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I’m a big believer in social-justice activism, and I get as frustrated with U.S. politics as the next gal, but if we’re not going to get involved, we’re in trouble.

So why are young women so loath to get involved? My own opinion is that young women especially are steered away from all things political from such a young age that by the time they get around to adulthood, they’re freaked out and intimidated by the process.

Plus, women are pretty consistently told that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and their opinions are often dismissed. Add to that a general self-consciousness about all things political, and we have a problem. But of course, this is just my little theory.

There’s also the fact that many young women don’t feel like politicians speak to them and the issues that matter to them—we’re talked about more than we’re talked to. But we can’t expect lasting change on behalf of women’s rights without political action.

So it’s really just time to suck it up.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Despite gains made through the years, women still only make up 15 percent of the seats in Congress, 14 percent of the one hundred seats in the Senate, and 15 percent of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. And of those eighty-one women serving on Congress in 2006, only 24 percent of them are women of color.

In state executive positions, like governor and lieutenant governor, women make up 24 percent of available positions.1 And we’re not making much progress, either. A report from the Center for Women in Government & Civil Society at the University at Albany found that from 1998 to 2005, the percentage of women in state government leadership positions only rose from 23.1 to 24.7. Not very impressive.2

So on all counts, we’re not even close to equal.

But it’s not just political representation that’s poor for women in the United States—it’s participation as well. Apparently, we’re not big on voting.

According to Women’s Voices. Women Vote., fifteen million unmarried women were not registered to vote in 2004 and almost twenty million unmarried women didn’t vote in 2004; if unmarried women had voted at the same rate as married women, there would have been more than six million more voters at the polls3 (and maybe we wouldn’t be stuck with Bushie right now!). If you’re married, I’m not trying to leave you out of the equation—I just think it’s interesting that so many younger women (we tend to be the unmarried ones) aren’t participating in politics. It’s fucking terrible, really.

The Headband Treatment

Remember the headband treatment of Hillary I mentioned? Well, that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to women politicians.

While all women are subject to being judged by their appearance, women in leadership positions get it like crazy. There’s something about a woman in power that makes people feel like they need to put her in “her place.”

Take this story, for example. Former governor of Maryland and current (as of 2006) State Comptroller William Donald Schaefer told a Washington Post reporter that his 2006 opponent, Janet Owens, is a “prissy little miss” who wears “long dresses [and] looks like Mother Hubbard—it’s sort of like she was a man.” He said in an interview, “She’s got these long clothes on and an old-fashioned hairdo. . . . You know, it sort of makes you real mad.”4 Uh huh. Can you imagine someone talking about the hairdo and clothes of a male candidate? Yeah, not gonna happen. By the way, Schaefer is kind of a known douchebag. He harassed a twenty-four-year-old administrative aide by watching her ass as she brought over a cup of tea and instructed her to “walk again.” (He later said that “this little girl” should be “happy that I observed her going out the door.”)5 Ah, sexist politicians.

Leading up to the 2004 presidential election a compagny called Axis of Eve created political panties to encourage voting among young women. The slogans included “Give Bush the Finger” and “My Cherry for Kerry.”

And judging women politicians on