July 25, 2020

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the House floor on Thursday.House Television, via Associated Press

By Jessica Bennett

“Having a daughter does not make a man decent.”

— Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, responding to a vulgar insult lodged at her by Representative Ted Yoho

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Brett Kavanaugh invoked it. Mitch McConnell used it too. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have each talked about it, and this week, Representative Ted Yoho joined their ranks: He, too, is now a member of the having-a-daughter-makes-me-an-ally-to-women — or, at the very least, should-excuse-my-bad-behavior — club.

“Having been married for 45 years with two daughters, I’m very cognizant of language,” Mr. Yoho, of Florida, said in a speech on the House floor this week, denying that he had used a sexist vulgarity in reference to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman congresswoman from New York, after a confrontation on the steps of the Capitol.

Mr. Yoho later expressed regret for the “abrupt manner of the conversation,” in which he told Ms. Ocasio-Cortez that her statements about poverty and crime in New York City were “disgusting.” But, he noted, “I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my God, my family and my country.”

On Thursday, in a speech on the House floor that has since gone viral, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, “I am someone’s daughter, too.” She said she had planned to ignore the insults but changed her mind after Mr. Yoho decided to bring his wife and daughters into the picture.

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Our culture is full of platitudes about fathers and daughters: the Hallmark card, the weeping dad at the wedding. But invoking daughters and wives to deflect criticism is a particular kind of political trope — and one that has been used throughout history to “excuse a host of bad behavior,” said Barbara Berg, a historian and the author of “Sexism in America.”

The love a man has for the female members of his family, particularly his offspring, is presumed to have special power — to humanize the other half of the population, to allow him to imagine the world his daughter will inhabit. Sometimes, in fact, this does happen. Other times, the Daughter Excuse comes across mostly as cynical ploy.

“As if familial affiliation alone equals enlightened attitudes towards women,” said Susan Douglas, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. “It’s like claiming ‘I have a Black friend‚’ as if that makes you anti-racist.”

There is, however, social science that has shown there is something to being the father of a daughter.

In a study titled “The First-Daughter Effect,” Elizabeth Sharrow, an associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her colleagues, determined that fathering daughters — and firstborn daughters, in particular — indeed played a role in making men’s attitudes toward gender equality more progressive, especially when considering policies like equal pay or sexual harassment protocols.

“Our argument is not that it is genetics or biology, but that it is proximity,” Dr. Sharrow said. In other words: The daughters help the fathers see problems they may have previously dismissed.

Witness the basketball star Stephen Curry, who has written about how since having a daughter, “the idea of women’s equality has become a little more personal for me, lately, and a little more real.”

Family members of of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, including his wife Ashley, right, and mother Martha, left, listen to his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in September 2018 in Washington.Pool photo by Jim Bourg

Or Dick Cheney, whose views on same-sex marriage shifted earlier than many observers might have expected because of his daughter, who is gay.

And yet.

Daughters influencing fathers’ views for the better is far different from fathers using their daughters as “shields and excuses for poor behavior,” as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez described it.

It’s also different from fathers using them as “props,” as Dr. Berg puts it, to emphasize their alignment with women’s causes — or, by contrast, their disgust over behaviors perceived to be in opposition to them.

Consider Justice Kavanaugh during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about allegations of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford. The justice spoke repeatedly of his daughters — as well as his wife and mother — and noted that coaching his daughter’s basketball team was what he loved “more than anything I’ve ever done in my whole life.”

“Men have often pointed to their relationships with and love for some women — especially wives and daughters — to combat claims that they have mistreated other women,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

In the wake of the 2016 news reports on vulgar comments made by Donald Trump on the now-infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, a host of fathers-of-daughters came out to condemn the behavior. Senator McConnell noted that “as the father of three daughters,” he believed that Mr. Trump “needs to apologize directly to women and girls everywhere,” while Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, said that the comments “demean our wives and daughters.”

Similarly, in response to revelations of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein, both Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who had worked with the disgraced Hollywood producer, expressed their disgust on behalf of their female offspring. We “need to do better at protecting our friends, sisters, co-workers and daughters,” Mr. Affleck said on Twitter, while Mr. Damon explained that “as the father of four daughters, this is the kind of sexual predation that keeps me up at night.”

Women, too, have at times invoked men’s daughters — and other female relatives — in trying to appeal to some men. When asked about Mr. Yoho’s behavior, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “What’s so funny is, you’d say to them, ‘Do you not have a daughter? Do you not have a mother? Do you not have a sister? Do you not have a wife? What makes you think that you can be so’ — and this is the word I use for them — ‘condescending, in addition to being disrespectful?’”

The caveat, of course, is the qualification. According to Dr. Dittmar, “Qualifying your outrage against misogyny as due to your role as a father or husband implies that, absent those roles, you would be either unaware of it or unconcerned.”

Or as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez put it: “Having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man.” Why should daughters still have to be a prerequisite for respect?

What else is happening

Here are four articles from The Times you may have missed.

The Wall of Moms outside of the U.S. District Court in Portland on Thursday night.Mason Trinca for The New York Times

“I wanted us to look like moms.” The “Wall of Moms” in Portland, Ore., has taken up the cause against police violence. [Read the story]
“There was just a calming sense of being back on the floor.” The W.N.B.A. is ready for the new season. [Read the story]
“We should all think about how pods might further the gap between our students.” Learning pods, micro-schools and tutors: Can parents solve the education crisis on their own? [Read the story]
“There weren’t many of us.” Along with feminist lawyers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nadine Taub made legal history in cases that argued that the Constitution protected women’s rights. [Read the obituary]

In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson.

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