Alexa Nicolas | Obama: One for the girls

Until this year, I thought we had gotten rid of gender inequality. I thought I lived in a post-feminist world where men and women were equal.

I knew my generation would have to fill some gaps in the professional world by occupying positions in science, business and politics. But the idea that there were political issues exclusive to women baffled me.

It still baffles me.

The idea of “the women’s vote” seemed absurd. There is no ideology that dictates how big or small women like their governments. There is no unified economic position that all women share.

Even though women represent every socioeconomic status, education level and religion — our gender has become another way to polarize the polls.

Two weeks ago, the Obama campaign sponsored an ad featuring Lena Dunham that made me feel prudish. The ad — doubtlessly intended for the “Girls” demographic — likened voting for the first time to losing your virginity.

Dunham starts off coyly. She speaks directly to the camera, telling fans: “Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy.”

She lays out her criteria — that your first time should be with a guy who cares about women, health insurance and birth control — before getting to the specifics.

It’s only halfway through the video that she mentions voting. Only at the very end do we realize that she’s describing the first time she voted.

“It was this line in the sand. Before I was a girl, now I was a woman,” she recalls. “I went to the polling station, I pulled back the curtain. I voted for Barack Obama.”

The ad made me squeamish.

For the first time, I found myself in a camp with conservative pundits. I found myself appropriating the conservative philosophy of limited government regulation to my sexual choices.

Thank you, Obama, for perpetuating a fairytale-esque “first time is special” narrative and demeaning my vote by simply relating to me through sex. Thank you for bolstering yourself as a candidate by exploiting my generation’s attitudes towards “sexual freedom.”

In this election, sex is obviously the only thing I care about.

I can’t help but think back to last spring, when Rush Limbaugh called a Georgetown law student a “slut” for supporting health care measures that would include contraceptives.

While Obama is trying to cast himself in contrast to conservatives by entertaining the idea of sexual choices, he similarly typecasts young people by their sexuality.

The ad also prompted me to think of women’s issues and the way they’ve been framed through both parties’ rhetoric in the past year.

Why, in this election cycle, do I feel like my vote has been bartered for simply because I’m a woman?

Women represent 52 percent of the electorate. Women also comprise the majority of those who receive Medicare, social security and other governmental program benefits, according to NPR. This, supposedly, means that women have a more “favorable view of government.”

But it’s dangerous to make generalizations about women. Obama has tried to change the conversation. This April, in a Wall Street Journal-sponsored conference about women and the economy, Obama urged his audience to realize that “women’s issues” are “family issues, they are economic issues, they are growth issues, they are issues about American competitiveness. They are issues that impact all of us.”

Yet aggressively targeted ads to women that push the conversation onto “women’s issues” detracts from that sentiment semantically. In an analysis of political advertising, the Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group has identified an abundance of Obama ads centered on women’s reproductive rights in recent weeks. The study suggests that Obama is strategically campaigning and catering to women to maintain his edge.

But it’s hard to blame Obama for using polarizing rhetoric to talk about women when the Republican Party has become synonymouswith out-of-touch men. Men like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock who delegitimize women’s experiences by undermining rape and, specifically Akin, who plainly deny scientific facts.

Thankfully, today marks the end of our collective bombardment with Romney Facebook spam, Obama emails, Twitter updates and general election news. But we shouldn’t let the conversation about women rest until the next election cycle.

Alexa Nicolas, a former 34th Street editor, is a College senior from New York, N.Y. Her email address is anicolas@sas.upenn.edu “The Fine Print” appears every other Tuesday. Follow her @____Alexa___

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