With the upcoming presidential election in November, there has been a lot of controversy about all of the remaining candidates. Each one of them is fighting tooth and nail to clinch the nomination of their party, and with Ted Cruz recently dropping out, it seems that Donald Trump will have the nomination for the Republican party, but it is still somewhat in the air what will happen on the democratic side. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are in a race to the finish and they are doing whatever they can to make them seem like the right choice and trying their best to win over Americans favor, but a lot of people already have their mind set on Hillary. It could be because of her policies, her past, her new ideas -- but it could also be because she is a woman and the idea that just because you are a woman, you should be voting for her, too.
Now, I am not just saying this just because I am a Bernie Sanders supporter, but because there has recently been a lot of pressure put on females to vote for Clinton because we share the same gender. Two feminist icons, Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright, went in front of a crowd at a Clinton rally saying that, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help each other," trying to get the young women, like me, who support Sanders to come to their senses and join Clinton because of her gender. Albright even went on to say that young women are only going to support Sanders because that's where "all the men are," and apparently that's they only thing we're after. Clinton has also been on record almost every time she's been speaking in public about why others should vote for her, and it is always mentioned by herself that she is a woman. Now it would be understandable that she mentioned that if maybe nobody had ever seen her before, but that is not the case. She has recently been accused by Donald Trump by playing the "woman card," which is basically him calling her out for announcing that she is a woman every 10 minutes, and as hard as it may be for me to admit it, Donald Trump is correct. Clinton sounds like a broken record at points because of it and she is doing this because there is an actual demographic who are voting for her because of it.
As we all know, this is a very pivotal election of who is going to be running our country for the next four years, and I don't think it is right of Clinton to be using her gender to her advantage as much as she is. It is a very exciting idea to have a woman for president, and she is the first to ever get this far, but here is my argument -- there is a large percentage of Americans that may not be as educated in politics and some are voting for Clinton solely because of her gender, regardless of her policies or constant flip-flopping on stances. Although she may be well qualified and some may think she is the person for the job because of this reasoning, we should step back and really think about why are we voting for her. Is it because we agree with her stances and her vision of what America should be, or because we think there should be a woman in charge? It is a very exciting and revolutionary idea; Sanders has even been on record saying that the idea of a woman president is revolutionary and life-changing.
I am all for a woman being the most powerful person in the free world, but she is not the right woman for me. I want to wait for a woman to come along that makes me think that she is going to make a change in this world, not because of her gender and not because there are other influential women in politics telling me I am wrong for supporting someone who they do not personally approve of, and I am going to vote for her not because she is a woman, but because I want to.
