The Daughter Theory
FOR our age of wonks and white papers and warring experts, there ought to be a word — something just short of, though not shorter than, schadenfreude — for the gentle thrill inspired by a social-science finding that mildly unsettles one’s ideological opponents.
I’m thinking of the satisfied tingle a liberal might get from a study that suggests high taxes are good for economic growth. Or the spring added to a libertarian’s step by a report that environmental regulations hurt the poor.
Or the pleasure that I took recently from the headline: “Study: Having daughters makes parents more likely to be Republican.”
Why pleasure? Well, because previous research on this question had suggested the reverse, with parents of daughters leaning left and parents of sons rightward. And those earlier findings dovetailed neatly with liberal talking points about politics and gender: Republicans make war on women, Democrats protect them, so it’s only natural that raising girls would make parents see the wisdom of liberalism ...
But the new study undercuts those talking points. Things are more complicated than you thought, liberals! You can love your daughters, want the best for them, and find yourself drawn to ...conservative ideas! Especially if you’re highly educated, which is where the effect was strongest!
Better dust off a different set of talking points — maybe something about the family as the source of all oppression and how deeply internalized patriarchal norms make parents subconsciously inclined to tyrannize their female offspring and then we can argue about that!
But the new study undercuts those talking points. Things are more complicated than you thought, liberals! You can love your daughters, want the best for them, and find yourself drawn to ...conservative ideas! Especially if you’re highly educated, which is where the effect was strongest!
Better dust off a different set of talking points — maybe something about the family as the source of all oppression and how deeply internalized patriarchal norms make parents subconsciously inclined to tyrannize their female offspring and then we can argue about that!
Yes, I’m afraid this is actually the kind of internal monologue that comes with arguing about politics for a living.
But let me make a more limited, more personal argument on the subject. The next round of research may “prove” something completely different about daughters and voting behavior. But as a father of girls and a parent whose adult social set still overlaps with the unmarried, I do have a sense of where a daughter-inspired conservatism might come from, whatever political form it takes.
It comes from thinking about their future happiness, and about a young man named Nathaniel P.
This character, Nate to his friends, doesn’t technically exist: He’s the protagonist in Adelle Waldman’s recent novel of young-Brooklynite manners, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.”
But his type does exist, in multitudinous forms, wherever successful young people congregate, socialize, pair off. He’s not the worst sort of guy by any means — not a toxic bachelor or an obnoxious pick-up artist. He’s well intentioned, sensitive, mildly idealistic. Yet he’s also a source of immense misery — both short-term and potentially lifelong — for the young women in his circle.
“Contrary to what these women seemed to think,” Waldman writes of Nathaniel P.’s flings and semi-steady girlfriends, “he was not indifferent to their unhappiness. And yet he seemed, in spite of himself, to provoke it.”
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 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.
Waldman’s portrait of Nate’s romantic life is sympathetic enough to have earned her fan mail from young men. But it’s precisely because Nate is sympathetic rather than toxic that the “Nathaniel P.” phenomenon — or what Rebecca Traister has dubbed “the scourge of indecisive men” — is a hard problem to escape. Indeed, it seems like one of the hidden taproots of well-educated women’s work-life-balance angst, and one of the plausible explanations for declining female happiness in a world of expanded female opportunity.
And lurking in Waldman’s novel, as in many portraits of the dating scene (ahem, Lena Dunham, ahem), is a kind of moral traditionalism that dare not speak its name — or that can be spoken of only in half-jest, as when the novelist Benjamin Kunkel told Traister that the solution was “some sort of a sexual strike against just such men.”
Because Kunkel is right: One obvious solution to the Nathaniel P. problem is a romantic culture in which more is required of young men before the women in their lives will sleep with them.
Because Kunkel is right: One obvious solution to the Nathaniel P. problem is a romantic culture in which more is required of young men before the women in their lives will sleep with them.
To the extent that parents tend to see the next generation’s world through their children’s eyes, that’s an insight that’s more immediately available through daughters than through sons.
And no matter what the next study says about your likelihood of actually turning into a Republican, once you’ve flirted with that insight, you’ve tiptoed a little closer to something that might be described as social conservatism.
Even if you live in Brooklyn.
UPDATED 12/18/2013
Sex, Sociology and the Single Girl
Not surprisingly, my weekend musings on the gender-specific anxieties parents might have about their daughters, and how those anxieties might possibly translate into some sort of affinity for moral traditionalism, has prompted a lot of responses from socially-liberal and feminist commentators — some huffy, some bemused, some condescending, some all three. For the purposes of this post I’m just going to work off these remarks from the New Republic’s Marc Tracy, who interviewed Adelle Waldman, the novelist whose “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” served as one of my column’s touchstones, and who used their conversation as grist for the following conclusion:
Here’s a relevant example of what I mean. If you look at the sociological literature on premarital sex and the attitudes surrounding it — how soon it should happen in a relationship, how casually it should take place — you see fairly clear gender differences: In the aggregate (note: I said aggregate), women’s stated preferences incline them toward a somewhat longer period of dating before sex and a closer link between intimacy, monogamy and commitment. And then you also see a significant correlation between female happiness and the fulfillment of those preferences: The risk of depression, for instance, is much lower for women with stable relationships and a low number of overall sexual partners, a correlation which doesn’t appear to anything like the same degree for men.
