Brendan O'Neill Takes on the Vagina Voters

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Chatham House

"I intend to vote with my vagina."

Have you ever read a more squirm-inducing sentence than that? It appeared in a pro-Hillary piece in Dame magazine, written by a person with a vagina who intends to vote for Clinton because she also has a vagina.

Let's leave aside the unfortunate image conjured up by that sentence. The bigger problem with such unabashed declarations of "vagina voting," writes Brendan O'Neill, is that they confirm the descent of feminism into the cesspool of identity politics, even biologism, and its abandonment of the idea that women should be valued more for their minds than their anatomy. These are the new sexists, reducing women to bits of flesh as thoroughly as hoary old misogynists were doing a hundred years ago.