Raging Hormones: CNN News Story on Women's Voting Patterns

After receiving much backlash for circulating an article online with the headline “Do Hormone’s Drive Women’s Votes”, CNN pulled it from the site, with spokesperson Matt Dornic commenting that it "did not channel through the standard internal process and it was not reviewed by senior editorial staff before appearing on CNN.com. As recognized by our leadership, audience and critics, the piece did not meet the journalistic standards of CNN and should not have appeared on our site. We had an obligation to remove it." The article used findings published in the Psychological Science journal to argue that single women who are ovulating feel sexy and therefore are more likely to lean liberal, while married or committed women are trying to resist sexy feelings so vote more conservative.  The idea that women’s reproductive bodies limit our ability to make sound and rational decisions is still widely accepted, and that’s not surprising. Not only is the argument inherently naturalized (can’t argue with science!) it’s normalized with everyday explanations for women’s behaviours, such as “she must be pms’ing or something”. But I think that medicalizing women’s voting patterns based on marital status and ovulation cycles is definitely going even further backwards. Personally I don’t think that even conducting this type of research contributes anything of value to society. While I think it’s promising that the article was so widely criticized and eventually taken down, it’s hard to be entirely optimistic when there are still so many discourses that reinforce the belief that women’s bodies determine why we are here (to make babies), where we find ourselves in society (taking care of babies) and who we are (nurturing, unstable, emotional creatures).

"We're single, and ovulating..."