Father Figure by Jordan Shapiro

Author:Jordan Shapiro [SHAPIRO, JORDAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Your Prototypical Boyfriend

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes, “Love is not only to give but also to take. This is important because we give girls subtle cues about their lives—we teach girls that a large capacity of their ability to love is their ability to sacrifice their selves.”18 I’d argue it’s even worse than Adichie suggests.

The expectation that a paternal authority figure be the model for a girl’s future romantic relationships masquerades as a good-natured and psychologically grounded strategy for fighting gender inequality, counteracting misogynistic messaging, and building better aspirations for womanhood. Meanwhile, it cunningly reinforces the same old patriarchal expectation that women be complacent and obedient. Clearly, if Dad is seen as the prototypical boyfriend, then a skewed power dynamic with a future partner is implicit. After all, a father is never his daughter’s equal. He’s an authority figure. Plus, her survival and well-being are completely dependent on him—or at least it feels that way to her. Pretending otherwise is tantamount to gaslighting; it’s a Don Quixote delusion that multiple generations of dads have accepted without question.

In the 1940s and ’50s, the erotic daddy–daughter relationship was framed as a modern, progressive, and empathetic acceptance of teen-girl independence—and in that sense it appealed to compassionate fathers, like my grandpa, who wanted their daughters to become strong, confident, independent women, like my mother, but every box of candy hid a covert form of consumption-oriented patriarchal authority. Girls learned that love, attraction, and respect are things you earn in the eyes of an authority figure—that dignity and worth are like merit badges you secure in exchange for demonstrating proper appearances and behaviors.

To understand why so many people bought into this narrative, and how a feminist dad can counteract it, first you need to recognize how Oedipal Stage 2.0 fits into a historical shift toward a seemingly democratic organization of family life. Many scholars have observed that the relationship between parents and their children became increasingly egalitarian around the mid-twentieth century. As authors Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross put it, parents became “accountable to their children in a relationship founded ever less on asserting authority and ever more on building mutual respect.”19 Family life was now negotiated. The father was no longer seen as a heavy-handed shepherd who should corral his daughter toward proper individualization. Instead, as sociologist Ulrich Beck argued, children “individualize themselves.”20

Beck calls this the “biographization” of youth. What he means is that people started to see childhood as a process of learning to write your own story. You discover agency through milestone events like a first kiss, a driver’s license, a prom date. You struggle to “find yourself.” Within this framework, the role of the parent supposedly becomes less about steering or governing, and more about encouraging and supporting a child as they construct a narrative that’s unique, individual, and self-authored. Agnes Callard, University of Chicago associate professor of philosophy and prolific blogger, frames it as a shift from “traditional parenting” to “acceptance parenting.” She points out that tradition comes from the Latin verb trādere, meaning “to hand over.

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