Hanna Rosin has a piece up at Slate about the rise and electoral importance of the single-woman voter – dubbed “swingles”.
It’s telling that there are never any write-ups on single or married men voting cohorts. I don’t say this as some sort of argument against a journalistic double-standard. But the fact that men’s voting decisions are less swayed by their marital status suggests that men are also less economically dependent – either on a partner or the government which serves as a partner-by-proxy. So to focus on either married or single women as bellwethers of an election is to focus on which support structure women happen to favor.
The single female libertarian is a unicorn (mostly, NAWALT). So some talk about the married woman voter cohort and some focus on the single woman married cohort. These cohorts shift in size depending on exogenous factors – the economy, the cultural milieu, and the level of government supports – but the general trendline is towards greater government expenditure – a Pandora’s box which was unleashed with women’s suffrage. Rosin writes:
Actually, Feehery’s folksy advice [for men to listen to their wives when casting their vote] is outdated. These days your daughter, or even your mistress, is the better campaign target. As married women split their votes about equally between Democrats and Republicans, they are fading into the electoral woodwork, while single women are doing what only single women can do: switch alliances, hold out for the best deal, express their outrage by suddenly going cold on a candidate who has irritated them and then warm up quickly to a new one who makes a better offer.
Straight from the horse’s mouth (is that misogynistic?). You’ll rarely find men casting their votes based upon “the best deal” that they can get. Men place more of a premium on autonomy and independence. Rosin continues:
The single woman, or “swingle,” as pollsters are now calling her, is already one of the largest voting blocs at 55 million, and that number is growing by almost 1 million voters a year—faster than any other group of voters broken out in the polls. Last year, single women made up one-quarter of voters overall—about the same number as self-identified white evangelical Christians. And if Obama’s strategy for courting these women works long term, pollsters say, single women might actually become the Democrats’ equivalent of the evangelicals—a reliable base for future elections.
This should frighten any small government type – from social conservatives to economic libertarians to men who decry the progress of social engineering which is making a large swath of men obsolete. For all the talk about Charles Murray and his book, our society will bifurcate into women who marry men and raise solid families and women who don’t marry but still try to raise a family. The final outcome isn’t the End of Men – it’s the End of the Underman. The alpha male will thrive.
If women are somehow geared towards this support instinct – if any economic or political choice is made not with autonomy but with support and security as the highest goal – politicians will always support women’s issues, the narrative will be crafted to favor the women’s viewpoint, and money will be spent to fund women’s needs over all else. The rise of the “swingles” is both a cause and an effect. The mere fact that swingles have political power is an effect of women’s suffrage, and it will be the cause of even more swingles who vote the same way and vie for the same political handouts.
We hear about how women are independent beings and such, but the Sandra Fluke affair shows that women are not as independent as feminists would like them to be (though, to be fair, the media has mischaracterized just how much women side with Obama and Fluke; many women favor autonomy – just not nearly as much as men). They need others to provide the supports for their lifestyle, well-being, safety, and comfort. Historically, husbands, fathers, or community elders fulfilled such duties, but the government increasingly crowds out the men who fill those roles.
The Constitution was meant to curb something like this – a special interest group getting ahold of the purse strings – but the thickness of it’s exoskeleton was overestimated. It has been chewed through and rampant democracy in a buoyless sea will toss us where it may.
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I think this is apt. What you don’t say is that this is likely irreversible, which you imply.
Gorb,
Yeah, I don’t see how or why it would reverse itself. Women will always be able to play up their health and safety needs that arise because of *essential* gender differences while using their feminist arm to eradicate gender essentialism.
Straight from the horse’s mouth (is that misogynistic?)
As Andrew Breitbart would say, SO?, as in so what.
http://takimag.com/article/andrew_breitbart_1969_2012_gavin_mcinnes
Chuck, you can´t build a media empire worrying so much
http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/10/how-andrew-breitbart-changed-the-news
Senior,
I wasn’t worrying there. I masked it as worrying in order to indeed point out that I meant something more by it.
If so called ¨swingles¨ keep doubling down on the policies that they seem to support, the result will be a disaster for them. It´s not like it is 1981 and the U.S. can continue to deny reality by pursuing their debt and spend policies. And, if there is to be any bifurcation, it will be between thriving parts of the country( Wyoming, Dakotas) and disasters( Los Angeles, NYC). Alot of good such ¨swingles policies have done for places like Detroit, Cleveland.
Most of them should be called “swindles” because that is what there vote is, a con job of America.
Very few are knowledgeable about current event, lest they have something to do with Hollywood. Seriously, any group of people that thinks they need one gay friend because Sarah Jessica Horseface told them they have to is seriously lacking in the ability to make critical decisions. These women carry around two huge purses because some idiot they saw in a magazine does. Now if a woman can’t decide on one purse or another is influencing others, those others don’t deserve a vote because they lack the ability to make up their own minds when it comes to carrying two purses so they just do it, they are lemmings.
