With talk of Hillary Clinton running for president in 2016, I have begun to gear up for the inevitable sexist rhetoric that metastasizes from the private to the public sphere every time a woman gets involved significantly in national politics. I don’t doubt that one of the big questions, if Hillary or any woman runs for president, will be something to the effect of: what will Hillary (or any woman running) do for women/women’s rights/women’s issues?

It’s a slippery question. It’s also one I don’t like very much. But it seems to be a way of thinking about certain issues that is advanced by media venues and figures on the left and the right. This isn’t to say that there aren’t some issues that affect women more than they affect men, but rather that labeling important issues as ‘women’s issues’ actually puts women in a bad position, and compromises success in those issues.

Let me be clear, here. I think the most pervasive, damaging sexist belief is also one of the oldest ones: that women think in extremely different/inferior ways compared to men. You can see it pop up pretty much everywhere, from pop evo psych arguments about women inherently preferring bad/immoral/violent sexual partners to the ever-present debate over (primarily women) victims’ culpability in their own sexual assault. The trouble is that, by defining particularly controversial issues as ‘women’s issues’, we tend to give more ammunition to that view than we should, and in doing so score pyrrhic victories.

I’ll use abortion as a case study here. Abortion is one of those issues that perennially shows up in the ‘women’ section of whatever media outlet we’re dealing with; it’s a regular topic in The Daily Beast‘s ‘Women in the World’ section and The Atlantic’s ‘Sexes’ section, which is more or less the same thing. When abortion comes up in public debate, as it did this year with Wendy Davis’ filibuster in the Texas State senate, we end up talking about ‘women’s stories’, ‘women’s lives’, ‘women’s choices’, and so on. Davis’ pink sneakers became iconic of the femininity inherent in the discourse.

An objectively observing Martian would assume that the issue of abortion, therefore, has to do with women being denied legal access to abortion by men. After all, if access to abortion is a women’s issue, we would presume that women would be in favor of it.

But they aren’t, at least, not to that extreme. Put more simply: 100% of women are women, but only (roughly) 60% of them think abortion should be legal in either all or most cases. The 40% of women who believe that abortion should be illegal in either most or all cases aren’t the majority, but 40% is far from a nutty fringe.

And people notice that. So the question becomes: if abortion is a women’s issue, why are so many women opposed to it?

There are three potential answers here, and none of them are good for women as a whole. They are: 1.) women who are against abortion suffer from some form of false consciousness (which can be imagined as brainwashing, ignorance, self-hatred) that leads them to the conclusion that abortion is wrong;  2.) women who are against abortion are religious/values voters who ignore science; 3.) women who are against abortion are in some way right. Option one is the one I’m interested in critiquing here; two has its own obvious issues, and three means you’ve lost the argument to some degree, which should present its own problems. So, on the topic of option one:

If we answer that women who are against abortion merely suffer from some false consciousness, we immediately participate in the narrative that women are, at least in part, irrational, crazy, or stupid. This is a serious problem not only because it’s wrong, but because when women say it of other women, it’s even more severely impactful than when men say it, as it appears to have some identity-credence and/or insider knowledge behind it. Below, some examples.

From Jezebel,  on anti-abortion activist and possible character from Friday Night Lights, Lila Rose:

In a piece for Politico, Rose claims that she’s penned the manifesto of the anti-choice feminist, a modern woman who both demands equality yet refuses to participate in what she sees as the pornification of culture, which would be totally fine if she weren’t so hell-bent on forcing every woman to agree with her. Her quest to make a case for being pro-women but anti-letting-women-decide-what-to-do-with-their-bodies quickly descends into self-contradictory fiction, a scary bedtime story warning about all the ways in which sex — and by extension, sluts — ruin everything.

Emphasis mine. I know there’s blogitude in the rhetoric here, but still, the summary of Rose’s anti-abortion argument is couched in terms of insanity, hysteria, and irrational nonsense. It’s not an isolated case.  Jezebel also invites you to read about young, anti-abortion women with the headline ‘Meet the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Pretty, New, Super Crazy Face.’ Alas, the old ‘crazy’ canard. Here we are on Charmaine Yoest, anti-abortion woman:

Doesn’t she seem like a lady you could have a sensible conversation with? She does, but – judging from Bazelon’s repeated attempts at engaging her in rational discourse – you really, really can’t do it.

