New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has an interesting piece about new research which suggests that parents with daughters are more likely to be conservative.

Douthat believes that what might be driving this is the increased awareness that the culture which promotes commitment-free sex is damaging women more than men.

He writes: “[A]s a father of girls and a parent whose adult social set still overlaps with the unmarried, I do have a sense of where a daughter-inspired conservatism might come from, whatever political form it takes.

“It comes from thinking about their future happiness, and about a young man named Nathaniel P.

“This character, Nate to his friends, doesn’t technically exist: He’s the protagonist in Adelle Waldman’s recent novel of young-Brooklynite manners, ‘The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P’.

“But his type does exist, in multitudinous forms, wherever successful young people congregate, socialise, pair off. He’s not the worst sort of guy by any means — not a toxic bachelor or an obnoxious pick-up artist…..Yet he’s also a source of immense misery — both short-term and potentially lifelong — for the young women in his circle.

“He provokes it by taking advantage of a social landscape in which sex has been decoupled from marriage but biology hasn’t been abolished, which means women still operate on a shorter time horizon for crucial life choices — marriage, kids — than do men.  

“In this landscape, what Nate wants — sex, and the validation that comes with being wanted — he reliably gets. But what his lovers want, increasingly, as their cohort grows older — a more permanent commitment — he can afford to persistently withhold, feeling guilty but not that guilty about doing so.

“And lurking in Waldman’s novel, as in many portraits of the dating scene (ahem, Lena Dunham, ahem), is a kind of moral traditionalism that dare not speak its name — or that can be spoken of only in half-jest, as when the novelist Benjamin Kunkel told Traister that the solution was ‘some sort of a sexual strike against just such men’.

“Because Kunkel is right: One obvious solution to the Nathaniel P. problem is a romantic culture in which more is required of young men before the women in their lives will sleep with them.”