Why Do Daughters Make Parents Conservative? Because Men Exist.

I have a daughter. One day she will grow up and start
dating, and if she’s hetero that means she’s going to date dudes, and some of
those dudes will be “shitty dudes.”
You know, the indecisive kind who won’t commit? This, says Ross Douthat
over at the New York Times, is reason
enough for me to start voting ‘publican, to long for the days when you still had
to buy the cow to get that sweet sweet unpasteurized raw Brooklyn milk.

It is a weird, convoluted piece
because it’s a weird, convoluted argument. Douthat cites a study
claiming that having daughters makes parents more likely to be Republican,
which contradicts an earlier study saying the
opposite. He is, naturally, tickled. And as the parent of a daughter and
apparently someone who still on occasion hangs out with single people, he has a
theory as to why. You see, there’s this fictional character named Nate in a recent
book he read — Adelle Waldman’s The Love
Affairs of Nathaniel P. — who is a nice enough guy
(“sensitive,” “idealistic”), but who happens to cause his
female friends/flings a great deal of emotional havoc in their Brooklyn creative scene, because he just wants the
sex and not the marriage, and the very fact that this fictional guy exists (as
a stand-in for ostensibly real ones) is enough of a terror to make parents of
daughters start thinking conservatively.

He provokes it by taking advantage of a social
landscape in which sex has been decoupled from marriage but biology hasn’t been
abolished, which means women now, still operate on a shorter time horizon for
crucial life choices — marriage, kids — than do men. In this landscape, what
Nate wants — sex, and the validation that comes with being wanted — he reliably
gets. But what his lovers want, increasingly, as their cohort grows older — a
more permanent commitment — he can afford to persistently withhold, feeling
guilty but not that guilty about doing so.

A-ha! A-fucking-ha! See, feminists and liberals? Men take
advantage of the new landscape you unwittingly created for them. You are
victimized by it! You thought you had it all figured out, what with the
decoupling of the sex from the marriage. But by expanding options for women, you
forgot the exorbitant cost: If you let men off the conservatively driven hook,
they will abandon all pretense of civilized courtship and its inevitable
endgame. Women will die barren old spinsters! Everyone loses!

Ugh. To me, the weirdest thing about when men advance this
argument is that they unwittingly call out their own entire gender as a terrible
piece-of-shit monster-dickmonger gender who only marry or honor their
commitments or even want to make them in the first place because society and
women pressure them, not because they want to. And if society doesn’t make
them, they will instead be indecisive faux-sensitive idealists who will not
marry you or breed with you. Ergo, we are all fucked, but not fucked in the
right way that leads to weddings and babies, just one-night-stand-indecisive
fucked. And nobody, but nobody, likes that (says Ross Douthat). And it’s all
your fault!

Worst assumptions found here in no particular order:

All women want marriage
All women want babies
All women would date Nathaniel P.
All men are like Nathaniel P.
Nathaniel P. is an epidemic sweeping the nation
Women don’t like one-night stands, they only
tolerate them
Women aren’t indecisive about marriage/kids,
just men
Women don’t cause men emotional havoc, it’s just
the other way ’round
Women always want commitment, men never do
Having a daughter means you want her to get
married
Having a daughter means you want her to have a
baby
Having a daughter means you want her to do this
with a guy who will be like Nathaniel P. and you will be so sorry when he does
not live up to your above, automatic desires for your daughter to mate/breed
You will have to somehow reconcile the fact that
ultimately your politics created this (fictional) guy
Having a daughter means you would change those
politics simply because you would flash forward to a time when she’ll be dating
and will date one or two dudes, whose ultimate character you will define
ENTIRELY BY “how likely he is to marry/breed with my daughter,” and
then, seeing how horrifically indecisive he will be, you will then rethink your
entire concept of politics and liberty to the extent that you will simply stop
wanting reproductive rights or equal pay for your daughter simply in the hopes
that a creative manchild type will change his ways and suddenly experience the
pressure to want to marry and breed right away with your daughter simply
because they hooked up and kinda liked each other at one point, all regardless
of whether either wants marriage or children, or has even met, or even exist,
or even enjoy the same books and films and pour-over coffee.
None of these things come up when having sons