But then when you ask women (and men) what they assume about other people’s sexual preferences and behavior, there is a consistent overestimation of how often and how quickly their peers are having sex. The phenomenon at work here goes by the technical name “pluralistic ignorance,” and its effects are summarized as follows by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in a discussion of sexual patterns on college campuses:
And where gender differences are concerned, it influences them in a very specific way: In the aggregate (note that word again!), the current conventions surrounding premarital sex seem to push women to conform to male desires rather than to their own stated preferences. Look, for instance, at Figure 2 in this paper, which compares female comfort levels with various activities during a casual hook-up both with male comfort levels and with what the women thought other women would be comfortable with. You’ll see a striking pattern: Male and female comfort levels diverged sharply when the options moved from what people used to call “heavy petting” to oral sex and intercourse — men were reasonably comfortable with everything; women weren’t — but the women surveyed mistakenly assumed that other women’s preferences looked much more like the male preferences than their own. (So, significantly, did the men.) In other words, in our sexual culture, the male preference gets treated as normative even by women who don’t share it, and whose own comfort level with sex outside a committed relationship is actually substantially lower.
Now there are three ways you can look at this kind of data, three attitudes you can take. One possibility, which I take to be view of a number of the feminist writers who criticized my column, is that the division in stated preferences is itself a social convention — one of the legacies of patriarchy and male privilege, an entirely socially-constructed divergence that reflects the historical shaming of promiscuous women and the devaluing of female sexual pleasure. In this view, women who think they want to wait longer to have sex than men and who are more uncomfortable than males with the idea of sex with near-strangers are victims of false consciousness, disconnected from their actual desires and own best interests, and their enduring hang-ups are an obstacle to equality, freedom, and truly liberated decision making.
But this argument ends up in a peculiar place. It is one thing to argue that, say, the association between female promiscuity and depression, and the absence of a similarly strong association for men, is just an example of how the old sexual double standard warps women’s sense of self-worth. That’s a plausible-enough argument, though one that I think is somewhat incomplete. It’s much more sweeping and strange, though, to argue that in the name of female empowerment, male attitudes toward sex should be treated as comprehensively normative and healthy, female attitudes should be treated as self-deceived and borderline pathological, and that women should reshape and renovate their own desires about sex and relationships to conform to what men already want. The logic can be made to work, I concede, with sufficient intellectual gymnastics. But it still feels like a very strange sort of feminism that looks at the literature on sexual and romantic preferences and makes what men want the measure of empowerment, happiness and health.
The second possible attitude, which I think is actually more commonplace (though often unstated) than the strict feminist take, doesn’t dismiss these patterns but basically denies that they have any clear relevance to individual lives and relationships — because every sexual situation is so different, every romantic encounter so distinctive, that trying to draw any kind of specific life lessons from what a bunch of men and women tell a sociologist is a fool’s errand. Or, alternatively, perhaps, it’s not a fool’s errand but it is a dangerous business, because the risks from having too many rules (repression, misery, etc.) are much more significant than the risks from having too few, and the “rigid social conventions” of the past were so self-evidently anti-sex and awful that it’s better not to question whatever conventions we’ve replaced them with.
I think you can see a hint of this idea in Waldman’s comment about waiting or not waiting to have sex, and how she had her protagonist end up with a girl he slept with quickly because that was true to the experiences in her social circle, and to the broader mystery of how specific couples interact. From a novelist’s perspective, that’s a wise choice: Every relationship really is different, which means that plenty of relationships begin with sex and become something deeper and more durable — and no work of fiction, even one that doubles as a work of social criticism, should privilege sociological findings at the expense of the raw complexity of real human interaction.
But it still feels like an abdication of intellectual responsibility — and of personal responsibility, to return to my column’s theme, in the case of parents and families and communities — to simply ignore the sociology, to insist that the patterns and preferences have no relevance to people’s happiness, or to try to paper them over out of an implausible fear that merely acknowledging them will send us hurtling back into the world of “Mad Men,” the Victorians, or worse. Because actually, for instance, in the aggregate (yes, that word again) it does seem to be the case that relationships are better when you wait to have sex — not till marriage or even engagement, necessarily, but just longer than the average, longer than the current cultural norm. And pretending that this knowledge shouldn’t have any relevance to individual sexual and romantic choices, and can’t possibly justify any kind of structural critique of contemporary mores, seems like a weird sort of anti-empiricism, a kind of faith-based liberationism that recognizes no challenge to its dogmas.
