PATHOLOGICAL FATHERLY PROTECTIVENESS

Many of my colleagues, most of them male, seem to be reproducing.  I enjoy absorbing by osmosis the happiness and excitement of the expectant fathers.  I enjoy making helpful suggestions as to baby names, although no one seems to like my suggestions. (What's wrong with Herbert, Hermione, Oscar or Bertha anyway?)  And, of course, it's fun to meet the babies once they arrive or look at their pictures. 

What I find irritating however is all the lame joking when a girl baby arrives on the scene.  The fathers with baby girls joke about not ever letting them date or not ever letting them out of the house.  The fathers with boys joke that they are relieved because they would be too worried all the time if they had a daughter.  I once challenged a good friend of mine, the father of a bouncing baby boy, when he made such a statement.  He gave me a lot of nonsense about how girls are more vulnerable to rape and pregnancy, and then made more jokes about how, if he does ever have a daughter, she's never leaving the house until she's thirty. 

Of course, on one level all of this is just harmless, light hearted water cooler banter.  On another level, however, it reflects a totally irrational anxiety about SEX, and women and girls being sullied by SEX, and men on some level or another equating women and girls with SEX. 

Sure, my friend tried to put a veneer of rationality over this weird view of daughters, but it really makes no sense. First, I think it's baloney and that this fatherly overprotectiveness isn't quite so well thought out as all that.  Second, if there is a danger that our daughters might get raped or pregnant, there is a corresponding danger that our sons might be doing the raping and the impregnating.  While the burdens of rape and pregnancy certainly weigh more heavily on the girl or woman, it would also be pretty awful if your son raped someone or became a teenaged father.  Thirdly, our sons are probably in far more danger than our daughters when they go out into the world.  Middle school and high school boys are far more likely than girls to engage in risky behaviors and more likely to engage in multiple risky behaviors, like substance abuse, fighting, carrying illegal weapons, or attempting suicide according to this study by the Urban Institute (see pages 4 and 5).  And, according to this article, three out of every four suicides are men and two out of every three motor vehicle fatalities are men (many of them in single vehicle accidents in which the car ran off the road into an object like a tree).  When you hear about a drunken college student falling off the roof of a building or a daredevil kid dying after trying some dangerous stunt, don't you automatically assume it was a boy?  And doesn't your assumption usually turn out to be correct?  And don't forget that boys and men are statistically more likely to be assaulted than girls and women.  You don't generally hear about women getting beaten up in bar fights, nor are women as likely to get mugged.

Yet it's our daughters, not our sons, we get all freaked out about. The only reason for this double standard is our twisted discomfort with women's sexual agency.  Cringe-inducing banter at the water cooler is only the tip of the iceberg as far as the evil consequences of this double standard. I think to be fair to our children of both sexes we (and by we, I especially mean you fathers out there) need to show more respect for our daughters' agency and ability to fend for themselves, and we also need to show a bit more concern for our sons and what they are doing and feeling.  Parental protectiveness of children is surely a good thing if sensibly applied, but this nonsensical double standard doesn't help anyone. 

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More reading on this topic:

1)  Amanda at Pandagon exposes this pathological fatherly protectiveness in this post when she deconstructs the following excerpt from an article at Renew America:

A chief aspect of civilization is the propagation of a society through its families and social customs. Modern western civilizations have always been held apart from third world nations and past monarchist or despotic societies because of the special standing that their girl children have had. Particularly the protective status that our little girls are accorded is one of the civilizing factors that separates us from the more brutal, uncaring societies where girls are treated as mere playthings, slaves or, worse yet, a curse on a family.

For many generations we have considered our girls as something to protect, to be kept pure and free of the ravages of a hard life until they are ready to enter into the world properly prepared. “Daddy’s little girl” is placed on a pedestal and we men joke of sending our little girls to a convent to keep them from those predatory boyfriends. After all, we were ourselves once young men full of raging hormones and we know exactly what those boys want with our little girls. Immediately thoughts of this send men in our society into protector mode.

