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By George Chesterton
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One of the strangest things about being a father of girls is that I’m encouraged to be sympathetic and informed about the female experience at the same time as being told I will never appreciate what it’s like to be a girl.
Show that you care, but mind your own business. Try to understand us, even though you will never understand us. It’s very confusing.
If I were a male chauvinist—I stress the "if"—I could suggest that insisting a man should do something you also believe he is incapable of doing is a classic female trap. Anyway, before I get into any more trouble, let’s get back to dads with daughters.
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I was and remain very happy to have two daughters. I’m often asked, "I bet you wish you had a son, though?" and I always said no. Firstly, I never thought of having children as a consumer choice. I was delighted and grateful to get what I was given. Two girls suits me just fine. And, secondly, I’ve long repressed the relief that I’ve never had to concern myself with what a son would probably have liked: soccer, cars, boogers (there’s no way of knowing this, of course: my hypothetical son may have loved baking cakes and embroidery).
It’s also true that, if a man had a troubled relationship with his own father, it can either make him want to put this right for the next generation or avoid it altogether. I wasn’t given a choice, but I’m happy life took on the latter course.
As my daughters get older, my role has become less obvious, and it takes more work to maintain the blissful relationships I shared with them before middle school. All the big biological questions—and there are many—are deferred to my wife. This is all perfectly natural, but it has the effect of cutting me out. It’s not that I want to get into the details of what happens to teenage girls’ bodies, but that my absence from these conversations leaves me outside looking in. I can’t help envying the intimacy between mother and daughter, even though I’m glad not to have to discuss the, well, you know…the awkward stuff.
My wife gets to be the high priestess of my daughters’ rite of passage into womanhood. If they have a question about their changing bodies or are upset because mean girls have discovered an unrequited crush, who are they going to call? Not dad.
It used to be common for men to react to their wives or daughters’ bad temper with a phrase such as "It must be your time of the month." Today, that could result in a deserved smack on the mouth. But, even though I would not be permitted to utter anything of the sort, it is not uncommon to hear my wife and eldest daughter talk about their behavior being affected by a full moon. "What are we, werewolves?" I say. Blank looks all round.
The positive side is that it reminds me to make an effort. To take an interest in their lives and find opportunities for our relationships to grow in new ways. But men can be useless, as all women know. When my wife had a hysterectomy, I often didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t understand the significance of it all, which confirmed that I was, most definitely, a man. It made me feel like I’d failed.
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Thinking about my daughters so much—their happiness, their future—pushes me toward the world’s most toxic debate and the question that is driving people crazy from Congress to campus: what is a woman? Some people go crazy if they are asked; others go crazy when they ask and don’t get the answer they want.
Where does this cultural civil war leave my daughters? Where does it leave the "sisterhood," that mysterious thing I have nothing to do with and no claim or right to understand?
If, as a man, I am by my own nature excluded from knowledge of womanhood, especially its unique physical challenges, doesn’t that suggest that womanhood is definable? It’s what I am not, apart from anything else. That’s some question. It’s the one that’s seen JK Rowling go from being the world’s most beloved author to its most vilified.
Even if I think solely about my wife and daughters and all they face, I recognize the risks of dismantling a definition of what a woman is until it becomes effectively meaningless.
And you won’t be surprised to hear me say that my daughters are definitely not meaningless.
George Chesterton is Newsweek’s Director, Publishing & Subscriber Strategy.
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