This U.S. election cycle has been an ugly and divisive one, by any standards. As Canadians, we have the front rows on the bleacher seats for the big event, and get to see the blood and hear the broken bones much more intimately than most other countries.

Still, we can’t take part, but if anyone south of our border — or west of it, since Alaska has played a role of unprecedented prominence this time around — is listening, I have a suggestion to make, one offered with my tongue only slightly in cheek.

I am urging American women not to vote in this year’s election. I realize that ignoring your franchise and rebuking the 19th Amendment — if only for one election — sounds absurd, especially in such a hotly contested election, but hear me out.

This has been an extraordinarily depressing election to witness, based on what I’m hearing from women on both sides of the political divide.

“I cannot predict who will win the presidential campaign,” wrote women’s rights advocate Helen McCaffrey in the Philadelphia Inquirer this week, “but I already know who will lose big: all women.”

She describes a young male student at the community college where she teaches, wearing a “Sarah Palin Is A C__t” T-shirt “without shame or even consciousness of what he was doing.” She recalls attending a Barack Obama rally where the mention of Palin’s name “drew shouts of ‘stone her.’” She laments that “instead of engaging Palin on the issues, critics attacked attributes that are specifically female. It is Hillary’s pantsuit to the power of 10.”

It was hard to ignore the treatment Hillary Clinton got in the bitter fight for the Democratic nomination, almost entirely from members of the media and political classes that identified themselves as liberal, or as supporters of her party. After this election, it’s hard to imagine a bright woman in either party willingly allowing herself and her family to endure this gauntlet of character assassination.

“Thank God for election 2008,” lamented Wendy Button, a speechwriter for Clinton, John Edwards and Obama, on the Daily Beast political website.

“We can talk about the wardrobe and make-up even though most people don’t understand the details about Senator Obama’s plan with Iraq.” A lifelong Democrat, she despairs at how her party has turned on two female candidates with such retrograde, belittling rhetoric.

It’s neither likely nor perhaps even desirable, but if half of U.S. voters withdrew their franchise in protest, it would wreak havoc with pollsters and campaign operatives at the very least, and delegitimize a dispiriting and tainted election at best. It’s a slap that would perhaps bring otherwise intelligent people back to their senses, and restore some decency to a process that has devolved into a shameful rebuke of a woman’s right to participate in their country’s political life.