what women want

apparently it's photo day over here at book slut.

please explain to me what female issues on politics and lipstick have in common. oh, i know- absolutely nothing. it seems that newsweek is using the infallible logic of "well, we're doing a piece about women and we have to come up with a catchy cover that represents women...so lipstick, obviously".

anyone who wants to make the argument that we are living in a post-feminist society (god, there is nothing i hate more than that term) should kindly explain to me why in this day and age it is a-okay to put such a sexist image on the cover of a national magazine.

also, i am all for women expressing their views in whatever form possible, but i really do not like women being summed up as this huge solitary group. this applies to many, many articles/media outlets in our society, but let's focus on this one for a minute. what i want politically is completely different from what my mother wants, which is different than from what the mother of the kids i babysit for wants, which is different than from what my boss wants. women are just too diverse to be clumped together like this. now, i realize that of course stats can tell us how people are voting, but i don't really understand how beneficial it can be to state something like, "on a national level, 57% of women support obama" (i'm using that as a made-up example, it is not an actual statistic) but what does this statistic tell us about american women and how they think politically? if we really want to determine how women are voting, wouldn't it be much more useful to know that 68%hispanic women ages 18-45 support obama or 56% of caucasian women ages 45-70 support mccain instead of talking about women as one solitary group? i haven't seen this particular method being used with men, so why is it this way with women? i think this also correlates with women seen as a target audience. we've had mccain and obama both appearing during commercial breaks in lifetime's army wives as an attempt to appeal to women voters. what are we supposed to take from this? that all women watch lifetime, and if we discover that candidate x watches lifetime too then we'll vote for him? i just do not like the way that women voters are being represented in this election, and this magazine cover is like the cherry on top.