We want to be sure that our girls are not mistreated, that they have loving husbands who will provide for them. And when the time comes for them to have children of their own, we Fathers want to be sure that our little girls will be comfortable and safe to raise theirs, as they ought.

Our cave man urges rise to the side of our daughters.

Or as Amanda puts it:

To summarize: The best way for men to avoid acting like men in less advanced countries is to be cavemen, since nothing says not primitive like being primitive. And the best way to avoid treating your daughter like a piece of property is to treat her like a piece of fairly expensive property. And the best way to protect girls from perverted men who can’t think of women as full human beings is to put those same kind of men in charge of them. And there’s nothing gross about a man who says, “I know what those perverts are thinking about my daughter, because I’ve had the same thoughts.”

With that kind of sharp thinking on its side, it’s a wonder the patriarchy managed to last a week, much less millenia.

p>2)  A while back, also in a Pandagon thread, there was some interesting conversation (started by me admittedly) regarding those old hackneyed jokes about the protective father who puts the fear of God into his daughter's boyfriend to ensure that daughter's boyfriend doesn't try any funny business with his little girl.  These jokes always drive me bananas for the reasons I explained in my comments.  The valiant Mythago also waded into battle on this one and, as always, she did a bang up job. 

Comments

[Morgana]

Hear hear! Happy, you should send that out to all of your colleagues, and give them something to think about. :)

[Richard]

>>> On another level, however, it reflects a totally irrational anxiety about SEX, and women and girls being sullied by SEX, and men on some level or another equating women and girls with SEX.

Yes it does, but isn’t this exactly what feminist argue all the time, that is, how women are treated as sex objects by men and how women just never know if the next male friend of theirs might turn into their rapist? Persecution of women at the hands of evil men is the very basis for feminist grievances, and now your getting all twisty because these new fathers have drunk the feminist coolaid. I mean, who’s being irrational here. You can’t have it both ways.

>>> He gave me a lot of nonsense about how girls are more vulnerable to rape and pregnancy …

News Flash. Girls are more vulnerable than boys to rape and pregnancy.

[Richard]

>>> AMANDA wrote: Modern western civilizations have always been held apart from third world nations and past monarchist or despotic societies because of the special standing that their girl children have had.

What a startling statement. Amanda knows nothing of the social history of non-western societies is she believes this. (And she's a leading feminist blogger? Boggles the mind.)

[Mandolin]

Richard,

If that quote comes from where I think it does, then it was something Amanda was quoting from a conservative columnist.

[TangoMan]

need to show more respect for our daughters' agency and ability to fend for themselves, and we also need to show a bit more concern for our sons and what they are doing and feeling.

Oh please, this is blissful theory taking precedence over immediate reality. It's funny isn't it, that so many idealists dump their theories when they become parents and don't want to use their own children as guinea pigs. The best way to change the world is for parents to actually put the ideas they believe in into practice. There is a major hint in this for the armchair theorists who don't like seeing the perpetuation of standard gender roles - we've now had a few generations of committed feminists coming into parenthood and they don't all seem to be following the advice of the theorists - it should be a pretty big wake-up call when some feminists who become mothers and fathers don't treat their 16 year old daughters the same as their 16 year old sons. There's little sense in single people castigating parents and future parents for these "failings" when they should simply become parents themselves so that they can then freely conduct social re-engineering experiments on their own kids and they can reap the benefits or suffer the consequences of their parenting choices. Don't tell people that they're raising their kids in an ideologically unfashionable manner, show them how your way is better. Which do you think would be more effective - following the advice of someone who doesn't have to suffer the consequences for giving bad advice, or following the example of someone who has put their money where their mouth is and can point to the benefits and pitfalls of the practice?

[Mandolin]

Fascinating, Tango, that you don't know any feminists who've raised their daughters in feminist ways.

