Reuters: Gender trumps all? Vote-shaming, slut-shaming not so far apart

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2016/02/10/gender-trumps-all-vote-shaming-slut-shaming-not-so-far-apart/

f you want to lose young women, just scold them. That will offend them every time. And it’s precisely what two stalwart, old-school feminist icons did over the past weekend when each chastised younger female voters for not lining up behind former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president.

“A lot of you younger women think it’s done,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said of the fight for equality. “It’s not done. There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”

On HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Gloria Steinem seconded the motion, adding some girly retro quip about young women jumping on Senator Bernie Sanders’ bandwagon because that’s where the boys are.

I cringed when I heard them. It’s so not cool — as well as being downright counter-productive — for older women to try to shame younger women. Nothing is worse than that shaming business, the attempt to make you feel embarrassed, less than creepy in your skin. That is often the lot of women, of whatever age. We live in a culture that shames us all the time. We’re too sexy, not sexy enough. We’re sell-outs. We’re impure. The truth is: Vote-shaming and slut-shaming are, alas, part of the same continuum.

The young women I talked with were all offended by this. Even those who say they might end up voting for Clinton. “You cannot tell a young woman to vote for her gender simply for that reason,” my 28-year-old niece Martine Moore told me, “because that objectifies her again. You’re telling her, ‘Don’t use your brain, don’t listen to the issues and that gender trumps all.’ That’s condescending and we hate it.”

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