Could this woman say something sexist?

Feminist icon and Bill Maher-tolerator Gloria Steinem

Feminist icon and Bill Maher-tolerator Gloria Steinem

On Friday night, Gloria Steinem criticized young women who support Bernie Sanders in, uh, problematic terms. “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘where are the boys?'” she told Bill Maher. “The boys are with Bernie.” That’s a bad argument, mostly because it implies that young women care less about politics than catching a man, but also because there’s a much more satisfying generalization right next door. When you’re young, you’re thinking, “where are the young people?” Eighty-five percent of voters under age 30 broke for Sanders in the Iowa caucuses, and he led Hillary by 21 points among voters 30-44. There may be some force at work here other than the overwhelming desire for boys. But if Steinem is a feminist, how can she say something sexist?

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Do fetuses matter more than women?

A developing fetus, pictured here with a grown fetus who could not be avoided.

A developing fetus, pictured here with a grown fetus who could not be cropped out

Over at The New Republic, Rebecca Traister has written a provocative essay titled Let’s Just Say It: Women Matter More Than Fetuses Do. Kombat! Kids: can you cut two words from that headline? Extra credit: can you explain why declaring that an adult woman has more rights than a cluster of cells feels transgressive? About two thirds of the way through, Traister suggests that it might feel that way since Roe v. Wade. As women gained rights not just to legal abortions but also to economic and political parity, they lost the aura of sanctity that came with purely reproductive value:

What rose up instead was a new character, less threatening than the empowered woman: the baby, who, by virtue of not actually existing as a formed human being, could be invested with all the qualities—purity, defenselessness, dependence—that women used to embody, before they became free and disruptive.

The way we talk about abortion suggests that we are most comfortable with people who don’t exist.

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