I created a hashtag on Twitter to complement my recent video asking if women should vote, and the responses from women, and feminists is particular, generally offer a strong argument for why women should, indeed, not vote.



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Let’s start with some research. I’m hardly the first person to ask if suffrage was really a wise decision. John Lott, from Yale, and Lawrence Kenny from the University of Florida, while not posing the question ‘should women vote’, did look at the impact of women’s suffrage on the size and scope of the government.

Lott and Kenny begin by observing that women are more risk averse than men, and wonder why women prefer government programs as a form of insurance, as opposed to marriage. Marriage, they note, ‘encourages men to accumulate market capital and leads women to acquire household skills and shoulder most of the child-rearing responsibilities’, and this division of labor tends to create thriving middle class communities. Divorced and single women, however, are not able to capture these benefits, and thus look to the state to provide for them. And of course, by the state, they mean men, since men pay most of the taxes the state redistributes.

This chart is really telling:

Within 4 years of giving women the vote, government spending crossed its previous peak, and within 11 years, women voted for candidates who doubled state expenditures. And this trend is going nowhere but up. Women are now demanding free tampons, free birth control, free college tuition. Paid for by the state men. Women are rapacious consumers of state resources, and appear to have no defined limits.

Women will vote for entitlements until the state collapses, if permitted to do so.

I haven’t parsed Lott and Kenny’s data very closely, but I do not doubt there are some correlation/causation metrics that could be argued. Or one might argue that expanding state benefits is a net positive. Or argue that women might reign in demands at a certain critical point, being that women are more risk averse than men, and have no interest in seeing the state collapse.

Not a single feminist made anything even approaching that argument. Not one.

Let me begin by noting that women do not need to vote to run for political office. That has never been a requirement for office. Women can be elected to any office, provided they appeal to male voters. Victoria Woodhull ran against Ulysses S. Grant for the US Presidency in 1872. She didn’t win, but she ran.

Secondly, I concede that any woman who has completed active military service has earned the right to vote, on the grounds that she has seen, up close and personally, the price of choosing leadership. An honorable discharge from active military duty comes with the right to vote.

Here is my favorite response from women to the #WhyWomenShouldNotVote hashtag.

Gemma deleted her account, and not at my suggestion. I merely indicated that her willingness to harm children because she does not like a particular idea is ample evidence for why she should never vote. Instapundit retweeted her comments, and I expect she caught a little well-deserved hell for them.

Here are some other insightful comments:

Die.

You’re an idiot. Shut up.

Grow up.

You’re an idiot. Again.

Protest this is hell.

You’re fat, stupid and old.

You should be killed.

I can’t believe you exist.

You’re cancer.

Ah, the smell of reasoned, mature arguments in the morning! I wonder what that’s like? So far, I have yet to have a single person comment on the hashtag without abuse, insults and death wishes. The fact that these women can not offer a single coherent, sane response as to why they should be allowed to vote is pretty clear evidence for why they should not!

I don’t expect much improvement on the commentary today, but who knows? It’s an important question, whether screaming harpies want to discuss it or not.

And I’m not of the mind to back down.

Lots of love,

JB