I’ve been trying to process the term
“daddy issues” for a while now. The term came to my attention again when I
saw the headline of a piece criticizing a feminist writer on my Twitter feed,
and then, suddenly it showed up everywhere – in comments on feminist pieces, in
movies and television shows – in Netflix comedy specials. It’s a way to close
down the conversation and put the focus on something entirely unrelated to
the issue you’re actually discussing. Instead of talking about
reducing sexual assault and possible solutions, we end up focusing on what may
or may not have been someone’s childhood experience with their father.
See also: Are you married? Do you have a
boyfriend? Do you have kids? Are you pretty? Are you young? Are you skinny? The
answer to all of these questions if the answer is no: Then whatever you have to
say is invalid.
And a lot of the time, our mistake is to
defend women accused of being spinsters, or ugly or old, by saying “No, she is
married with children,” or “Yes, but she looks great for 52! I doubt you’d pull
it off.” But obviously, that’s not the point. Tina Fey’s being married, Ellen
Degeneres’ having a spouse, Janet Mock’s being beautiful and [insert any young
feminist writer out there] being 20-something will not somehow inoculate these
women from criticism. If a prominent feminist writer embodied near
physical, emotional and mental perfection in terms of what straight men find
acceptable, she would still be roundly mocked as an ugly man-hating harridan.
But the term hits harder for me because until
now I didn’t realize I had either ignored it or unintentionally supported it
myself instead of confronting the term altogether. I’ve seen that term hurled
at women, and thought, “Ha! No one could accuse me of that.” My dad wasn’t only
there for all of my childhood, which is a very low bar for fatherhood but
nonetheless one men are taught is acceptable, but he taught me to embrace both
traditionally feminine and masculine interests. Not only did we fish together,
but I scaled and gutted the fish with him. He helped my mom cook and clean, and
not simply by doing chores occasionally to congratulate himself on an
egalitarian marriage. He was the only example of an equal partner I had growing
up in a rural town where most of my friend’s dads expected their wives to be
more traditional.
So, of course, I’m proud of this. And I’d love
to write a piece just to thank my dad for being himself. But I have so many
friends and relatives who grew up without fathers, or with fathers were present
sometimes but not always. I imagine that going on about how my father helped me
develop into a well-rounded, opinionated woman may somehow suggest that if you
didn’t have a father growing up, you ended up missing something you can never
get back or that you were irreparably harmed in some way. We love to talk about
the role fathers have in their children’s lives, whether a son or daughter, but
we always focus on the gender part. Fathers will improve their sons lives by
teaching them “correct,” (respectable, benevolent sexism) manhood and improve
their daughters by giving them enough confidence to avoid emotionally attaching
themselves to other men “too soon” or god forbid, sexually attaching themselves
to too many men in order to win the approval they never had. So goes the tale.
Fathers should be valued, not as men, who
presumably have more social capital than mothers or instill fear in the men
their daughters date, but as another human being who can give their child love
and attention (as well as some dough for that child to live on). When we talk
about motherhood, we talk about everything humans do to nurture and support
other humans, but with fathers we focus on this very narrow part of someone’s
growing up, a part that never necessarily had value to begin with, and is toxic
at worst.
So then it’s no wonder misogynists would throw
that particular insult. The only role they see for fathers is in teaching their
children gender roles. And if a feminist writer is making her rejection of traditional
gender roles known, she obviously didn’t have a father, since that is all they
consider fathers good for. They don’t think fathers do the things mothers do,
such as take them to school in the morning, make sure they get to a doctor’s
appointment or tell them they’re proud of them. They tie a woman’s sexuality to
her father, going back to a time when daughters’ sexuality was owned by
fathers. It’s a an archaic mindset, and yet, with a little help from Freud, it’s
so commonplace.
That’s why I shudder to think of the times
when I was way too proud to have a
father, rather than to have a great person in my life who helped me through
difficult times and was there to congratulate me during the good ones. Not to
mention the fact that women without fathers are considered doomed, when plenty
of children would do well not to have some fathers, or mothers for that matter,
in their lives, and instead have supportive, stable and kind family, biological
or not, mentors and friends. I grew up among family and friends without
fathers, or with fathers who could not seem them regularly. As a child, it
never occurred to me that they were in a bad situation or that I should feel
mine was better. They usually seemed happy, and for those who weren’t, I didn’t
assume their fathers were the reason.
It wasn’t until I became older that I learned
people were shamed for not having fathers in the household or in their states
for that matter, or that families were considered incomplete or broken without
them. It wasn’t until my early junior high school years that I learned girls
faced a particular, sexualized shame for not having a father married to their
mother, much less one who wasn’t around at all. There’s a suggestion there,
part of which reminds me of a man at a bar backing down at the mention of a
boyfriend but not a woman’s refusal: “Oh, so a man doesn’t own you and
therefore protect you? You must be up for grabs. You must not be worthwhile to
one man, so I’ll treat you as if you are subhuman.”
The phrase also serves as a way to bring a
conversation back to men, and more importantly, women’s dependence on men for
social acceptance. And in one sentence they use this rhetorical device to shame
women who didn’t have their fathers in their lives growing up, as if it were
something they deserved or a fact they should be ashamed of. For this reason,
I’ll never see the casual use of “daddy issues” the same way again or enjoy
seeing some feminists talk about their awesome dads as a response to those
barbs, because that’s not the point.
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