Amanda Marcotte

Ebola patients, immigrants: There were plenty of ordinary people elevated to villainous status in right wing media in the run-up to the election. But of the groups who got negative attention, perhaps the strangest was single women. Fox News in particular put single women under the microscope and found them, as a group, to be wanting as people and particularly as voters.

The latest blow came when former prosecutor and now-host of The Five on Fox News, Kimberly Guilfoyle, took a swipe at the ability of single women to handle the responsibilities of jury duty properly. It was part of a larger discussion about how single women are supposedly bad at voting because they tend to be more supportive of Democrats than married women. Co-host Greg Gutfeld suggested that it's because single women are young and not wise to the ways of the world. Guilfoyle replied with, "Same reason why young women on juries are not a good idea, they don't get it. They're not in that same life experience of paying the bills, doing the mortgage, kids, community, crime, education and health care. They're like healthy and hot and running around without a care in the world." She said, when she was a prosecutor, she would dismiss them so they could "go back on Tinder or Match.com."

Under fire, Guilfoyle declared that it was a "joke" and she was talking about juries and "Nothing about voting." That, of course, was a hard excuse to buy because the hosts spoke at length about voting and how single women are doing it wrong. Indeed, even in her response, Guilfoyle doubled down, saying she was just worried that people---single women, really, who were the topic of conversation from the get-go---would "dilute the votes out there" by being "uninformed". But, of course, this insinuation that single women are particularly uninformed is what got everyone so angry in the first place.

If it were a one-off event, it wouldn't be that newsworthy, but trying to stir up audiences about the subversive nature of single womanhood in America is an ongoing thing for Fox News and conservative media generally. Tucker Carlson complained about ads, from Republicans, targeting single female voters by saying that Republicans shouldn't encourage "people who don't know anything about what they're voting for to vote." His evidence for the contention that single women don't know anything is that they are people "whose favorite show is Say Yes To The Dress." Similarly, Jesse Watters of Fox dismissed single women as "Beyoncé voters" who "depend on government because they're not depending on their husbands."

Beyond Fox News, you also have Kevin Williamson of the National Review attacking Lena Dunham -- who is a handy right wing stand-in for unmarried women generally -- with a headline reading "Five Reasons Why You're Too Dumb To Vote". It was really just one reason, which is that Williamson thinks wanting reproductive rights is a sign of "permanent, asinine, incontinent juvenility" and that women who consider reproductive rights a priority "is nothing other than a reiteration of the original infantile demand: 'I Want!'" Why is wanting control over your own sex life is less mature than wanting lower tax rates? Williamson doesn't say, seeming to think it's self-evident, which it only is if you're already inclined to think poorly of single women.

And, of course, you also had Rush Limbaugh arguing that the GOP needs to set up a "dating service" to get those single women married off. There are many variations on the theme, but the core message stays the same: Single women vote for Democrats because they are stupid. Sometimes the idea that a husband will fix you is outright stated and sometimes it's just implied, but either way, the message comes through loud and clear.

What was the value of all this demonizing of single women? Well, it's actually quite a smart way to derail the "war on women" narrative that helped the Democrats so much in 2012. That narrative lost a lot of its power this time around, and it's not because the attacks on women receded any. It's because the attacks were more explicitly aimed at single women, which allows married women to feel superior. It helps pit married women against single women, which replaces the "war on women" narrative with a more subtle "war between women" one. That's why so many of the attacks on single women came from women themselves. It assures female voters that the war on women isn't about them, but about those other women: The single ones. Or, if you're single and conservative yourself, those bad (read: slutty) single women.

Amanda Marcotte blogs about feminism and politics.

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