'Cuz I do. May I point to mine, among others?

[The Happy Feminist]

Richard says: Yes it does, but isn’t this exactly what feminist argue all the time, that is, how women are treated as sex objects by men and how women just never know if the next male friend of theirs might turn into their rapist?

Well, that's not exactly it, but the habit of equating women with sex is a problem for women. And these pathological papas are part of the problem, not the solution. I wish I'd been more explicit about this, but the thing is that this freakish overprotectiveness isn't really about rape and pregnancy but about the fear of daughters having sex at all.

News Flash. Girls are more vulnerable than boys to rape and pregnancy.

Of COURSE, they are. But this is a nonsensical justification for being zillions of times more protective of daughters than of sons for the reasons I outline on the second paragraph below that statement.

TangoMan, point taken. I will immediately get going on trying to get pregnant and meanwhile I will refrain from having any opinions whatsoever about the differential treatment of sons and daughters.

(By the way, one of the best aspects of my upbrining was the lack of any particularized protectiveness over me. I am still grateful to this day that my parents, my father included, trusted me to stay at all night, make sensible decisions about whom to date and when or whether to have sex, and do my own thing. They certainly cared about my well being but there was none of this business of "The sky is falling, my little girl might have sex (shudder))"

[The Happy Feminist]

Also, Richard, I think it's safe to say that overprotectiveness of daughters and restrictions on girls and young women out of a fear of them having sex far pre-dates the work feminists have done in studying and directing attention to the problem of rape.

Rape is certainly a serious problem, but so are all the dangers boys face. The solution is not a double standard of protectiveness, nor is it an irrational anxiety over young women's sexuality.

[chem fem]

What a father feels after the birth of his child and once he's actually doing the parenting is probably very different though. Who ever undertakes a particular task (especially one a large as being a parent) in the way they first thought they would. I think it is a distinct lack of understanding or girls and women that makes men say this. My dad commented a few years ago that he was definately very happy to have had daughters, especially having seen my aunt raise sons. He was taken by how much more havoc and 'ware and tear' they caused among other things which I'm sure is something a new dad never thinks of. I don't think he was any less able to do things with me that he could have done with a son either. We always went and looked at the sky through his telescope and visited the science museum.....

[Sydney]

Hi Happy,

These men? They're probably just disappointed that they got a girl instead of a boy, even though they'd never admit it. Indeed, they may even be unaware of their preference. Check out this article by Stephen Landsburg on the topic http://www.slate.com/id/2089142/. He also has a follow up rebuttal article that answer many of the common criticisms that people voice. Here is the link to that one: http://www.slate.com/id/2089756/

[Richard]

Happy-- You didn't address my point. How can you square feminist outrage over their allegations of being almost universally sexually objectified by men with what you are calling these new fathers' pathological overprotectiveness? To say that it's only because fathers don't want their daughters to have sex is just plain weird. I call it the cartoon-character view that so many feminist have of men. So unrealistic. It's every bit as likely that these fathers have bought into the feminist line that men almost universally objectify women for their own selfish sexual gratification. Doesn't it seem plausible to you that these fathers are concerned about their daughters being sexually objectified by the men they will eventually meet in their lives? Aren't they only stating the feminist company line in their own way?

By the way, I don't have any kids, but if I did, I would much prefer daughters. I have stated this for years. I think they are *generally* less self-destructive as youths.

[evil_fizz]

How can you square feminist outrage over their allegations of being almost universally sexually objectified by men with what you are calling these new fathers' pathological overprotectiveness?

The existance of objectification is not an excuse not to treat women like the moral agents they are. The fact that women are vulnerable to rape and unwanted pregnancy is not sufficient in of itself to warrant the kind of pathological concern which gets expressed.

"How can you square feminist outrage over their allegations of being almost universally sexually objectified by men with what you are calling these new fathers' pathological overprotectiveness?

