The gender gap in politics has widened substantially over the past thirty years, with women increasingly gravitating toward the Democratic Party and men to the Republicans. The Democrats have accordingly taken up a pro-female agenda and pushed for a number of bills that support women and punish men, such as VAWA, IMBRA and the pending Paycheck Fairness Act. Republicans, on the other hand, have never explicitly supported men, often engage in white knight posturing, and probably only get more male support because they are not in favor of taxing men as much.
There is really no party for men, so men tend to vote against the party that angers them. In fact, this is why the Democrats control the White House and Congress today. Men felt cheated and lied to by the Republicans during the Bush administration, and switched their allegiance in 2008, handing power to the Democrats. Now that the Democrats have had two years to remind men what they do when in power, men are angry at them all over again.
A poll recently released by the NY Times and CBS indicates that men are not only more upset about what the US government is currently doing, they are much more motivated to do something about it than women, who have expressed less interest in the midterm elections, as well as a good degree of confusion about the issues:
So far in this election, women are not nearly as attentive as men and express less enthusiasm about voting, the poll found. Men are more likely than women to fall into the category of voters who say they are paying a lot of attention to the campaign right now. They are also more likely than women to say they are more enthusiastic about voting in this congressional election than they remember being in past mid-terms elections.
The poll suggests that men are angrier than women, and that their anger may be more motivating than the sense of hopelessness expressed by women, particularly on economic issues.
“I’m confused as who to vote for,” said one of the poll respondents, Diana Rhoads of Hallam, Pa., a 59-year-old independent who voted for President Obama. “I just don’t know who I can count on to move us in the direction I’d like to see the country go. Frankly, the financial problems are beyond our understanding.”
This raises the question of why Republicans, if they really want to win, are ignoring their main constituency. However, perhaps more importantly, it points to the lack of a party that men can support without fatal reservations, and may suggest that the Republican Party is a dinosaur headed for extinction. If the Democratic Party is the women’s party, and the Republican Party is simply the party that isn’t the women’s party, then what possible purpose could it serve other than preventing America from becoming a totalitarian, one-party matriarchal state? Perhaps that’s something, but it isn’t much.
Unfortunately, it appears that the “Tea Party,” despite its grass-roots origins, is being usurped by attention craving and power hungry women. I can’t imagine that the Tea Party has anywhere near the support from women that it does from men, but it seems that most of its candidates and “spokespeople” are female.
How did this happen?
The problem is that politicians and political parties are always willing to explicitly support women where their interests are at stake, but I have never once heard a mainstream politician do the same for men. Because it is taboo to discuss men’s issues, they are simply never addressed, and inevitably the focus shifts toward women in every single issue in which there is some element of gender politics.
This is a big mistake. The way things are today, it wouldn’t make any difference if the media were to shame politicians or activists for bringing up men’s issues. Men would hear whoever did so, and overwhelmingly agree. They would vote for such a man (or even a woman, if she existed), just like they voted for Scott Brown in the race against Martha Coakley in Massachusetts to replace Ted Kennedy. Scott Brown explicitly supports fathers’ rights, and for his pro-men stance received a whopping 60% of the male vote, easily enough to cancel out the majority female support Coakley received.
A politician who wisely embraced men’s issues would not only win over more men, he would inspire them and motivate them to vote in numbers above what your typically tepid, vacillating politician could hope for. Also, it wouldn’t necessarily chase off women. Most women like a winner, and follow trends. Shrieking feminist denunciations could only make a politician look better.
It’s time for some politicians, no matter what their party affiliations, to wake up and figure it out. In the US, votes count, and those who support men will get more of them.
