According to this, only 4% of voters in 2020 were black men (which sounds low), but 19% of them voted for Trump. If that needle moves just a little bit in states like PA, WI & MI, that could also help swing the election.
Female turnout variation from election to election is not that important, though, is it? If we’re looking at sex-linked differenced in candidate preference, what will matter in 2024 is not whether female participation is higher than female participation in 2022, but whether it is higher than male participation in 2024.
Women who are paying attention should vote overwhelmingly for every Democrat across the board. It’s life and death at this point— women with ectopic pregnancies in some states are bringing suit (or dying).
A trending question on search engines is “can my husband find out who I vote for?”
Calling people male or female makes me think breeding animals dogs, horses, etc. It just feels demeaning. It seems more so for women because certain men have historically used “female” in degrading ways.
I understand terms like female can feel insulting, just like calling Kamala Harris a girl is insulting.
I don’t want to derail the thread, its just that terms like ‘men voters’ or ‘women voters’ feel grammatically incorrect while male voters and female voters sounds more correct.
Meanwhile phrases like ‘voters who are female’ feels much more degrading than the phrase ‘voters who are women’.
Meanwhile ‘men’s vote’ and ‘women’s vote’ sound correct, just less accurate than male vote or female vote.
Female vote sounds like a description of the overall womens vote. Female voters sounds like an individualistic description that could have nothing to do with voting patterns
Its too bad George Carlin is dead, he could do something with this.
Thanks for breaking this down. Begging some forgiveness from the mods for briefly continuing this line (hoping that we can go back to polls and statistics soon!)
My sense is that “female” as a noun is always problematic. Women are people; females are chattel.
“Female” as an adjective is typically fine, especially when paired with “male” as a descriptor.
While no one in this thread has used “female” in quite the problematic way that @Sylvanz noted above, there are many sentences that could have be easily been reframed to speak about women as people.
In the zeitgeist of this post-Roe election where women are being denied emergency care to placate religious zealots who value a union of haploid cells more than an actual human; where women (and girls) are being forced to carry pregnancies from rape and incest to term, where women are at risk of sepsis from carrying unviable fetuses to term, where women cannot decide to terminate a pregnancy that will end in stillbirth or a painful death of a much-wanted child in a way that preserves their health and moral dignity, where women are at risk of orphaning existing children or losing hope for future children because they have to travel to another state when they are bleeding out from an ectopic pregnancy— In the context of a national conversation where JD Vance agrees with a statement about “the purpose of the post-menopausal female” — in this context, seeing “female,” even as a properly used adjective, plastered across the screen is a reminder of our lost agency as human beings, as people, as women.
I’m a prescriptivist at heart and hold precision in language in high esteem. But I’ve come around to “them” and “they” as respectful pronouns and think I can come around to using “women” as an adjective, given the poisoned ground we’re treading just now.
