vagina and Blue Man Group, which one will you choose? Well, I guess it depends if you’re still cringing at the use of the word vagina. As Freud and some other dudes would no doubt posit (thanks, Brendan), this might have something to do with your repression of your origins.

At the same time, let’s talk about the issues at hand here. It is summarily insulting to expect that the women who voted for Hillary will investigate only the other candidates’ chromosomes, as if they were devout followers of the Holy Vagina, who, like some kind of Old Testament God, regularly smites the pro-choice and pro-life alike.

There’s some confusion about that issue, however. As Feministing points out, Fox News, that champion of all that is fair and balanced, recently ran a news story claiming that Palin was pro-choice, when in fact the woman is so pro-life that her 17-year-old is having a baby in four months– meaning that Bristol Palin will probably not graduate from high school on time, and may not attend college or achieve any career goals she may have had. ( I don’t particularly venerate careers in the traditional sense; i just don’t think that Bristol should have had to move directly from the positive pregnancy test to this outcome, without having a say in it– by the time her child comes into her legal majority, freeing Bristol to pursue other things full time, Bristol will be 35.)

This is important, because those of us who have vaginas would like to have some say in how they are used. In a move similar to previous attempts to make sure that men were in control “women were not being coerced into abortion” and to make sure that men were in control “fathers had a say in whether abortions occur,” there’s a new ruling that once again privileges other people over women who want to get abortions.

In this case, the Health and Human Services Secretary, Micheal Leavitt, wants to make sure that no doctor feels that he or she is being forced to provide abortion procedures against his or her will.

This is akin to the Department of Health and Human Services suggesting that the moral or religious causes for protest of abortion are, in their eyes, justified — AND more so than those causes that have been openly repudiated by the politicians who appointed them, such as euthanesia and stem cell research, neither of which has (as far as this blogger knows) recieved such special treatment.

"I vote for the right to decide."

In addition, this is redundant legislation, since doctors currently have the same rights to freedom of religion as everyone else, and also since those doctors whose employers might sue them for refusing to perform abortions are probably already working in situations where they have employers, and therefore are not the only doctors employed there, and can pass the abortion cases to other doctors.

Micheal Leavitt is also trying to use anti-abortion arguments against contraception — which the vast majority of Americans use at some point in their lives. Check the story at Human Nature. This means that everything from condoms to emergency contraception pills would be viewed as abortion. Sure, that’s what America needs: thousands and thousands of unwanted babies. They can push our cars when gas prices continue to balloon.

This is more evidence that the Republican party is not as big on individual rights as it might claim– not when they’re the individual rights of people they don’t agree with. Take, for example, Amy Goodman and the two other Democracy Now! producers unlawfully arrested at the RNC — for attempting, it seems, to produce a news report. All of this makes me vote with my vagina, if voting with my vagina means voting keeping my vagina free and brave, as befits a resident of the land of the free and home of the brave. And if that means voting for Bros before Hoes, sobeit.

On a related note, check out Frank Rich’s argument that McCain’s choice of Palin was “brilliant politics” because it diverts attention from his aging façade of being a “maverick” while being wedded, the majority of the time, to Bush, in a new kind of “love that dares not speak its name.”