Women Are Still Voting With Their Libidos

In what is being billed as the widest gender gap in presidential election history, 54% of women favored Bill Clinton over Bob Dole. Working women gave Clinton an even wider margin: 55%, to 35% for Dole. The reason may have more to do with Clinton’s projection of personal power than with his lofty public ideals.

Obviously, scandals, missteps and allegations of adultery haven’t turned off the female voter. The reality is that Clinton exudes so much power and charisma that women are willing to ignore domestic flaws in the White House that would detonate a divorce in their own homes.

What women see--or choose to ignore--in powerful men is filled with delicious irony. A quarter of a century ago, the feminist revolution was supposed to have empowered an entire generation of women. We were to appreciate our own enormous potential, our emerging political muscle and our own sexuality. At the ramparts of a new era, we were supposed to crush our own stereotype of a swooning woman trapped behind a typewriter.

And yet the 1996 election results dramatically reinforced the findings of a new national poll of secretaries and office assistants conducted for the Osias Foundation, which studies feminist issues. The pollsters surveyed 800 women who worked as secretaries, office assistants or in similar entry-level positions around the country. They were asked about their intimate responses to men in their workplaces who wield authority. Their reactions proved that, the feminist revolution aside, the projection of power as an aphrodisiac holds in other offices than the Oval Office.

In the survey, conducted the week of Oct. 21, 45% of respondents had envisioned having an affair with a boss or superior. Five percent said they would consider an affair with a coworker on a subservient level. The results are unmistakable: Power creates sex appeal, and women will respond in a visceral manner to men who have the charisma to wield it correctly.

Tackling the issue head on, 68% said that women find power and position to be sexually attractive in a man. In addition, women know that men are deliberately transmitting that power, since 73% felt that men are aware that positions of authority attract women.

Militant feminists will not be pleased to find that, with all the talk about feminism and liberation in the workplace, sex and power still attract, motivate and drive what women think, how we work and who we vote for.

Perhaps our responses follow social and genetic patterns engineered over the eons; the man with the biggest club still gets the woman. It may take generations to alter that response. The continuum of men, power, women and sex has the same inevitability as the laws of gravity. Doubters need only review the allegations against a president who is returning for a second term based on the strength of the women’s vote.