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March 15th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Actual women—instead of phony gynecological issues—pervaded the last
election. Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle
Obama, Katie Couric and even Tina Fey can each credibly be said to have
changed the outcome of the 2008 presidential election, as Rebecca
Traister documented in her rollicking chronicle of that race, Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women.
And those were just the women at the podiums. In Traister’s account,
each campaign hired women aplenty on the understanding that they could
help their candidates, in one way or another, to attract voters. Got
that? Women didn’t come around to discuss obscure lady matters, but to
help campaigns win votes.
Yet this time around, genuine women have disappeared, in favor of sex
talk smuggled under the rubric of “values.” The conversation recalls
nothing so much as the days when the nightly news shows couldn’t stop
running pseudo-health segments that featured male reporters fondling
silicon breast implants. They’d cluck over their hazards and fondle away
at the translucent synthetic protoplasms. Today’s fondlers of
ultrasound wands seem no less prurient.
It’s time we sidelined the fine points of obstetrics from public
discourse in an election year. Just as girlie magazines are marketed to
male readers, public discourse that features women’s body parts should
be clearly labeled—as Playboy used to be—”Entertainment for Men.”
Transvaginal probes? Entertainment for Men. Interstate abortions? Entertainment for Men.
Single-sex entertainment is just fine, as far as it goes. But
“transvaginal” anything and “interstate abortions”—no matter what side
you’re on—don’t count as social issues. This stuff is arcana, and the
rhetoric associated with these topics is third-order porn, and an
occasion for (mostly) male commentators, politicians and satirists—and I
mean you lefties too, Jon Stewart and Garry Trudeau!—to perseverate on gynecology in a weird O.C.D. way.
It’s creepy.
Really, the zeal with which male politicians of all stripes make
politics sexual is disconcerting. Last week Barack Obama placed a
personal call to console Sandra Fluke, asking the law student and
advocate of birth-control subsidies if she were “OK” in the days since
Rush Limbaugh incoherently deemed her platform akin to sexual
promiscuity. Limbaugh had likened Fluke to people who are paid for sex,
and likened taxpayers to her pimps, or some bunk like that; Obama aimed
to redeem a 30-year-old woman by comparing her to his daughters, ages 10
and 13, who evidently need his protection from bad men who use bad
words.
Didn’t this seem strange? It drove what should have been a non-erotic
conversation—about health and money!—back into the key of sexual
melodrama, with Dudley Do-Right Obama saving Maiden Fluke from Rake
Rush.
The way Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney wax gynecological
is weirder still. And, come on, Ron Paul is an actual gynecologist. They
all get right into it, gunning to destroy Planned Parenthood and
casually discussing “rape and incest”—limit-case exceptions to an
abortion ban that doesn’t exist—as if these far-fetched scenarios served
any polemical purpose except to name-check sexual trauma.
Fortunately, women treat these fake-clinical spiels as neither
appalling nor exciting, like Playboy itself. Maybe that’s because those
of us who have annual physicals don’t cherish the notion of rehearsing
the particulars of the ultrasound—or the speculum, for that matter. The
topic’s cashed even for humor.
Nor do women seem to be engaged in the psychedelic philosophical
seminar, led by master logician Limbaugh, of whether employer-provided
birth control is tantamount to whoredom. Instead, according to a
Bloomberg poll published Wednesday, some 77 percent of women don’t believe that birth control is a fit subject for any kind of political debate.
Is birth control a talking point for sluts and prostitutes? Or for good
patriotic women in public life? Neither! As a political topic, it’s a
non-starter.
It’s no surprise that Terry O’Neill, of the National Organization of Women, wants politicians to “get out and stay out of women’s wombs,”
but she should retire her incendiary anatomical language, too. It’s
just not what voters care about. Exit polls in the primaries suggest
that Republican women tune out when male candidates start yapping about
uteruses and cervices. As Kate Phillips and Allison Kopicki put it
Tuesday in the New York Times, “All of the talk about birth control and
abortion laws seems to have had little effect on the ways women are voting for the two leading Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.”
New idea: no more examining-table politics—not transvaginal,
transtesticular, or any other kind. Four years ago, with the exception
of a brief discussion of Sarah Palin’s reproductive decisions, the
campaigns steered clear of fake-clinical gibberish. Perhaps we’re less
eager to talk gynecological smack when there are real women around.
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