One of my Facebook friends recently posted an image that read: “What if I don’t have daughters and therefore no way of knowing that women are people? Good news, all women are people all the time, not just when assholes have daughters.”
On HuffPost, one writer criticized “a couple of celebrity men [who] put out statements or gave interviews about [Harvey Weinstein’s repeated assaults on women]…emphasizing that as fathers of daughters, they found this behavior abhorrent.”
My Facebook friend and this writer are pissed off because “men see each other as humans. And a lot of men still don’t view girls or women that way.” The “I have a daughter” trope confirms this reality because it stands as “the flip side [to] sexual assault. In both situations, a woman is an object — to grope or protect from groping.”
I get their anger. But I don’t think they’re giving the “transformative” power of having daughters enough credit (even though the HuffPo writer links to that article in her post). I don’t know if they’re fully grasping what that transformation consists of.
The goal of every feminist is to reduce the level of ignorance, to bring those who are not yet capable of it to the realization that women are people too. I’m not sure we have the right to judge the ways in which an individual is brought out of that ignorance. To do so is to put the method ahead of the result.
The HuffPo writer makes an assumption that the men who make these comments do so to protect their daughters from being groped, and in some ways, I know that they do, but couldn’t they also be making these statements because they’ve grown as human beings? Not because they want to protect their daughters, but because they want to defend the rights of everyone to live their lives free from harassment and oppression?
It is a process to bring someone out of their ignorance, and it takes generations to do it on such a massive scale, but with each parent, teacher, and celebrity brought out of their ignorance, humanity gains one more person capable of providing those who are most easily influenced with earlier and earlier opportunities to be brought out of the systemic ignorance.
I appreciate the desire to critique the “I have a daughter” trope, but it seems as if it’s being done with too much judgement, almost as if we’re screaming at someone for not getting it earlier, when maybe we ought to appreciate that, given the society they continue to live in, they ever got it at all.
People only know what other people can teach them. Let’s not forget that children are often our greatest teachers.