Understanding the Relationship and Attitude of Men towards Women Essay

Read the essay below carefully. After reading it, write an essay in which you state the topic of the text you've just read, summarize the author’s main idea, identify and assess the evidence used to support it, and then construct your own idea in response to the author's position, supporting your thinking with evidence from your observation, reading, or first-hand experience.
● Please double space, and use 12 point, Times New Roman font, and black text
RESPOND TO THIS PASSAGE:
Our culture is full of platitudes about fathers and daughters: the Hallmark card, the weeping dad at the wedding. But invoking daughters and wives to deflect criticism is a particular kind of political trope — and one that’s been used throughout history to “excuse a host of bad behavior,” said the historian Barbara Berg.
The love a man has for the female members of his family, particularly his offspring, is presumed to have special power — to humanize the other half of the population, to allow him to imagine the world his daughter will inhabit.
There is social science that’s shown there is something to being the father of a daughter.
In a study called “The First-Daughter Effect,” Elizabeth Sharrow, an associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her colleagues, determined that fathering daughters — and firstborn daughters, in particular — indeed played a role in making men’s attitudes toward gender equality more progressive, particularly when it came to policies like equal pay or sexual harassment protocols.
Daughters influencing fathers’ views for the better is far different from fathers using their daughters as “shields and excuses for poor behavior,” as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez described Mr. Yoho in her speech.
It’s also different from fathers using them as “props,” as Dr. Berg puts it, to emphasize their alignment with women’s causes — or, by contrast, their disgust over behaviors perceived to be in opposition to them.
“Men have often pointed to their relationships with and love for some women — especially wives and daughters — to combat claims that they have mistreated other women,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “We have seen this both inside and outside of politics, especially when men are subject to accusations of sexual harassment and assault.”
The caveat, of course, is the qualification. “Qualifying your outrage against misogyny [contempt for or dislike of women] as due to your role as a father or husband implies that, absent those roles, you would be either unaware of or unconcerned,” said Dr. Dittmar.
Excerpted from ”AOC and the Daughter Defense” by Jessica Bennet.
The New York Times, 20 July 2020