Why isn't it as discriminatory to vote for a woman "just because she's a woman" as it is to vote for a man "just because he's a man"? What difference does sex make? Who cares if the government is run mostly by white men or mostly by black women or mostly by purple dogs--it's the *ideas* that matter!

Bull. Shit.

Reading this piece in the WaPo brought to mind all of these annoying arguments that keep cropping up. And since if Clinton gets the Democratic nod (and believe me, folks, she will--you can say you heard it here first, 'kay?), we're going to hear EVEN MORE of this stuff, I'ma post a li'l explanation right now and you all can bookmark it and refer back to it as needed, 'kay?

1. Seeing gender/racial/gay/etc. representation as important /= voting for (or hiring, or admitting to college) someone "just because they're" a woman/a person of color. The argument itself is sexist/racist/homophobic, if you think about it for just a second: it implies that the *only* reason one would vote for a woman is because of her gender, and that being "a woman" makes one devoid of ideas--as if Candidate Girl is a cardboard cutout with boobs.

Folks who are happy to see a woman/a black man running for office, and want to vote for Clinton/Obama on those grounds, wouldn't vote for, oh, say, Phyllis Schlafly or Ward Churchill. Women and ethnic minorities are not all the same. They have ideas, just like the white guys.

2. Gender/racial/gay/etc. representation *does matter.* It would be lovely if it didn't, but we just happen to live in a world where, all other things being equal, a given woman's experience of America is going to be different than a given man's. Just as an Indian's, or a black person's, or a Filipino's experience of America--all other things being equal--is going to be different than a white person's. I know *that* black people are much more likely to be tailed by security guards while shopping in fancy stores, but I don't actually know what it *feels like* to be in that position. In theory, I think it sucks. In practice, it's probably a less urgent issue for me than a lot of other things. I'm all for gay rights, and I know that there are states that have laws making it illegal for employers to offer domestic partner benefits. I also know that some employers (universities, for instance) offer individual insurance packages to people as a way of trying to make sure they can make job offers to smart gay scholars. What I *didn't* know until an Actual Lesbian pointed it out to me--because it simply never occured to straight li'l gay-friendly me to think about, since it *never came up in my life*--is that these packages mean that gay academics earn less than their straight counterparts--because they end up spending a big chunk of their paychecks on "private" insurance, not to mention lawyers, in order to make sure their partners and kids have health coverage and legal protections in case something happens to them.

Hence, for instance, in the linked article, it's a woman representative with a young child who *just happens* to be introducing federal legislation to protect women's rights to breastfeed in public. Back when Plan B was getting blocked by the FDA, it *just happened* to be a woman who quit the FDA in disgust, and it *just happened* to be two more women, Senators Clinton and Murray, who stepped up and put a hold on the nomination process for a new FDA chair until the FDA stopped stalling. It *just happens* that the people who pushed hardest for women's right to vote were women. Yes, there were male suffragists, and god bless them. And there were women who thought that women's suffrage was unnecessary, and that the suffragettes were man-hating hysterics. But women--*all* women--didn't get the right to vote because men who had the "right ideas" gave it to them. They got it because enough of them stood up and demanded it.

3. We are not, contrary to what a lot of people would like to believe, brains on sticks. The idea that bodies don't matter, because ideas are somehow pure and universal and perfectly communicable, is itself, if you think about it, a sexist (and racist and homophobic, etc.) idea. Or at least, believing it perpetuates sexism, even if the person convinced of its truth thinks him- or herself perfectly convinced that All People Are Equal. Equality /= "the same," and (for instance), it is a simple fact that women are the ones to bear children, and that women bear the lioness's share of caring for children. Yet when we talk about these issues, we talk about them as peripheral to, rather than central to, human experience--if you "choose" to have a child, then the consequences of that for your life are, at best, something society as a whole "accomodates." Because the default, universal, brain-on-a-stick way in which we're all "equal" assumes that we're all autonomous individuals, and that being imperfectly autonomous (pregnant, a parent) is somehow an "aberration." Which is true--if you're a guy. If you're a chick, pregnancy/motherhood are pretty central to your humanity--even if the way that centrality manifests itself is that you remember to take a pill *every single morning* in order to avoid it.

This argument brought to you via a couple centuries of feminist philosophy. If you want to think about this stuff in depth, as opposed to getting the severely condensed web-friendly SG newswire version, go pick up a copy of The Second Sex, which oughta be required reading for everyone.


Bitch_PhD loves the header image, which is a (slightly altered) detail from "Simone de Beauvoir With Bear," by Gordon Lester, a former student and TA.