This is brand new father and mega-famous rapper, Jay-Z:
Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich/ I didn’t think hard about using the word bitch/I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it/Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it.
No man will degrade her, or call her name/I’m so focused on your future, the degradation has passed/ I wish you wealth, health and insight/Forever young you may pass/Blue Ivy Carter, my angel.
And more from this thought-provoking article from Lisa Belkin (hi!) at the Huffington Post:
Jay-Z is not the first man to realize he has been a misogynistic jerk only after he has a daughter.
Okay, maybe the academic studies don’t use those words exactly, but one, from the University of Maryland titled “Like Daughter, Like Father: How Women’s Wages Change When CEOs Have Daughters,” found that the birth of a girl to a male CEO closes the wage gap at his company by .5 percentage points, and if that daughter is the CEOs first child the gap closes by 2.8 percentage points.)
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That same switch might flip some of a father’s political views, too. A study of the voting records of US Congressmen found that those with daughters voted more liberally on issues of reproductive rights, flexible work policies and funding for education. And data on British families found that fathers with three sons and no daughters were far more likely to vote for conservative candidates than were fathers of three daughters and no sons.
“Daughters make people more left-wing, while having sons, by contrast, makes them more right-wing” the author of that last study, Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick said when it was released in 2009.
Still, world, we can’t wait for every man to have a daughter – men, find your feminism NOW.
blue milk 
Great post! It made me think of a few more men of hip hop who have expressed similar feelings:
“Yeah but it all comes back, that’s why I named my daughter Karma/Who’s teaching me the lesson of life and making me smarter” -Ludacris “Large Amounts”
“Better than a chick who say yes too soon/Until you have a daughter that’s what I call karma/And you pray to God she don’t grow breasts too soon” -Kanye West “We Major”
Haha. You kinda called me out. I agree we can’t wait for every man to have a daughter but part of privilege is being able to opt out. The more men that see their privilege through the eyes of their daughter and want everything for her they would want for a son, the better.
Fatherhood as a path to feminism is infinitely better than many ways fathers deal with daughters around the world. By definition, life changing experiences change us. Think we have to be happy and support those who change for the better and work hark to ensure more people have positive changes going forward.
I wish that was true for Tony Abbot!
Jay Z has a mother, a wife … don’t those women command any respect in his life?
Pfft.
Yeah, I’m going to have to agree with this one.
Women you ‘meet’ as adults often don’t generate the protective emotions that your children do. Those women are standing up and taking care of themselves, so it doesn’t become an issue until you see the possibilities for someone who can’t deal with it yet. I think it happens to parents in a lot of ways. Suddenly they see the world their child will face, and it doesn’t look quite like what they have gotten used to.
So proud (as always) to be the mother of three marvelous daughters.
I don’t think that the arrival of my daughters led me to be more left wing, prob the opposite. what it did do was make it harder for me to see violence against women in an abstract manner, an essential skill in my previous employment. it was a bit like a switch flipped in my brain and the casual violence and misogyny of my clients, i was an adolescent parole officer, was no longer something to develop strategies to address and became a direct threat against my daughter. After 5 months of wanting to strangle the little bastards, i took my turn at home and never went back.
This can be true even when a grown woman joins the family (daughter-in-law). When I started dating my husband, his father was a vice president at a chemical company. He suddenly began seeing the under-utlizied women in his workforce (master degree engineers working as day laborers instead of using their acquired knowledge) and he began promoting them to more appropriate positions.
I think fatherhood can be a positive route towards feminism for a lot of men, but it can also sometimes reek of paternalism (I mean, that’s where the word comes from). I want having a daughter to inspire men to want to create more opportunities for women, because they see how it’s like to grow up as a different gender, not get more protectorive of all women instead.
I’m not being eloquent here. I just keep thinking of the song “Daughters” by John Mayer and wanting to vom: http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/daughters-lyrics-john-mayer/64b0cd5ff8c9d2b248256cf4000e6f67
I also keep thinking of Tracy Jordan’s bit on 30 Rock when he finds out he’s having a daughter, recruits a woman to join his crew and then refuses to take her to the strip club even when she begs. Anyone?
It’s a sad state of affairs when a man has to have a daughter in order to see that calling a woman a “bitch” is wrong. This man is married, for God’s sake. Does he think of his wife in those terms?
I have to say, I’m not really feeling it either. Yes, great if becoming a father turns men on to equality and feminism. But I agree with those who think that what we are seeing here could just be the ‘special’ daddy-daughter relationship, men protecting women because we are special, vulnerable, weak, blah blah blah.
Put me with those saying ‘great, but I’m still underwhelmed’. very interesting to see the fact about having daughters or sons making their parent less or more conservative. in dating world, I have wondered if men my age tend to be right wing and women my age tend to be left wing… or if it’s just the circles I move in…
[…] Fatherhood as the path to feminism. Jay-Z just had a baby and now he doesn’t want to degrade women anymore! Good for him. Apparently the wage gaps get smaller when CEO’s have daughters and I’m not surprised. It’s great that having a daughter is the path to feminism for some men but it’s not enough. Men should be able to come to the realization that women are people deserving of equality without having a daughter […]