The existance of objectification is not an excuse not to treat women like the moral agents they are. The fact that women are vulnerable to rape and unwanted pregnancy is not sufficient in of itself to warrant the kind of pathological concern which gets expressed."

How is joking around pathological concern? She didnt point out examples of men refusing to let their daughters go out at night. They were just joking about the concern they feel for their daughter's future.

I think I am with Richard on this one. The statistics on how many women are raped or otherwise assaulted keep getting thrown around, yet a parent is supposed to ignore those statistics?

[will]

oops. that was me.

[evil_fizz]

Joking about your infant daughter's future dates seems kinda pathological to me. Threatening (in jest or in reality) your daughter's dates? Also seems excessive.

[The Happy Feminist]

Right. I have only given examples of joking around-- but I think the jokes do reflect an inclination to treat daughters differently. Maybe I'm wrong but certainly in the past, that has been the case. The example that comes to mind was the fact that decades ago college women were locked in their dorms at night while college men were free to roam around. Or just the other night, I heard Donald Trump saying on that show "The Big Idea" that he would take it a lot harder if his daughter had been the victim of a statutory rape as a teenager than if his son had been.

Again, my distinct impression is that this kind of protectiveness has more to do with the idea that even consensual sex that does not result in pregnancy is inherently bad for girls, but not for boys.

How do I square feminist outrage over rape with my irritation at the double standard in parental protectiveness? Well, to me they are part of the same phenomenon. One of the reasons rape is such an evil is not only the impact on rape victims themselves, but the broader restrictions or by restrictions imposimpact on all girls and women who necessarily find themselves restricted out of fear of rape-- either by self-imposed on them by authority figures.

Look, I am not knocking the parental protective instinct. Nor am I suggesting that you let your 14 year old daughter stay out all night, or that you don't meet her boyfriends. What I am suggesting is that a lot of the parental response to children's vulnerability is irrationally weighted towards fear of girls having sex or a desire to deny daughters as much agency as sons in making romantic and sexual decisions.

Obviously rape is a problem. But feminist solutions involve punishing offenders, teaching sexual ethics to our children (including the basic principle that you don't have sex with someone without his or her full consent), and teaching children to make intelligent decisions. Intelligent decisions may include abstinence or practicing safe sex. Intelligent decisions may include (if you are a woman) not ever being alone with a man if that's what makes you most comfortable OR making an intelligent cost-benefit analysis as to whether to be alone with a man. Your daughter may choose to hang out with a guy in his dorm room knowing there is a possibility that he may try to force sex on her, but she may freely choose this risk because it isn't worth it to her to restrict her freedom to the extent of not hanging out guys with their dorm rooms. Ultimately, when she grows up, she has the right to make that decision. The process of bringing up children is protecting and guiding them towards that point of being able to make those kinds of cost-benefit analyses for themselves. Smothering a daughter doesn't really help that process and jokes about locking daughters away in convents may be harmless but they do have that subtext of denying the value of allowing the female half of the population any agency.

[chem fem]

sydney, the first article wasn't so good but the second was well written and amusing. However he doesn't seem to acknowledge that maybe fathers don't fair well in a more 'female' environment (one where females out number males in a household) so therefore are more likely to leave, where a mother is either comfortable in a male dominated environment or is financially less likely to be able to leave a marriage because of it (women earning less and being more likely to be full time parents). So divorce results should be broken down by family income and earning power of the mother......

Perhaps then parents with boys don't try for many more because boys are hard work and the idea of having more is not worth thinking about......

This explains the results also....

[The Happy Feminist]

I should also note that good parenting involves equal attention to sons and their issues. I haven't looked at the statistics, but I'd be willing to bet that your son has a greater chance of dying an early death than your daughter. There seems to be so much hand wringing over daughters (and yes, it most definitely PREDATES the feminsit movement) but too little attention to the potentially very damaging choices boys are inclined to make. If we're inclined to be overprotective, boys certainly warrant that overprotective instinct as much as if not more so than girls.