Which brings us to the third possible response to the sociological findings and patterns mentioned above. If there’s evidence that 1) women’s stated sexual preferences are somewhat more conservative than what men say they want and what our cultural norms encourage, that 2) women’s happiness increases when their sex lives conform to their own preferences rather than to the culture’s more libertine script, and that (at least anecdotally) 3) men tend toward a kind of indecisive, listless, semi-exploitative relationship style when their preferences are too easily fulfilled, then perhaps — just perhaps — what we have here is a case for a somewhat more conservative sexual culture. Not a culture where the Ministry of Virtue locks Nathaniel P. away for crimes against chastity; not a culture where nobody ever has a one-night stand or a friend with benefits; not a culture where women are treated like porcelain or taught to quiver in fear of the ravening lusts of lecherous males. Just a culture where it’s a little easier for women (and men) to act on attitudes and preferences that, in the aggregate (!!!!), seem to correlate more with happiness and flourishing than many social liberals are willing to acknowledge or admit.
In my reading, Douthat makes the classic, noble conservative mistake of assuming that rigid social conventions must do the work that we cannot trust young adults to do themselves. Waldman’s opinion (and mine) is that granting young men and women the social freedom to make their own way will result, most of the time and more times than not, in liberated decision-making that leaves everyone better off.I actually have no idea what kind of romantic landscape would result from perfectly “liberated decision-making,” because — much like the anarcho-capitalist utopia of certain libertarian imaginings — no such perfect personal liberation is possible. To be human in society is to live with conventions, patterns, expectations; if you do away with one set on the grounds that it’s too “rigid,” as Tracy puts it, you can expect that whatever social system emerges after the revolution will have its own set of pressures, assumptions, and constraints.
While hesitating to be too much of a spoiler, Waldman explained, “The person Nate winds up with in the book is one that he slept with on the first date. And that was deliberate, because it doesn’t ring true to my experience or to people I know that relationships are better when you wait to have sex.” She added, in a line that should only sound gooey if you have never been through it, “I think that what really makes relationships work depends on the two people and what they bring to it at that moment in time.”
Here’s a relevant example of what I mean. If you look at the sociological literature on premarital sex and the attitudes surrounding it — how soon it should happen in a relationship, how casually it should take place — you see fairly clear gender differences: In the aggregate (note: I said aggregate), women’s stated preferences incline them toward a somewhat longer period of dating before sex and a closer link between intimacy, monogamy and commitment. And then you also see a significant correlation between female happiness and the fulfillment of those preferences: The risk of depression, for instance, is much lower for women with stable relationships and a low number of overall sexual partners, a correlation which doesn’t appear to anything like the same degree for men.
But then when you ask women (and men) what they assume about other people’s sexual preferences and behavior, there is a consistent overestimation of how often and how quickly their peers are having sex. The phenomenon at work here goes by the technical name “pluralistic ignorance,” and its effects are summarized as follows by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in a discussion of sexual patterns on college campuses:
… pluralistic ignorance happens when within a group of individuals, each person believes his or her private attitudes, beliefs, or judgments are discrepant from the norm displayed by the public behavior of others. Therefore, each group member, wishing to be seen as a desirable member of the group, publicly conforms to the norm, each believing he or she is the only one in the group experiencing conflict between his or her private attitude and his or her public behavior. Group members believe that most others in their group, especially those who are popular and opinion leaders, actually endorse the norm and want to behave that way, while they themselves privately feel they are going along with the norm because of a desire to fit in with the group and exemplify the norm. This pattern suggests that plenty of college students think that they don’t have sex as much as other people do and aren’t as comfortable with uncommitted sex as other people are, but generally don’t wish to appear so. In other words, many college students are more sexually conservative than they prefer to let on. They’re afraid to appear prudish, which strikes many as a social kiss of death. The results of pluralistic ignorance about others’ sex lives, however, can “lead one or both sexual partners to act according to the perceived norm rather than to their own convictions.” In other words, sex becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: “The more students believe sexual activity is occurring, the more sexual activity occurs.”If you don’t like the jargon of “pluralistic ignorance,” you can just use Tracy’s language instead: The expectation of relatively-swift sex is itself a “social convention,” no less than the expectation of chastity or courtship, and one that like any convention influences people’s decisionmaking as much as their own internal beliefs and preferences do.
