With only one week until Election Day, things are getting pretty hectic. Campaigns are still running strong, people are rushing to get their votes in early and countless cable news networks are reporting on anything and everything election-related.
Thankfully, amid all the chaos, Fox News was there to comfort the young women who are confused by all this voting business.
On Tuesday, “The Five,” one of many Fox News talk shows, delved into the gloriously titled segment, “Will The War On Women Backfire Against Democrats In Midterms?”
Co-host Greg Gutfeld implied that young women aren’t smart enough to vote conservative and therefore, shouldn’t vote at all.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, another co-host, even suggested that young women be excused from jury duty because of our apparent lack of life experiences. Or, more simply, because we just “don’t get it.” Instead of utilizing our rights as citizens, Guilfoyle said we should all “go back on Tinder or Match.com.”
This segment was just one of many efforts to discourage women from voting in the upcoming elections.
To put the bitter icing on top of this ipecac-filled, Fox News-themed cake, Bill O’Reilly also gave his two cents about the dangers of female voters last week. After declaring that America is “a much weaker country” since President Obama has taken office, he soliloquized about why exactly women vote Democrat.
Because women are too gullible and dumb to know what we want, we just go ahead and vote Democrat, which, in turn, is ruining the nation.
Before Fox News jumped on this hot issue, Kevin D. Williamson covered this topic on the National Review website. You might recognize Williamson from Salon.com’s “Can you tell the difference between National Review’s Kevin Williamson and a 4chan troll?” quiz, which immediately gives you a sense of perspective on his writing.
Williamson’s handy guide, titled “Five Reasons Why You’re Too Dumb to Vote,” actually only gives one reason — young women “get [our] politics from Lena Dunham.”
In a sentence that can only be described with an eyeroll, Williamson argues, “Our national commitment to permanent, asinine, incontinent juvenility, which results in, among other things, a million or so abortions a year, is not entirely unrelated to the cultural debasement that is the only possible explanation for the career of Lena Dunham.”
I’ll give you a minute to pop your eyeballs back in place.
Let me start off by saying the “War on Women” that Fox-News types think is imaginary is indeed very real. Abortion clinics are closing left and right, poverty has been increasingly feminized, and rape culture is seeping into our legal system. The mindset that this war is simply made up by hysterical feminazis is almost as bad as the war itself.
While Democrats are certainly not getting a pass for their part in America’s oppression of women, it goes without saying that conservatives have nearly erased 50 years of feminist progress. Beginning with everyone’s favorite actor-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been inching closer and closer to the right-wing and have regularly imposed fascist restrictions on women and their bodies.
After most of the year is devoted to badmouthing women, people of color, the LGBT community and pretty much everyone else, conservatives often struggle during election season when they realize they actually have to get people like us to vote for them. When they realize that they have narrowed down their target demographic so much that it’s practically nonexistent, conservatives panic — hence the numerous urgings of women not to vote by conservative media right before Election Day.
Women were granted the right to vote in America less than 100 years ago, and it’s a relatively new concept to the entirety of Western civilization. Comparing us to Lena Dunham and deeming us Tinder-obsessed fools will not discourage us from enacting our rights. Women will fill up voting booths nationwide on Nov. 4 regardless of Bill O’Reilly’s incessant bullying.
I lost hope with the Republican party a long time ago. I foresee that conservatives will continue to trash-talk young women year after year in an effort to get us not to vote, but I haven’t lost hope in my fellow women.
SidneyRose Reynen is a 19- year-old film and media arts sophomore from New Orleans. You can reach her on Twitter @sidneyrose_TDR.