The World O' Crap Archive

Welcome to the Collected World O' Crap, a comprehensive library of posts from the original Salon Blog, and our successor site, world-o-crap.com (2006 to 2010).

Current posts can be found here.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

September 23, 2003 by s.z.


When Losers Opine, Women Vote Democratic

Ah, the gender gap.  The term was invented in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was popular with male voters (who liked the idea of blasting things from platforms in space, and were also partial to chimps), but was less popular with women (who were tired of cleaning up broken space toys and chimp poop).  Since there are more women in this country than men, and women turn out to vote more than men do, it could be a big problem if your candidate doesn't appeal to women.

That's why, starting circa 1996, Republicans were delighted to find that if you measured the gap differently, it went away!  See, if you found statistics that showed that married women, by and large, vote the same as men, then you could write off the entire female sex and base your platform on manly policies that appeal to MEN!  If anybody said that polls showed that women weren't going to vote for your guy, you could say, "The married women are on board with us, and they're the only women who matter anyway, since THEY caught a man!" You could discount the rest as eccentric maiden aunts who "respond to liberal rhetoric about 'compassion,' 'caring,' etc., rather than to conservative rhetoric about individual rights and fiscal responsibility." Or else they are black and Hispanic, and therefore single mothers who just want to keep the Welfare checks coming.  Or else they are frustrated old maids, who look to the government to take care of them because they can't find a man to do the job.  You could then refrain from bothering about those vaguely repellent "women's issues," and get back to business as usual.

Dennis Prager must have been suffering from writer's block, since he decided to use this moldy old chestnut for his TownHall column this week.  But he found a way to make it denigrate not just women, but also single people, African-Americans, "nontraditional families," etc.  And he ticked me off.  So, let's take a gander at his key points, and see if they makes us want to vote Republican.  I'll jump in whenever I can't stand it anymore.
Single women, especially single women with children, tend to vote Democratic, while married women, especially married women with children, tend to vote Republican.
Why is this?
There are two primary reasons.
One is that women's nature yearns for male protection. This is a heretical idea among the well educated whose education is largely devoted to denying the facts of life.
Yes, gettin' educated just plants the dang-fool notion in their heads that they can take care of themselves, and that's why we ought to keep 'em barefoot, pregnant, and illiterate. 
But it is a fact of life that can easily be proven: Extremely wealthy women almost always seek to marry men who are even wealthier than they are.  Actress Jane Fonda had more money than almost anyone in America, yet she married Ted Turner, a man who had even more money than she.
Well, if Jane married Ted, then clearly Dennis is right about "extremely wealthy women," a statistically significant group, "almost always" marrying wealthier men, and this PROVES "the fact" that women want to be taken care of.  End of story.  This is bad news for extremely wealthy men, who apparently don't have what it takes to attract extremely wealthy woman and so will have to settle for just regularly wealthy ones.   But it's good news for women everywhere, who can now quit work and either let a man or the government take care of them. 
Given women's primal desire to be protected, if a woman has no man to provide it, she will seek security elsewhere -- and elsewhere today can only mean the government.  In effect, the state becomes her husband.
But the sex isn't very good.  And she asks it to come and kill spiders for her and to take out her trash, because she's just a woman and biologically incapable of caring for herself, but it never does.  And when the state lies to her, telling her that it's off to Iraq to seek weapons of mass destruction when it's REALLY fooling around, then the women gets very mad and wants a divorce.  Happens all the time. 
This phenomenon has frequently been commented on with regard to the breakdown of many black families. The welfare state simply rendered many black men unnecessary and therefore undesirable as spouses: Why marry when you can get more benefits from the state while remaining single (and get even more money if you have children while remaining single)?
Um, because the state sex isn't very good, and you still need somebody to kill your spiders?
And of course, it's only "many" black women who have children out of wedlock just to get benefits from the state, and it's only "many" black men who are "unnecesary" because they can't take care of their woman as well as the welfare check can.  But hey, now that we've neatly categorized the African-Americans. men AND women, and their reasons for voting Democrat, we can dismiss them and get back to our thesis of why women are inferior and need Republicans to look out for them.
For the married woman, especially if she has children, two primal urges work against her having a pro-big government attitude. Her urge to be protected, which is now fulfilled by her husband, and her primal urge to protect her nest are now endangered by the government, which as it grows, takes away more and more of her family's money.
And women are slaves to their primal urges, the poor dears.  Sure, they might read extensively, research candidates, and TRY to make an informed opinion, but when it comes right down to it, they will instinctually vote for the Republican candidate, since their biology tells them to protect their nest, which is being endangered by the state tax on golden eggs.

