Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Letter: Women don't vote by gender Sex appeal won't buy votes

Geraldine Curtis
Sunday 17 November 1996 00:02 GMT
Comments

Your article "Tony and the women" (10 November) was a fascinating analysis of women's voting intentions broken down by age. It was also pointless. The whole premise and the tone of the argument was governed by an unstated assumption of maleness being the norm and femaleness being abnormal, unusual and therefore worthy of analysis in its own right. A similar article analysing the political attitudes of men in such a superficial and generalised way would rightly have been called irrelevant. I would be surprised if any woman bases her voting on her gender. Objective factors such as education, employment experience, geographical location, wealth and public services are more important. Equally insulting is the idea that some women will vote Labour because of Mr Blair's apparent sex appeal. This is worse than the arguments that say women only watch football because of the supposed sex-appeal of players.

I have never found an article suggesting that men voted for the Tories because of Margaret Thatcher's sex appeal.

Geraldine Curtis

London SW2

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in