I keep reading that the election turns on women’s votes. Yet apart from the issue of abortion, women seem curiously invisible this election season–except of course for the endlessly focus-grouped, interviewed and psychoanalyzed women of Ohio and other toss-up states, who can’t decide whether to vote for Gore because he kissed his wife or for Bush because they like his mother. Are these ninnies really representative, or is their prominence more a symptom of the emptiness of political reporting, which has cast the race as a personality contest between a Fibber and a Dope? What, for example, do women tell pollsters is their most important issue? Hint: It’s not whether Al Gore or George W. would be more fun on a date or make a better babysitter. It’s pay equity.

Yes, women are apparently unpersuaded that they earn 71 cents on the male dollar because, as the Independent Women’s Forum insists, they choose low-paid jobs in order to have lots of time and energy for childcare and housecleaning. Yet when Bernard Shaw asked Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman about pay equity in their Veep debate, the two men quickly turned to the marvels of their respective tax proposals. Shaw let them–what’s pay equity to him? Even issues that are on the table are discussed as if they have no gendered aspects–affirmative action, for instance, or proposals to privatize all or part of Social Security, which will affect women much more than men: Not only do women on average live longer, they make up the large majority of retirees and dependents who survive on Social Security alone. Violence against women has gone unmentioned–as opposed to media violence and smut, a major theme and supposed woman-pleaser–ditto insurance coverage for contraception (Viagra’s already covered, but you knew that), high-quality daycare, the near-impossibility of collecting court-ordered child support from an ex-husband who doesn’t want to pay it (there’s a middle-class issue for you) and dozens of other problems facing real-life women. There are a number of women running for national office, but you don’t hear much about them. From the media point of view, the continuing scandal of women’s underrepresentation in government is as musty as the ERA. Women had their year back in 1992.

There’s only one woman on the political scene who seems to evoke any kind of passion–and that’s Hillary Clinton, or “Hillary.” But most of the passion is negative: She’s like a Rorschach test of feminine evil. Through direct mail aimed at Hillary-haters across the land, the Conservative Leadership Political Action Committee has raised almost $2 million for her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, a hyperaggressive nobody whose wife boasts that she cleans her own house–I suppose that’s the contemporary equivalent of Pat Nixon’s good Republican cloth coat. The First Lady, a supporter of the death penalty, welfare reform and interventionist foreign policy, is depicted as an “angry woman who is abusive to White House staff and obsessed with imposing her radical left vision on the rest of America.” How hated is Hillary? Eighteen percent of Democratic primary voters pulled the lever for her totally obscure challenger, a doctor who subsequently revealed himself to be a Lazio supporter. Maureen Dowd has completely lost herself in an ecstasy of psychological projection–her Hillary is like Joan Crawford in an old weepie: While the Gores and Liebermans bill and coo, she rattles around in her empty new house, loveless and lonely, and excluded from society as “Manhattan’s dread extra woman.” On the Drudge Report, Juanita Broaddrick accused Hillary of threatening her at a political function two weeks after her alleged rape: The threat was conveyed by thanking Broaddrick effusively–too effusively–for her support.

Disapproval of Hillary for sticking with her marriage cuts across party lines–Jimmy Breslin and George Will together at last with all those suburban harpies happy to knife a woman who steps out of the box. But her devotion to Bill has brought her an odd defender, Linda Waite, author with right-wing columnist Maggie Gallagher of a book-length soundbite called The Case for Marriage. In a New York Times Op-Ed, Waite castigates conservatives like Will for taking opportunistic potshots at Hillary’s decision to stay married: After all, Hillary is honoring the institution of marriage and making the choice conservatives–although presumably not Will, who is divorced–think people should make when faced with marital trouble. “Staying in an imperfect marriage is a perfectly reasonable choice for many women,” writes Waite, not to mention good for society. Interestingly, Waite seems to have forgotten her own potshot at Hillary: In their book, Waite and Gallagher torment a remark of Mrs. Clinton’s that seems clearly aimed at gossips and Nosy Parkers (“I learned a long time ago that the only two people who count in any marriage are the two that are in it”) to portray her as a standard-bearer for the idea that marriage is a private contract with no social significance. In fact, as they should know, Mrs. Clinton is quite a conservative on marital matters; she supported the Republican-authored Personal Responsibility Act, which begins by stating that “marriage is the foundation of a successful society”; in It Takes a Village, she wrote favorably of making divorce harder to get.

If you want to see a woman politician boldly standing up for the right to privacy–or anything else–you have to go to the movies. In The Contender, a swell political thriller, Joan Allen plays Laine Hanson, a Republican-turned-Democrat senator who is nominated to fill out a dead Vice President’s term and finds herself under withering attack for supposedly participating in a fraternity sexfest as a college freshman. The movie, which is dedicated to “our daughters,” is one long prayer for the abolition of the double standard–which it then, in typical Hollywood fashion, endorses. Laine is so pure and idealistic that she survives only because Jeff Bridges, as the wily Clintonesque President, stoops to tactics that would never even occur to her. In other words, in order to be in politics, a woman has to be too good for politics.