And a touch more on Michelle Malkin’s response to Chelsea Handler joking about her abortion on Conan:

Twitchy, which is a site run by 42-year-old sassy teen Michelle Malkin (a person my grandma would probably call “the poor man’s Ann Coulter,” which is pretty sad since Ann Coulter is already so terrible), has a rundown of Twitter reactions to Handler’s appearance on Conan, which range from shocked! SHOCKED! to FOR SHAME! to UR HATESPEECHIN’ MEH!

That article has ‘nutjob’ right in the title. (I think Jezebel is a good venue here because it is primarily written by women, is largely read by women, and has quick enough turnover to be very ‘responsive’ in its tenor. It’s also got a varied audience.) I need not quote the fifty billion articles calling Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin out as some permutation of crazy, stupid, or ignorant for their stance on abortion to round this point off.

Worse yet, the ‘false consciousness’ narrative now has such a firm hold on the abortion debate — each side accusing the other half of being insane — that the anti-abortion people accuse the pro-abortion people of thinking that women are stupid, too. Here’s LifeNews on Wendy Davis:

Davis spoke with John McCormack of the Weekly Standard after the speech and press conference. During the interview she said women who support banning late-term abortions don’t understand the issue of abortion. Essentially, Davis said pro-life women are too stupid to understand the totality of the issue of abortion.

There it is again. So now we have women on both sides either imagining other women as crazy/stupid/irrational, or being framed as imagining other women as crazy/stupid/irrational. As I’ve pointed out, this not only perpetuates the old narrative about women’s minds on its face, but bears a doubled impact because it is coming from women themselves.

But this is all an issue of frame. That is to say, these harms only arise because abortion is framed as a ‘women’s issue’, calling attention to the fact that some women and/or large chunks of women are opposed to the legality of abortion. The logic tree that forces us to either call women irrational, stupid, ignorant, or incapable of processing scientific fact is born of the framing of abortion as an issue in which women, by nature of their stake in the issue, should have a uniform opinion.

If abortion were framed as just a regular ‘issue’, nobody would have any real reason to ask why women in particular are opposed to it: after all, nobody sits down and asks why women are opposed to particular wage policies, or specific higher education policies, or drone strikes, or whatever — those are all just viewed as general public issues. Which they are. And in that case, we wouldn’t have to resort to engaging in these really anti-woman lines of rhetoric to explain why some women are opposed to abortion. We would just say: it’s a controversial issue, and some people are opposed.
In the meantime, the best takedowns of women who are opposed totally to abortion have just centered on their wrongness and/or misrepresentation of data, like Ned Resnikoff, on Lila Rose:

Despite Rose’s repeated claims to the contrary, she has never once provided “video and audio proof” of Planned Parenthood’s “institutionalized willingness to aid and abet such sex traffickers.” None of the videos she’s released have even hinted that this is the case. In fact, the letter which Rose today finally responded to directly is the very same letter in which Richards reported suspected sex trafficking to the FBI. No matter how much Rose tries to confuse the issue, the fact of the matter is that reporting evidence of crimes to the authorities is pretty much the opposite of aiding and abetting.

In other words, Lila Rose is a person with political motivations who does what people with political positions sometimes do for the advancement of their causes: lies, misrepresents, fudges, hedges. That’s all true, and this is a good example of how to proceed in the abortion debate while it’s still framed as women’s issue without strengthening the old ‘women are crazy’ narratives that still hurt women today.

Nonetheless, I hope we can slip out of the ‘women’s issue’ framing as time goes on. Abortion, birth control, and sexual assault are issues that arguably affect women disproportionately to our male peers, but it’s wrong to suggest they don’t affect men whatsoever, and moreover, cordoning them off as ‘women’s issues’ understates their impact and leads to some anti-women rhetorical tendencies. In 2016, let’s just ask: what’s Hillary done for the good?