Daughters and fathers
Apparently there is no number of daughters sufficient to convince men of the need to take women seriously.
Donald Trump has daughters. Ditto Vladimir Putin. David Cameron, with two, maintained a primitive preference for male colleagues/banter. George Osborne’s daughter couldn’t inoculate him against airing psychopathic fantasies about Theresa May. That Boris Johnson was the parent as prime minister of two, then three girls, similarly confirms that hiring only men who have daughters cannot, sadly, be the solution to misogyny in Westminster, the City or the Metropolitan police.
Admittedly, since spawning another girl, Johnson has apologised to the female colleague known to his old WhatsApp pals as “that cunt”.
Baby steps. Plus lots of daughters. This is going to take some time, isn’t it.
I have a paper somewhere about what encourages men to publicly support justice for women in the workplace, which suggests that there’s no correlation between having daughters and supporting women (IIRC a sense of fair play and experience working with women leaders are the most highly correlated).
One wonders why so many people believe that men with daughters are more sympathetic to women while men with wives don’t seem to be…. (no need to really wonder – a wife is just that person who makes his life miserable while a daughter carries his own special DNA and was created with his own special sperm)
Many of them have sisters as well, and I suspect most of them had mothers. Somehow being around women doesn’t seem to work.
Unless something unexpected happens in the next 7 hours the last thing worth mentioning I did in 2023 was to read Hags – The Demonization of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria ”Glosswitch” Smith (recommended btw. I suspect iknklast will find this one interesting!). In it, among other things, she writes about the perpetual sham (sometimes even masquerading as a superior, more enlightened form of feminism) according to which women’s equality is always just around the next corner and will be realized once the hags who are currently ruining everything (the witch, the evil queen, the mother in law, the Karen, the TERF, the bigoted older feminists who are on the wrong side of history) have died out and the more enlightened next generation of women, the ones who ”get it”, who are not like those feminists, who by a remarkable coincidence just happen to be most attractive to men, have taken over. It’s not that anyone is bigoted against older women, see. It’s just that the women currently in the post-reproductive age always just happen to be truly beyond the pale. It’s easy to reconcile misogyny with having daughters if you can convince yourself that your own daughter will never become a hag like all those previous generations of women. It’s even easy for young women to convince themselves that they will be spared the same treatment as long as they don’t make the same mistakes as their mothers. And yet each new generation of women somehow end up as the new hags once they’re no longer considered fuckable. I wonder why.
Bjarte, already read that one…and I also recommend it. In fact, it will probably be high on the list of best books I read this year, which I will probably compile this afternoon, since there is NO WAY I will finish my current book by tonight (I just started it last night). And it doesn’t appear likely to make my favorites list, anyway.
One thing I found interesting in her book was her own change from viewing women as hags and becoming one herself. It is a bit of self-awareness more people could do with. I never saw middle-aged women as hags, but it is easy to think of them as past their prime…even though they may be in their prime as far as education and experience go. I was fortunate to have some of these ‘hags’ as mentors, and I learned a lot from them, including that middle-aged women are worth listening to.
I wish I’d had that book to read when I was younger…but of course it didn’t exist at the time I’d really have benefited from it. (I have recommended it to younger female colleagues.)
iknklast, I should have guessed :)
guest #5
Then again, she does acknowledge that it even she would have a hard time getting through to her younger self. One formulation that stuck with me went something like (from memory) “No one can prepare you for what it’s like to be a middle-aged woman. Or the ones who can are all middle-aged women, so why would you listen to them?”
Can we add Prince Andrew to that list of misogynistic men with daughters? Two teenage girl at the breakfast table, and his sweaty hands (oh wait, completely dry hands) all over young women who are approximately the same age later on that evening at Jeffrey Epstein’s perv-party. All these men ever do is put their own women in a separate category to all other women.