But let's recap Dennis's arguement so far: Women yearn for a man's protection, i.e, his money.  Single women vote Democrat because they don't have a man, and so look to the state to be their boyfriend.  Married women vote Republican because they have a nest and selfishly don't want to use any of their their twigs for the good of the group.  In both cases, women sounds like such twits that they shouldn't even be allowed to vote (which I bet is what Gary really thinks in his heart of hearts).

But let's hear his second reason:
The other reason married women are less likely to be liberal and vote Democratic relates to maturity and wisdom.
Just about everyone -- a man as much as a woman -- is rendered more mature and wiser after marrying. This is not an insult to singles. It was as true of me as of anyone else.
"Calling you singles immature and stupid is not an insult -- after all, I used to be as childish and unintelligent as you are, until I got married and became the wise, evolved being I am now."
If you're single, ask any married person -- happily or unhappily married -- whether or not marriage has matured them.
Ask them if marriage hasn't aged them overnight, rendering them feeble, crippled, and mentally incompetent.  And then ask yourself if these people should be allowed to vote.
Narcissism becomes far less possible in marriage than in the single state. And just as marriage decreases narcissism, it increases wisdom.
Despite the lack of any cited proof, and all of your experience to the contrary, just trust Dennis on this.  In fact, other than his anecdote about Jane Fonda, he hasn't provided any backing at all for this theories.  I guess we're just meant to accept them because they sounds so good.  But here's my competing theory, which I find even MORE valid than Gary's, since I cite a Ph.D:

Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics who has written several books on the subject of the differences in male and female communication, says that women primarily value intimacy and friendship, and seek to maintain connection with others by getting and giving empathy and support.  They "minimize differences, try to reach consensus, and avoid the appearance of superiority, which highlights differences." They are more concerned with being liked than in having status.  Men, on the other hand, tend to group themselves hierarchically; they are socialized to seek status over connection, and to value independence over intimacy.  They tend to see life as a contest in which they struggle to gain the upper hand, try to one-up competitors, and seek to keep others from pushing them around.

So, based on Tannen's research, my theory is that women vote Democrat because the party's emphasis on reaching out to others, helping those in need, opening the playing field to those of other races, eliminating some of the hierarchies between rich and poor, etc., appeal to women's needs for everyone to be happy. 
My theory further states that men who haven't worked out their issues from growing up tend to vote Republican because they are still trying to break away from their mother, need to prove their independence, and want to tell the government that it's not the boss of them.  They also want to preserve the hierarchies, because how else could they tell if they were winning over anybody else?  They are also likely to boss around their wives, and to have hissy fits if they learn she plans to vote differently from them (and thus render their vote impotent, limp, and unmanly). 

So, it's a "fact of life" that women naturally want to vote Democrat, because that appeals to their nuturing natures.  However, women married to men who vote Republican will also vote Republican, to avoid maritial dischord.  And mature and intelligent men will vote Democrat, because they realize that they can get more status by being mature and intelligent and playing well with others than by trying to suck up to Bill Gates by giving him another tax break.  And childish, stupid, narcissitic men who write columns for TownHall will tend to vote Republican, and will have wives who are stockpiling money in secret back accounts so they can leave their protectors and vote any way they want to.

That's my theory.  If Dennis thinks he can prove his over mine, I'm willing to listen.

Anyway, here's his big finale.
Am I implying that increasing one's maturity and wisdom works in favor of the Republicans and against liberalism and the Democrats? Absolutely. Wisdom and contemporary liberalism are in conflict. That is why the vast majority of people who change their politics as they get older (and presumably wiser) change them from liberal to conservative.
For all these reasons, the Democrats know how important it is for them to expand dependency on government and to promote "alternative families" rather than the family that consists of a married man and woman with children.
"For all these reasons (women are helpless, blacks are lazy, liberals are stupid babies, and old, rich people want to hang onto their wealth), the Democrats are passing out goverment crack and forcing people to watch all those new fall shows about 'alternative familes' who zing each other with snappy insults but learn important lessons every week.  Because, as everyone knows, a homosexual marriage with children does not promote wisdom and does not decrease narcissism because, well, it just doesn't.  And those single mothers who work full-time and then come home to the full-time job of raising their kids are pretty self-centered, what with their belief that they should be paid the same as a man, even though they aren't one.  And those other 'alternative families,' like single women who care for a sibling with Downs Syndrome, or retired couples who take in an elderly parent, or single men who adopt handicapped children, etc. are all a blot on the Republican landscape, and need to be eliminated so they don't vote Democratic, since they're just in it for the government handout, even though they probably don't get one.  But in any case, I have proven that I am superior to women, singles, homosexuals, poor people, people of color, and Democrats, and so I AM NUMBER ONE!" 

And with that Dennis's work here is done, and I'm going to bed.

3:29:49 AM  

No comments:

Post a Comment