Daddy, don't let your baby grow up to be Chunky Reese Witherspoon

We have not paid much attention to our old pal Ross Douthat for some months now because he has been boring boring boring the hell out of people about Obamacare and the Pope and Breaking Bad with the trademark electrifying prose that has made him the Lester Bangs of the David Brooks set. This has been an (un)interesting change of pace from Douthat who seemed to always be tacking and jibing  the inescapable Bermuda Triangle that we call the American Lady Vagina.

If you are a Douthat sex-history virgin (you lucky bastard) , let me bring you up to speed on what makes lil Ross not grow:

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–”Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–”You know, I’m on the pill…”

Hard (hah!) as it may be to believe, but Harvard man Ross Douthat was once a virtual vagina-magnet bad boy who couldn't beat them off with a stick [insert your own  joke here] because they flew at him so fast and furious like lady junk is wont to do. Scarred by that that fateful encounter, with a chubby actress doppelganger who made his chubby go sad, Ross has become quite the dispenser of advice on the care and feeding of vaginas both far and wide (for you ladies with wide set vaginas and, no,  I don't even know what the hell that means nor do I want to. Really  Don't tell me).

But now Ross has read a study and a book and an article about young women and The Sex That They Do, and he is using them to make a triangle of his own and in to it we must go because it appears to be a warm and welcoming place where men wish they could spend most of their lives ... like a Buffalo Wild Wings, although you probably guessed I was going to write "vagina" because you're a perv.

So lube up, because we're going deep.

Douthat read a study that stated that having daughters causes parents to become more conservative and this has excited Ross because he has daughters (Ross Douthat humblebrag: "I had sex at least two times. I'm cured!") and this in turn  has validated his entire outlook on life:

.... the pleasure that I took recently from the headline: “Study: Having daughters makes parents more likely to be Republican.”

Why pleasure? Well, because previous research on this question had suggested the reverse, with parents of daughters leaning left and parents of sons rightward. And those earlier findings dovetailed neatly with liberal talking points about politics and gender: Republicans make war on women, Democrats protect them, so it’s only natural that raising girls would make parents see the wisdom of liberalism ...

But the new study undercuts those talking points. Things are more complicated than you thought, liberals!

[...]

But let me make a more limited, more personal argument on the subject. The next round of research may “prove” something completely different about daughters and voting behavior. But as 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.

Who is this man? What has he done to our daughters? Does he come from a nice family?

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.”

Oh. Okay. So this fictional Nathaniel P. is actually  kind of nice guy who likes to hook-up but he's not ready to get hitched up and this makes the all the single ladies sad because what women really want is to find a man who'll put a ring on it and with whom to have as many babies as they can possibly poop out which is also why women go to BYU. You see, while guys dicks keep on tickin' (and there is a pill for the little rascals when they don't) lady's baby clocks are like the Doomsday Clock and every moment they are one step closer to that barren "rocky place" apocalyptic wasteland where a man's seed "could find no purchase". 

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.

Also, Lena Dunham:

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.”

So, to sum up:  the dating landscape has turned ugly and women are unhappy and this means that your daughter may have her heart broken someday because she did not choose wisely and this concerns you and now you are A Conservative. On the other hand, if you think that your daughter is an adult who is entitled to make mistakes and learn from them and that she possibly has the normal libido of an adult woman which involves occasionally hooking up with a 'friend with benefits' or maybe have a brief affair that may only last a few months before both parties decide they aren't receiving the fulfillment they thought they might find ... you're probably a liberal.

And your daughter is a whore.

We can only hope that Ross Douthat doesn't discover Looking For Mr. Goodbar lest daughters Chastity Abstinence Douthat and Celibacy-Sue Douthat be dispatched to a nunnery before they even enter pre-school....