As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters -The Toast

This classic Toast post originally ran on September 11, 2014.

Listen, as a father of daughters, I’m really against this kind of behavior, this kind of treatment of women. The kind where they get hurt or they can’t vote or we don’t give any money to them. You know the kind I’m talking about. The kind I don’t want my daughters to experience, and then I just sort of extrapolate out from there.

It didn’t always used to be this way. I used to only have sons. Things sure were different then. How merrily I used to drive down country lanes in my old Ford, periodically dodging off-road to mow down female pedestrians (you must remember I had no daughters then). Was what I did wrong? How was I to know? I had no daughters to think of.

Before I had daughters — Stimothy and Atalanta are truly the apples of my eye — I would follow women into voting booths and knock their hands away from the lever whenever they tried to engage in the democratic process. Who knew having daughters would change all that? Not I.

Personally, now that I have daughters, I don’t think anyone should do bad things to women, especially the ones who are my daughters. I think we should treat every woman in the world like she was my daughter, except for my wife and my mother, who I will treat slightly differently.

Did you know that when you have daughters, it’s like making a woman you have to care about out of parts of your own body? Well, it’s true. Now that I have daughters (two of them, to the best of my knowledge), I’ve got all sorts of new ideas about how to treat women. Now that I’ve got daughters, it’s time for the whole world to make some changes.

I’m not proud to admit this, but before I had daughters, I sometimes used to harvest women for their organs to build Liver Pyramids in my backyard. I just didn’t see a problem with it. I sure do now, though. What if someone killed my daughters just to make a pyramid, or even a ziggurat, out of women’s internal organs in their backyard? I sure wouldn’t like that at all. They’re my daughters!

Boy oh boy, do I regret all the women I paid an illegal sub-minimum wage to, then cannibalized before I had daughters. If I could take that back, you can sure bet I would.

Before, I wasn’t sure what women were. I’m not a scientist. Who was to say they weren’t holographic projections sent to fool me by some sort of evil demon? But now I know what women are: different versions of my daughters, running around the planet in all sorts of different faces and hairstyles. If every woman in the world is sort of like my daughter, then that makes me everyone’s dad, sort of. And we should all be nice to my daughters.

After all, I’m their father.

[Joke inspiration to Jasmine Guillory, who truly is the best Jasmine]

Mallory is an Editor of The Toast.

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gavinbyrnes 143p · 550 weeks ago

Definitely naming my future daughter Stimothy now. But since she's my future daughter and I don't have any daughters yet, I obviously can't read the rest of this piece or respect your opinion. See you in a few years when I have daughters.

As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters

ByDaniel Mallory Ortberg

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