I really like your post Red Cat, and you're absolutely right that it's not helpful to just regurgitate the same opinion over and over, but I just wanted to comment on a couple of points:
As a citizen of the United States, I feel no guilt in saying this to women (in general) who live here with me: "It's your fault that overwhelming majority of elected officials are male. You make up a majority of the voting population. If you want more women in elected office, stop voting for men." I know this is a little simplistic, but my point is that women voting against their own interests is a bigger problem than men voting against women's interests. There are plenty of men who support women's rights and equal rights. I know that there are also plenty of men who do not support equal rights, but we shouldn't need their help to move society forward. If a candidate does not support equal rights for women, then that should be a deal-breaker for women and if they still choose to vote for that person, they have no one to blame but themselves.
I agree with this up to a point. You're right that a lot of negative stereotyping of women comes from women themselves (women who don't accept feminism, women who only have male friends because they don't like other women, women pressuring other women to look a certain way). But the issue you mentioned about elected women in office shouldn't just be "vote for more women", it should also be "more women should stand for elected positions".
I definitely identify as a feminist, but I wouldn't vote for a woman (nor should anybody)
because she's a woman, because that sort of reasoning got Margret Thatcher elected in the UK, where she proceeded to exclude all women from her cabinets for the eleven years she was in office. What we need is a society where it is
equally easy for a woman or man with the required skills to run for an elected position. It's patently clear, in the US at least, that it isn't, because the only woman running in the 2016 election is married to a former president (whoo, meritocracy), and faces sexist questions that her male counterpart doesn't on a fairly regular basis. It's all well and good to say that women should use their vote (they should! Emily Davison died for you!), but when the choice is between a bunch of men and a woman who doesn't care about women's issues (or is entirely about women's issues to the exclusion of everything else), it's clear that the playing field isn't equal.
I'm not blaming all men for this, but there have been
lots of studies that show that boys are far more likely to be encouraged to talk in the classroom (by male and female teachers), and this continues at college and into the workplace. Women are also
far more likely to get interrupted while speaking (by men and by other women), and all of this sort of feeds into a society where what women say is less valued than what men say. When you couple this with the sexist questions that women get asked when doing something like running for office (or
working in laboratories, or
going into space), it's no wonder that fewer women would choose to run in elections.
I also believe that women (and men) need to stop taking body imaging so seriously. If you are offended by the way women are portrayed in advertising and media, then again it is like saying that women are incapable of coming up with their own definitions of beauty and are relying on the media to do it for them. Sometimes the best approach is to shrug your shoulders and say that you don't care because at the end of the day, they are desperate for your money and the best way to starve the beast is to not feed it the attention it craves. If you see an ad with a woman who looks like a stick and is scantily dressed, then just understand it's not real. Don't make it real by saying how sexist the ad is.
That's enough from me. Feel free to disagree with anything I've said; if we all just say the same thing then this thread becomes a bad-idea machine.
The thing with body-imaging issues is that, as a woman (or a man!), you don't suddenly stumble across them when you're a well-adjusted, happy-with-your-body 30-year-old and decide to get offended. They're there from the moment you're born, from the Barbies that young girls play with, to the beauty pageants for toddlers, to girls' mums who might have body issues they pass to their daughters, to the increased sexualisation of children and young teens; children aren't able to just flick a switch to say "I'm not going to be bothered by society's expectations of my body", and I don't know of any women (or men) who have body issues that don't stem back to childhood. My best male friend growing up was bulimic, I don't for a moment pretend it's a women-only issue, but I believe that a) it does affect more girls that boys, and b) feminist ideas such as embracing a diverse range of body types, and challenging the sexualisation of children is a good way to combat these issues.
...sorry for the wall of text ._.