[Allison]

Amen, amen, amen. Considering the conversations I held with my own father this weekend about this topic, I love seeing what you have to say. Childless or parent-to-nine, please continue to post your opinions. If others disagree, fine, but it's ridiculous for them to suggest that you shouldn't hold an opinion. You may not *have* a child, but you *were* one at some point in your life!

Tango, I'm a mother to a girl who is now 19 months old. I'd always said (in younger years) that I thought I'd be a boy mom, because I "wouldn't know what to do with a girl," and some of the fears this post addresses were part (but not all) of that train of thought. Now that I have a girl? Everything has changed, and I find that I'm more--not less--inclined to take a feminist view toward raising my daughter. MUCH more...

(Side note: I'd be very curious to hear from Tango, Richard, and the other detractors who comment here what they imagine a feminist is. Who do you think we are? What do you think we believe?)

HF wrote: The process of bringing up children is protecting and guiding them towards that point of being able to make those kinds of cost-benefit analyses for themselves.

Absolutely, yes. In many ways, I think that I wasn't raised toward this goal, because the assumption was that someday my husband would handle these issues for me. Guess what? I'm nearly 35, and I'm single. I'm certainly not going to put my life on hold waiting for some prince to whisk me away and take care of me. Whether I ever marry or not, and whether my daughter ever marries or not, I want her to grow up learning to make considered choices.

[will]

Do you think that these fathers give their female and male children different curfews? I suspect not.

You do not worry about your son getting raped. But you should worry about your son getting drunk and doing something stupid.

I suspect that most parents spend most of their worry on the particular issues involving boys and the particular issues involving girls.

[Kira]

"News Flash. Girls are more vulnerable than boys to rape and pregnancy."

To being pregnant, yes- but not "to being involved in a pregnancy". A gal at least has the availability of a decision regarding what to do with her pregancy (regardless of the legality of her decision, in some places). Her impregnating counterpart, by nature, does not.

And since two out of the three admitted adult rape victims that I know are male (one raped by a male, one by a female), I wouldn't be any less worried about a son being raped in this age of date rape drugs. Any gender of kid that I have is going to be subject to the same "stick with groups of friends, don't accept drinks from anyone ever, here's a stack of info on contraceptives, and before you have voluntary sex with anyone of the opposite sex, think about whether you would want to have an eighteen-year legal relationship with them over a child" lectures.

Or I might just keep them all home 'til they're thirty. Because we all know that no one gets raped, ogled, pregnant or molested after thirty... :(

Another thought- have any of you had friends who tell you that they want their daughter to be gay in high school so that she won't get pregnant? That must be new, but I've heard it a couple of times lately.

[MLight]

A few not-necessarily-related-to-each-other comments.

I always took comments like this by new fathers as being a reflection more on negative memories what they themselves were like as teenagers or what other teenage guys they knew were like. Since they probably think that they did fine for themselves as teenage guys, they probably expect that their sons would also. They can't have that kind of inner confidence about a daughter. The parallel would be a mother worrying more about her son than her daughter - the worry being with the child of the unfamiliar sex.

For me, being, I think, the first comment poster who actually has a teenage child of each gender, my concern has a lot to do with the social "savvy" of my teens. My daughter has much more of that than my son (he would admit the same) so, when he starts dating, I probably will be, at least in some ways, more concerned about him. With the caveat that I consider the female danger of being raped to be worse than the male danger of being beaten up - so, although I've been talking to both of them all along as to safety issues, the dangers of guys who are not as nice as they may seem is something I have to add to my discussions with my daughter.

My worries concerning my daughter are mostly theoretical at this point since she has no interest in dating - early teenage boys being mostly "jerks" in her view. My worries about my son - the, basically pacifist, future entomologist who doesn't even swat mosquitos - are actually more at the front of my mind ever since he had to register with selective service a few months ago. That worry should be theoretical too, at this point, but it's got me keeping a close eye on international news.

