In a recent White House forum on women’s issues, President Barack Obama said, “There’s been a lot of talk about women and women’s issues lately, as there should be, but I do think that the conversation has been oversimplified.” The president went on to assert that women are not a “monolithic bloc” or an “interest group.”
The president’s investment in handling women’s issues by not approaching women as a voting bloc, ironically, consolidates women into a group that he is no doubt jockeying to woo in the upcoming election. His approach seems to be working. In a Pew Research Center poll, Obama is leading Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney by a 20-point margin among female voters (58 percent to 38 percent).
Although Obama’s rhetoric doesn’t express anything any socially conscious person wouldn’t already believe (women aren’t all the same – really?), over the past few months, his competitors have tried to divest women of their reproductive rights.
You may remember the Susan G. Komen for the Cure controversy in which the breast cancer awareness and prevention group planned to defund 19 of Planned Parenthood’s 83 affiliates around the country in what some people, including Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, saw as capitulation to anti-abortion pressures.
You might also remember Rush Limbaugh’s vitriolic – and illogically conceived – attacks on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student who testified in front of Congress about the outrageous cost of contraception and the fact that her school’s health insurance plan didn’t fund contraception. Fluke claimed that as a result, women on her campus were paying about $1,000 a year for contraception. Her testimony prompted Limbaugh to call her a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
You might also remember when the U.S. Senate was debating the Blunt amendment, a measure slipped into a highway funding bill that would allow employers and health insurance companies to deny women coverage for contraceptives.
After an enormous outcry from women around the country, Susan G. Komen did eventually refund Planned Parenthood. The Blunt amendment was also killed – just barely – in the Senate by a 51-to-48 vote. Perhaps the victories are a sign women’s rights are doing swell. However, as Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) was quoted as saying in a March 1 New York Times article, these attacks on women’s health are part of “a systematic war against women.”
It might sound radical, but it isn’t that far from the truth. In those three instances impinging on women’s rights, the pundits, politicos and politicians were caught slipping. They lost touch with the identity politics that make their subdued hatred so successful. Limbaugh’s attacks on Fluke were too honest. In a “post-gender” society, you never say “slut” – you imply it. If Fluke’s character were successfully compromised, she would have been thrown right off of Capitol Hill. Remember Anita Hill?
Perhaps the most detrimental systemic inequity present in these measures to limit women’s access to contraceptives and the right to have abortions is a historic masculine claim to ownership over the female body. Angela Y. Davis wrote in her book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, that, under English common law, “marriage resulted in a state of ‘civil death.'” Women’s bodies were relegated to confined domestic spaces. Their bodies were unique in that they could produce children.
Sustaining masculine control over women’s reproductive faculties relies on perpetuating negative images – the “slut” or the “jezebel.” Narratives of “decency” and “respectability” exclude “sluts” (i.e. women who engage in sexually liberating activities harmful to the male ego) from being considered respectable. What we need is a new discourse that accounts for the complexities of women and allows them to exercise sexual agency without reproach.
Michael Casiano is a senior American studies and English major. He can be reached at casiano@umdbk.com.
