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. 

****************************************************************

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/