[h sofia]

I wonder how much of men talking like this is something done because it is expected or approved "new father talk." I hear stuff like this almost every time a young man I know becomes a father of a girl. At the same time, I hear a lot of things about baby girls and boys being "heartbreakers" one day, and flirts and other such things. It always struck me that parents (and other adults) had a strange fascination with the future mating practices of small children.

I am with you 100% about parents needing to focus on how to keep their sons from growing up into the rapists and thoughtless sexual predators that they are so afraid of. These people are not parentless phantoms.

[TangoMan]

one of the best aspects of my upbrining was the lack of any particularized protectiveness over me.

Well, I would think that as people know you and can model how your upbringing was instrumental in your development as a person that the appeal of that upbringing should be self-evident. For some of us here on the internets some examination of the benefits and drawbacks associated with your upbringing may be more informative than a call to ideological arms.

What I am suggesting is that a lot of the parental response to children's vulnerability is irrationally weighted towards fear of girls having sex or a desire to deny daughters as much agency as sons in making romantic and sexual decisions.

When I read the above statement the impression I get is that disparate parental behavior is deemed de facto to be irrational. What about the parents who deliberately make decisions that lead to disparate treatment?

teaching children to make intelligent decisions.

Absolutely, and the teaching process begins with decisions that have few negative consequences and escalates as the child develops better heuristics, prior experience, abstract thinking skills, and maturity.

good parenting involves equal attention to sons and their issues. I haven't looked at the statistics, but I'd be willing to bet that your son has a greater chance of dying an early death than your daughter.

You'd win the bet. There are about 105 boys born for every 100 girls and by the time people reach their late twenties the ratio is about 1:1 and by the time people are in their late 30s women being to outnumber men.

In your statement above, it seems that you're implying that it is unequal parental attention that is responsible for young boys increased rate of fatality. Is my inference incorrect?

Now that I have a girl? Everything has changed, and I find that I'm more--not less--inclined to take a feminist view toward raising my daughter.

I'm not dissing your change. My whole point was that having a kid does change everything. I still keep in touch with some of my feminist firebrand friends from college. I recall their sweeping pronouncements about how they would raise the next generation free of the antiquated notions . . . you get the idea. Then I look at the reality of their lives and the parenting choices that they make and I laugh a silent laugh. Theory and ideology are fine topics when you're shooting the breeze over a beer, but lot's of parents aren't inclined to use their own kids as guinea pigs.

Look, case in point is the incidence of stranger pedophile abductions. Their incidence hasn't increased over the last 30 years though the parental hysteria certainly has. How many parents are willing to let their 7 year old daughter, or son, walk to school unescorted, the way our parents did in the past? Even the parents who know the statistics are still acting irrationally by our outside observer standards, but to them, their decisions are entirely rational. The key difference is the expected value of a bad outcome. For the disinterested observer, having 1 child out of 10,000 abducted is a pretty low cost to weigh against all of the needless worrying. However, for the parent who is making the calculation they assign a cost to such a low probability outcome that is commensurate with their child being the one that is abducted, and therefore the calculation of odds in combination with the extremely bad outcome leads them to make an entirely rational decision. It's great for us to talk all hypothetical like, about giving more agency to young girls when we don't have to suffer the consequences of living true to idealistic visions of how the world should be. The most effective way to change the world is to lead by example - for instance, as more parents see other parents letting their 7 year old daughters and sons walk to school unescorted, and play unsupervised in the neighborhood, they may come around to adopting the same position. They'll however likely be more rejecting of Oprah's call for them to do the same thing, considering that Oprah isn't a parent and it's their child that Oprah is asking them to risk.

[TangoMan]

parents needing to focus on how to keep their sons from growing up into the rapists and thoughtless sexual predators

I think you'd really be surprised at how little influence parents have on these types of outcomes, or how little parents really do matter in terms of shaping their children's temperments.