This current situation seems very unstable. So many women have become dependent on having the government transfer economic resources to them from men via the tax system, either directly providing them with welfare or indirectly through giving them government jobs that will pay more than what they can get in the private sector. At the same time, the number of men who actually produce more than they consume, thereby leaving a surplus that can be confiscated, is decreasing. I just wonder what goes on in the minds of these women. Do they have any dim awareness that this can’t continue much longer? Or do they totally evade any thoughts about the future economic collapse rushing toward us?
I think this is apt. What you don’t say is that this is likely irreversible, which you imply.
It’s not reversible. Unwin pointed this out in his book “Sex and Culture”. Once a society reaches a certain threshold of power and affluence, feminism comes along in some form or other, and women become empowered (to own property, to divorce, to get support and so on). It seems to follow from the surplus situation — i.e., something that an affluent society can “afford”. Once it happens, though, it can’t be turned back. If that was the case for Rome and Babylon it’s even more the case in a democracy where women control political power on the ground. Of course, ultimately, as Unwin points out, it isn’t sustainable, and the civilization collapses under its own weight (birth rates plummet, men disengage and so on). The only issue is how long it takes our own civilization to get there, and I don’t think we’re terribly close at this stage.
“The single female libertarian is a unicorn (mostly, NAWALT).” This is saddengly true. There is a VERY small cohort of libertarian women, and they tend to be both attractive and not single.
The swingle trend doesn’t bode well for the state of the Republic. It’s another caustic agent in the slow sclerosis of this society. The Roissian exhortation to enjoy the decline from the poolside view seems evermore prescient. Especially true as I watch Ron Paul go down in flames, even though I agree with your point that it’s better that RP lose the race, rather than be tarred with the destruction, or at least increased rate of sclerosis, that is to come.
Piggy bait!
http://www.good.is/post/minimum-rage/
damn it Trouble, i was trying to avoid tackling anything over the weekend. that piece is going to force my hand.
I was hoping ‘swingle’ would be in reference to a single who swings with married couples.
Perhaps with pics.
“You’ll rarely find men casting their votes based upon “the best deal” that they can get. ”
They don’t get democracy.
“We hear about how women are independent beings and such, but the Sandra Fluke affair shows that women are not as independent as feminists would like them to be ”
Oh yeah their independence, their independence isn’t about becoming invisible like men or to do something on their own. The autonomy means that they are not asking to be given things, they are ordering it like coffee. The government follows like a beta bitch.
interesting that his only affects western white women
looks like Men of Color know how to keep their women satisfied!
Why even take something written by a white-hating, west-hating, man-hating lefty like Hanna Rosin seriously? It’s just a propaganda piece, and should be treated as such. Any article on these so-called “swingles” that isn’t broken down by race is worthless, since these swingles must be weighted toward non-whites and these non-whites are motivated more by racial hatreds and spoils than sexual ones. Rosin’s goal here (the same goal as most feminism) is to separate white women from the interests of their people and culture in order to facilitate the destruction of that people and culture. Voting for white-hating multiculturalism isn’t in the long-term economic interests of white women, and that’s what Rosin wants to obscure.
As far as ending the destructive effects of brainless female voters goes. it will happen when they are no longer allowed to vote, which will happen when no one is allowed to vote any longer because, thanks in large part to the stupidity of these female voters, the inevitable dictatorship will have taken over the ruins of what was once a great nation,
After reading this, not only am I convinced that the poster of this blog is in desperate need of psychiatric bolts of electricity, but the poster of this blog is in desperate need of a woman not afraid to terrorize this mongrel into shirking its delusions of apish grandeur and beginning on a purging path to fucking sanity. I have 5 sisters who would absolutely revel in the opportunity, and all of them are single mothers doing extraordinarily well. Oh, and they are all rather intelligent too. What a crock of shit.
What a crock of shit^^^^^^^
You must be the philandering pederast who killed his mother for an inheritance. ^^^^^^^
Am I wrong to generalize that most places with an noticeable excess of women to men are either financially ruined or on the road to ruin?
I’ve dealt with your kind before. You are the guys who would suck a politician’s dick for a chance to have your face on the television. Let me guess, B.A. in Political Science. No, you seem like the Business Management-type; the foolhardy, self-absorbed degenerate the Founding Fathers had in mind when the wrote the Bill of Rights. Not because you’d be the stereotypical suspect class to have your rights constantly threatened and annihilated, but because you’d go out of your way to ensure the rights of as many people unrelated to you financially, racially, and politically were buried so far beneath so many endless stacks of paperwork, even the minorities themselves would grow weary and give up before they ever found them. Jesus Christ would never have agreed with this fascist, plutocratic dogma and you sound like just the sort of idiots who go around worshiping imaginary people in the sky who look, talk, act, think, and fuck like you do. See y’all in hell. You seem the ripe crop of Lucifer himself. That’s, however, taking the quantum leap of idiocy and believing there is an afterlife. I know, the injustice fucks me up too.
