A Letter to Washington Post Advice Columnist Carolyn Hax About "Daughter's Tight Clothes"
Allow Fathers to Help Guide Their Own Daughters About Appropriate Clothing
Dear Ms. Hax,
I read your advice column in the Washington Post every day, so I know that you usually give sound advice to your readers, often cleverly delivered with a dose of humor.
However, your recent column, Dad fears his daughter’s tight clothes will attract disrespect, was wrong in several ways. I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
As a brief introduction, please know that I’m a proud lifelong reader of the Post who nevertheless has long noticed the paper’s gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence.1
But in 2018 my pride in the Post finally turned to shame after the paper published two undeniably gender-biased articles: Why can't we hate men? and Amber Heard’s libelous op-ed. Since then, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate an anti-male bias.
Your reply to this father is another example of this bias.
It managed to: insult the father (and by extension all men); help propagate feminist hypocrisy about the “objectification of women”; unwittingly endorse the complete abandonment of parental guidance on how daughters should dress; and help put America’s daughters at risk of sexual assault.
You can promote a healthy internal dialogue by seeing the objectification of women as a problem that chauvinists create with their behavior, not that women create with their clothes.
With your use of the label “chauvinists”, it appears that you’ve forgotten that the term is short for “male chauvinist pigs”, a hateful gender slur against men, uttered freely and shamelessly since the 1960’s by millions of women around the world. It also appears that you and they are completely oblivious to the hypocrisy and long history of chauvinistic utterances by women. Most notable is Elizabeth Cady Stanton who said, “We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men…”.2 Please visit this post for more examples of female chauvinism.
For you to blame the behavior of only men for the objectification of women, and to completely ignore women’s own role, via their often-provocative clothes, helps propagate a preposterous feminist myth foisted on the Western world: that women are blameless in their own sexual objectification.
Feminists have a Jedi mind trick ability to convince us that men objectify women even as women objectify themselves by dressing and behaving as sexually alluring as they wish. A prime example was J.Lo’s 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, where, in addition to wearing revealing outfits, she used a stripper pole — a STRIPPER POLE, ON NATIONAL TV, for crying out loud! — as part of her show:
What kind of message do J.Lo and other female performers who wear “almost-not-there” outfits send to young, impressionable girls? Their hypocrisy is, I believe, perfectly summarized by South African author Mokokoma Mokhonoana:
“Most women have a problem with being seen as a sex object by men, or so they claim, but do not have a problem with benefiting from, or even exploiting, their being seen as a sex object by a man.”
(Please take the time to visit two posts, The Gym Girls of TikTok and “Stop Treating Us As Sex Objects!” for image-based examinations of this hypocrisy.)
Next, keeping in mind that the man’s wife completely gave in to the fashion whims of her daughter (“…this is the fashion of the moment”), your reply, in rejecting the father’s concern, implicitly abandons parental guidance for daughters about appropriate clothing.
If we don’t provide guidance about how girls should dress, why then shouldn’t we also abandon parental guidance for other areas of raising these girls? Should they be able to unilaterally decide whether to go to school? To get appropriate medical care? Whether or not to drink alcohol or smoke pot? Whether to date older or even married men? Or even whether to post nude pictures of themselves on the internet?
Of course not!
Then why do you tell this worried father “… if [the daughter’s] values are to live her life on her own terms, and to use that as her inner compass as she matures and learns and adjusts her course over the years, then I bet it looks beautiful on her.”?
What if she thinks this Sexy Prom Dress “looks beautiful on her”?
Perhaps I’m just old and out of touch, but to me this dress looks more suitable for the boudoir than at a high school prom. (You really should visit the site where it came from to see what passes for acceptable PROM dresses today. Be prepared for a shock.)
Finally, your reply, by trivializing and rejecting this father’s concern about “…the potential treatment [his] daughter might get from others”, completely ignores the fact that, yes, regardless of what feminist dogma says, the way women dress can draw unwanted male attention.
Your feminist-driven advice, whether you care to see it or not, can also put girls at risk of sexual assault or in mortal danger from a very small minority of men.
If you doubt this observation, you REALLY need to read an article by anti-feminist Camille Paglia, The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil about the nature of extreme sex crimes like rape-murder.
The article should be must-reading for every mother and father who want to prevent their own daughters from being victims of such ghastly crimes:
“Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”
Ms. Hax, please reconsider the advice you give to the next father who writes to you worried about the revealing clothing that his daughter and her friends wear today.
My observation was recently confirmed by a February 2023 report by The Coalition to End Domestic Violence that described a 10-Year Suppression of the Truth on Domestic Violence by the Washington Post.
Stanton’s full quote: “We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male can possess.” – Diary entry December 27, 1890, Published in Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary and reminiscences