Accidental feminist

The other day my thirteen-year-old daughter was complaining about an incident at school. Her history teacher had paired her with a boy in her class for some project or another. The boy asked my daughter if she wanted to hear a joke. My daughter declined because she is a smart kid and knows that when a thirteen-year-old boy asks a girl if she wants to hear a joke, there is zero chance the girl will want to hear the joke. Like with that one uncle who always asks you to pull his finger. But the boy persisted and this time he did not wait for the chance to be rejected. Do you want to hear a joke? Women’s rights!

Ha ha. That was a good one! Get it? Women’s rights are a joke! When my daughter shared this story with me my response to her was: meh. Boys are jerks. Don’t reward them by wasting time and emotional energy worrying about it. I suppressed an urge to tell her next time it happened, she should reply: Do you want to hear an even funnier joke? Your penis. But I knew her mother wouldn’t go for that, so I went about my business.

But what the kid said to my daughter stuck with me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my advice was wrong. My daughter should not be taught to ignore comments intended to belittle or demean her because she is a girl. Rather, boys should be taught to not harass girls. And they should be expected to grow into men who do not harass women. The notion that it is laughable that a woman should be entitled to equal status with men is just wrong. Period. It is wrong for a boy to make a girl in his class feel uncomfortable with an insulting “joke.” Not just a girl in his class, but my daughter. So fuck that little douche bag.

Look, I’m not claiming that there are zero differences between boys and girls, men and women. I am a middle-aged guy who grew up with brothers and now lives with a wife and two daughters. So I am keenly aware that men and women come from different planets. I’ve learned to live on the planet where I share the bathroom countertop with curling irons, where I have learned to close the toilet seat after I pee, and where I watch Quentin Tarantino movies alone. But I’ve also learned that men have no monopoly on any meaningful element of humanness like intelligence, moral and ethical rigor, perseverance, or professional competence, to name a few. In short, there is no rational basis for denying women equal opportunities.

There are men – many men – who dismiss the idea that there is a genuine issue over how we treat women in our society. What do women have to complain about, right? Then there are men – fewer in number but still too many – who are hostile toward the notion that we should even consider women as equals to men. These men are idiots. I’ve never been one of that tribe. But I have been generally ambivalent on the whole equality issue, tending to believe that the arch of the moral universe is bending toward equality for women, and letting it be at that.

But my daughter’s experience made me wonder if I’ve been too complacent. I mean, you are willfully obtuse if you don’t see the litany of shit women still put up with simply because they are women. Less pay for same work. Catcalls. Slut shaming. Objectification. Glass ceilings. Sexual harassment. Sexual assault. Not an exclusive list, but those are some of the lowlights. These are all things that I can afford to pretend don’t exist because, you know, I’m a guy. But I’m also a dad and a husband.

So I turned to my wife, Carissa, for a reality check. Am I getting soft out here on the east coast? Am I being overly protective of my daughter, letting my male ego take control? Carissa and I have been married for twenty-two years. She is one of the most competent, capable, decisive people I have ever met. She has a Ph.D. She is a senior executive for a prominent education policy organization in Washington, D.C. She is nearly six-feet tall. A former college volleyball player. Triathlete. Fearless. Tough. Red-headed. She isn’t afraid to call bullshit on fabricated outrage. While I know she firmly believes that she is the equal (or better) of any male, she’s never really made an issue about it.

Our conversation surprised me. I learned that sometimes she feels vulnerable when she’s running alone, wary when a male runner approaches. She travels a lot for work. When she’s on a hotel elevator with a man, she mentally maps out a plan for a potential escape if he gets off on the same floor that she does. She is discrete when using google maps on her smart phone so a stranger does not notice she is alone in unfamiliar territory. In the past when a male colleague or professional acquaintance commented on her appearance, she said she wondered if she was dressed inappropriately. I seriously had no idea that these were situations that ever bothered her.

I recall a time during her doctoral program when a male professor emailed her that she was his “soul mate.” Carissa had been icked out by Professor McCreepy and I remember thinking he needed a good ass-kicking. I hadn’t taken the time to consider that the bigger deal was a leering male professor making a female student feel uncomfortable when the balance of power in the relationship was not equal.

I should emphasize that Carissa was not complaining but responding to my direct questions about how seriously I should care about some punk kid crudely attempting to belittle our daughter because she is a girl. Most of what Carissa told me came as a surprise because I had assumed she was immune to the puny efforts of simpleton men to put her in her place.

It is obvious to me that my daughters deserve more than a “meh” from their father when they are confronted with boys or men who discount them because they are girls. It also reinforces my choice to teach my daughters to be neither subservient to nor dependent upon men. I've even implemented a rule to foster this environment of independence: no marriage until after graduate school is complete.

But in true displays of independence, I fully expect that my girls will never agree to allow me to decide when – or even if – they will marry. Or, to be honest, let me decide anything else either.

I’m OK with that.