First Citizen Kane, any men in that household or just you and the five sisters that terrorize your thinking?
My brother died from a drug overdose and my dad died from kidney failure. So, yeah, just me.
Let me guess, that proves your point about the excess of women to men leading to ruin? Hahahaha, have a healthy apocalypse, Manchild. God, what an appropriate name.
well you do seem to be proving my point
Not all places are apocalyptic
I apologize for the unwarranted hostility and name-calling, but this is a total perversion of what was intended for this country. You are wrong about men and women. The gender roles in this country, and in the world at large, are so categorically fucked up, ever gaining any semblance of rationality between them is going to take the entirety of the will of mankind to evolve beyond the callous, superficial, and superfluous standards by which it has existed up until now. Feminism was caused by misogyny. So, if you wish to state that feminism is somehow mutated or backward, then you must go to the source from whence such a movement spawned, and that is the male sex’s persistent and authoritarian stranglehold over women; just like the white stranglehold over ethnic minorities; and most, most, most importantly, the rich stranglehold over the entire world. Gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, etc. these are all ridiculous attributes by which to discriminate people when, in the capitalist world in which we live, economic status trumps all, every time, no matter what. You can be a gay, black Jew, but if you have the money, you can be whatever the hell else you want to be too. A poor, gay, black Jew is just that. It is screamingly absurd that such trivial distinctions such as gender or race still weasel their way into the political arena when classism will clearly be the catalyst to the end of America as we know it.
I read the Rosin essay and agree with H. above that it is promotional. She persuades her readers to feel insulted-by-demographic by Rush Limbaugh’s slut tirade. She uses the word “slut” gratuitously to hammer it home.
Chuck writes, “you’ll rarely find men casting their votes based upon the “best deal that they can get.”
Are you so sure?
How then *do* single men vote?
Do they vote their wallet? ie. taxes?
Do unemployed single men vote for unemployment extension and more SSDI?
Do they vote for the candidate that plays basketball and publishes his March Madness picks?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/14/obama-final-four-picks-swing-states_n_1344615.html?ref=elections-2012
my eldest daughter is a single female libertarian unicorn. Her campus nearly evacuated to attend the Grant Park election night rally in 2008 ; she stayed home.
Re: Brendan – Unwin says, IIRC, that the point of no return is when three full generations have lived under totally permissive sexual norms. We are hitting that point now…
“The single female libertarian is a unicorn”
Pretty unicorns, though!
http://www.dailypaul.com/220571/ron-paul-has-the-biggest-caucus
The post is all too true but men get their own toys too. The US empire (military, wars, veterans affairs, CIA, state dept. etc) costs the best part of a trillion a year. Security of the realm doesn’t require anywhere near a trillion of annual expenditure. A lot of bombs get dropped in far away places and sport stadiums get built that needn’t because of the political pressure of men. Wall street and the City of London are the preserve of men and we stuffed that up so much that the whole of the economy could still yet collapse. A lot of men talk a good game when it comes to capitalism and freedom and what not but they are first in line for Government handouts and largess at every opportunity.
“Feminism was caused by not enough misogyny.”
FTFY
“and that is the male sex’s persistent and authoritarian stranglehold over women”
As a successful lady litigant (May, 1896) remarked to her husband, “There is no law which compels me to obey or honour you, but there is a law that you must keep me.” This woman tersely sums up the position. In the case of a man of property the Courts will expropriate him for the benefit of his wife. In the case of a wage-earner the Courts from police magistrates to Supreme Court will decree him to be her earning slave, bound to work for her or go to prison. A wife, no matter if rolling in wealth, is not obliged to contribute a penny to her husband’s support, even if he be incapacitated from work through disease or accident.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Legal_Subjection_of_Men#Matrimonial_Privileges_Of_Women.
“economic status trumps all, every time, no matter what. ”
amazing that capitalism puts down all these nasty discriminations based on gender,race,religion to rest, innit?
“It is screamingly absurd that such trivial distinctions such as gender or race still weasel their way into the political arena ”
and why is that?
“when classism will clearly be the catalyst to the end of America as we know it”
LOL ‘as we know it’, like the anti-sexist and anti-racist nation for the past half-century? Well, it’s already dead.
“but the poster of this blog is in desperate need of a woman not afraid to terrorize this mongrel into shirking its delusions of apish grandeur and beginning on a purging path to fucking sanity. ”
‘why you no mangina like me?!’
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Huh? Single women have been a heavily Democratic-leaning voting bloc for many elections now. Married women have voted more Republican that Democrat in several recent elections. Nothing new here, and yes black women, most of whom are single and almost all of whom are Democrat, do skew the numbers somewhat.