And where gender differences are concerned, it influences them in a very specific way: In the aggregate (note that word again!), the current conventions surrounding premarital sex seem to push women to conform to male desires rather than to their own stated preferences. Look, for instance, at Figure 2 in this paper, which compares female comfort levels with various activities during a casual hook-up both with male comfort levels and with what the women thought other women would be comfortable with. You’ll see a striking pattern: Male and female comfort levels diverged sharply when the options moved from what people used to call “heavy petting” to oral sex and intercourse — men were reasonably comfortable with everything; women weren’t — but the women surveyed mistakenly assumed that other women’s preferences looked much more like the male preferences than their own. (So, significantly, did the men.) In other words, in our sexual culture, the male preference gets treated as normative even by women who don’t share it, and whose own comfort level with sex outside a committed relationship is actually substantially lower.
Now there are three ways you can look at this kind of data, three attitudes you can take. One possibility, which I take to be view of a number of the feminist writers who criticized my column, is that the division in stated preferences is itself a social convention — one of the legacies of patriarchy and male privilege, an entirely socially-constructed divergence that reflects the historical shaming of promiscuous women and the devaluing of female sexual pleasure. In this view, women who think they want to wait longer to have sex than men and who are more uncomfortable than males with the idea of sex with near-strangers are victims of false consciousness, disconnected from their actual desires and own best interests, and their enduring hang-ups are an obstacle to equality, freedom, and truly liberated decision making.
But this argument ends up in a peculiar place. It is one thing to argue that, say, the association between female promiscuity and depression, and the absence of a similarly strong association for men, is just an example of how the old sexual double standard warps women’s sense of self-worth. That’s a plausible-enough argument, though one that I think is somewhat incomplete. It’s much more sweeping and strange, though, to argue that in the name of female empowerment, male attitudes toward sex should be treated as comprehensively normative and healthy, female attitudes should be treated as self-deceived and borderline pathological, and that women should reshape and renovate their own desires about sex and relationships to conform to what men already want. The logic can be made to work, I concede, with sufficient intellectual gymnastics. But it still feels like a very strange sort of feminism that looks at the literature on sexual and romantic preferences and makes what men want the measure of empowerment, happiness and health.
The second possible attitude, which I think is actually more commonplace (though often unstated) than the strict feminist take, doesn’t dismiss these patterns but basically denies that they have any clear relevance to individual lives and relationships — because every sexual situation is so different, every romantic encounter so distinctive, that trying to draw any kind of specific life lessons from what a bunch of men and women tell a sociologist is a fool’s errand. Or, alternatively, perhaps, it’s not a fool’s errand but it is a dangerous business, because the risks from having too many rules (repression, misery, etc.) are much more significant than the risks from having too few, and the “rigid social conventions” of the past were so self-evidently anti-sex and awful that it’s better not to question whatever conventions we’ve replaced them with.
I think you can see a hint of this idea in Waldman’s comment about waiting or not waiting to have sex, and how she had her protagonist end up with a girl he slept with quickly because that was true to the experiences in her social circle, and to the broader mystery of how specific couples interact. From a novelist’s perspective, that’s a wise choice: Every relationship really is different, which means that plenty of relationships begin with sex and become something deeper and more durable — and no work of fiction, even one that doubles as a work of social criticism, should privilege sociological findings at the expense of the raw complexity of real human interaction.
But it still feels like an abdication of intellectual responsibility — and of personal responsibility, to return to my column’s theme, in the case of parents and families and communities — to simply ignore the sociology, to insist that the patterns and preferences have no relevance to people’s happiness, or to try to paper them over out of an implausible fear that merely acknowledging them will send us hurtling back into the world of “Mad Men,” the Victorians, or worse. Because actually, for instance, in the aggregate (yes, that word again) it does seem to be the case that relationships are better when you wait to have sex — not till marriage or even engagement, necessarily, but just longer than the average, longer than the current cultural norm. And pretending that this knowledge shouldn’t have any relevance to individual sexual and romantic choices, and can’t possibly justify any kind of structural critique of contemporary mores, seems like a weird sort of anti-empiricism, a kind of faith-based liberationism that recognizes no challenge to its dogmas.
Which brings us to the third possible response to the sociological findings and patterns mentioned above. If there’s evidence that 1) women’s stated sexual preferences are somewhat more conservative than what men say they want and what our cultural norms encourage, that 2) women’s happiness increases when their sex lives conform to their own preferences rather than to the culture’s more libertine script, and that (at least anecdotally) 3) men tend toward a kind of indecisive, listless, semi-exploitative relationship style when their preferences are too easily fulfilled, then perhaps — just perhaps — what we have here is a case for a somewhat more conservative sexual culture. Not a culture where the Ministry of Virtue locks Nathaniel P. away for crimes against chastity; not a culture where nobody ever has a one-night stand or a friend with benefits; not a culture where women are treated like porcelain or taught to quiver in fear of the ravening lusts of lecherous males. Just a culture where it’s a little easier for women (and men) to act on attitudes and preferences that, in the aggregate (!!!!), seem to correlate more with happiness and flourishing than many social liberals are willing to acknowledge or admit.
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