While this election is over, the analyses and rundowns haven’t subsided.
Just like confetti flying at the end of the Super Bowl, what’s expected to mark the finale of the football season only rings in voices predicting the NFL draft. Then there’s the actual NFL draft. Then, NFL draft aftermath.
Trying to pinpoint what demographic is responsible for Romney’s defeat has lead to speculative, unfair pigeonholing. And it sounds a lot like squawking.
While race and ethnicity have an enormous spectrum of standpoints, the distinctions are proven to be a more accurate predictor of candidate preference than say, gender. And boy, has gender been the talk of this election. And pre-election. And post-election.
Referring to ‘women’ as a collective demographic (void of class, race, ethnicity or age) oversimplifies the gender. What about jobs and economy? Foreign policy? Federal spending? Health care?
According to some analysts, women are regarded as a demographic because they’re single-issue voters. In this election, women’s loyalties laid with free birth control, or the right to use it. This is why so many women voted for Obama. Specifically, unmarried women.
Of unmarried women, 67 percent voted for Barack Obama, with only 31 percent voting for Mitt Romney.
The reason?
A segment on O’Reilly Factor addressed this. It boiled down to the presumption that single women voted on a single issue: abortion and contraceptives.
Fox affiliate Gretchen Carlson noted that married women think “more about economics and the future of their children,” and abortion and contraception isn’t a huge part of their life.
And for unmarried women, it is? Is it assumed that unmarried women primarily focus on future pregnancy scares? And do espoused women become sterile after matrimony?
Legal analysts Jeanine Pirro echoed these statements, saying single women are “married to the government” and rely on the elected to take care of them (keeping with the heterosexual, traditional way of life).
Aside from the horror of attributing women with only caring about contraceptive and abortion rights, the logic doesn’t hold up.
An average of 61 percent of singles reported that they hadn’t been sexually active in the past year, compared to 18 percent of married people, according to a recent study conducted at the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. Do married women never think about contraception? Or, pardon the taboo, abortion?
But women are still paid less for the same positions as men, with female managers at 73 percent of what male manager’s earn. As a demographic, women are analogous in that they’re more likely to be poor, as stated in a U.S. Census Bureau population report.
Some women thought about equal pay at the polls. And taxes. And housing. And the national debt. A binder could be filled with the possibilities of what drove more than half of the population to their candidate preference.
Women make up nearly 15 percent of U.S. military forces—the highest it’s ever been. Earlier this year, thousands of positions working with on-ground combat units were added for women. When these women voted at the polls, perhaps foreign policy was on their mind.
Men and women on opposite sides of the political line shouldn’t distinguish their counterparts as one-note ponies.
At the Democratic National Convention in September, women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke was incorrect when she said the issue of contraception “affects nearly every woman.” It takes two to tango. When did contraception become solely a woman’s issue?
“Sex without making a baby every time is a winning proposition for men too,” said Amanda Marcotte in a recent Slate article about the subject.
Maybe analysts are grasping at straws to fill airtime. But honing in on more than 50 percent of the population and regarding them as a single demographic is no longer a rift between party lines, but something more oppressing.
