A Daily Wire essay published this week makes a personal case for a father’s influence over his daughter’s life, using the writer’s memories of her late father — referred to throughout as “Big Jim” — to argue that girls who are taught early to guard their own agency are less likely to become victims.
The piece, written in the second person as an open letter to “girl dads,” frames the writer’s upbringing as a counterpoint to contemporary conversations about sexual assault, binge drinking, and who bears responsibility when young women are harmed.
‘The Talk’
The writer says she still hears her father’s voice nearly two decades after his death, particularly when she reads news stories like an alleged gang rape at Cornell University. She credits him with teaching her that being female did not mean being “a passive participant” in her own life — that she was “not a leaf scattered by the breeze.”
According to the essay, her father sat her down once it became clear that his influence was competing with that of her peer group. The speech, which she says she heard often enough to finish his sentences, warned that friends who pressure you into things that violate your values — or who shun you for refusing — are not friends at all. He told her that people would offer her alcohol and drugs and call her names when she declined, and that she should ignore them because they were “not worth your time.”
The writer, who describes herself as raised “staunchly Catholic,” says her father also framed drinking, drug use, and sex outside a committed relationship as choices that carry consequences — choices, in his view, that cede control of your behavior and your future to the substance or the moment. He added a warning she says she never forgot: never sip from an open can, cup, or bottle that had not been in her sight the whole time, because some people actively seek to take advantage of others.
Feminism, Culpability, and a Sorority Debate
The essay invokes commentator Camille Paglia — whom the writer says her father unknowingly echoed on the question of culpability — and points to a clip of Paglia commenting on the Cornell case. The writer then contrasts her father’s teaching with what she describes as a strain of feminist argument that treats female victimhood as inevitable.
She recalls hearing Dr. Caroline Heldman argue that a sorority member has the same right as a fraternity member to binge drink, and that when harm follows, responsibility falls on the men around her not to exploit the situation. The writer says that framing is not the feminism her father described. While she agrees that only people of low character would take advantage of someone in a compromised state, she asks why a woman bears no responsibility for the decision to drink to incapacitation — a question she says Heldman did not answer.
The essay is careful to note that the writer never gave her father obvious cause for concern. She describes herself as a happy homebody who preferred card games with her family, never went on an official date in high school beyond the annual father-daughter dance, and went through college on the swim team and in a sorority without assuming it was inevitable she would drink to the point of helplessness. She attributes that trajectory to taking seriously her father’s lesson about choosing the right people and investing in becoming someone she could be proud of.
A Broader Argument About Victimhood
The piece lands amid recurring national debates over campus sexual assault, the role of alcohol in those cases, and how much responsibility accusers bear for their own choices — debates that have intensified around high-profile incidents at universities in recent years.
The through-line of the essay is that fathers who speak plainly to their daughters about peer pressure, substances, and self-protection give them something no institution can: a durable sense of their own agency. She writes that her father’s love was made so plain that letting him down was never an option she wanted to consider, and that what others think of her — including critics who might dismiss her argument — is, because of him, not her business.
Whether readers agree with her prescriptions or not, the essay positions the parent-child conversation as the first line of defense, arriving long before any campus policy, orientation training, or activist framework.
Reporting on the essay was first published by The Daily Wire.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/girl-dads-listen-up-heres-why-your-words-matter-in-your-young-daughters-life