DADDY ISSUES

You bottom feeding shidiots have got to stop embarrassing yourselves like this.

“Yeah we get it, you hate men because your dad left to go get the milk and never came back. Get over it, bitch.”

Well, not quite…

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It’s a chilly evening in September and I’m riding in the car with my dad. I mention that I’m cold, and without saying a word, he takes the flannel shirt off his back and tosses it over to me. He sincerely believes that I’ll win a Pulitzer Prize one day and is always brainstorming ideas with me for my next piece. He cries when we all get together in the living room and he tells my sister and I that we are the greatest contributions that he has ever made to this world. He says to me every time we talk how proud of me that my grandmother is, and he knows this because her spirit still speaks to him through the plants and the birds. He rolled me joints and taught me how to drive a jet ski over many midwestern summers. He took me out for a milkshake even after I backed his truck into a trailer.

Like many little girls, the first idea I ever had of what a man is was formed based on what my father showed me a man is. In the formative years of my life, I earnestly thought all men were, by nature and by biological imperative, providers and protectors who cherished and treated the women in their lives with respect and as equals. From a very young age, I always knew how to spot an insensitive, unthoughtful, hateful, disgusting, rat-faced dipshit of a man because those men had nothing in common with what I had known and seen a man to be. Though as I grew from a girl into a woman, it became painfully clear to me that my father was the exception and not the rule. This positive initial perception of men provided them with a pedestal that they have since spent my entire life kamikaze diving off of, determined to reach new lows that I never even dreamed were possible. Men could only ever wish that how I see my father had anything to do with how I see them, because if that were the case, maybe I wouldn’t fantasize about beating them to death with a trench raiding club every time I see them enjoying themselves in a public space.

It’s unfathomable for the average man to come to terms with the fact that I am not a sex object, but a fully formed human being with eyes and ears that process what happens around me—and, unlike males, I don’t need the popular consensus of my bootlicking homosocial group before forming my own opinion about something. If you are a man and I am telling you that you are a bitchass teabagging hobgoblin, that is because you have shown that you are a bitchass teabagging hobgoblin — point blank period. But because men cannot cope with any type of accountability whatsoever, they self soothe by writing masturbatory fanfiction in which my dad sucks so they can ‘justify’ why I refuse to regard them as anything beyond a bitchass teabagging hobgoblin. A genetically inferior bipedal roach. A useless violent gutterpig. A meatless jagaloon bozo.

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A man will literally come at you with the most disgusting whorephobic rape coded and misogynistic vitriol — and if you dare object to any of it, he will simply ignore the backtalk and say with his whole chest, “I said nothing wrong, you’re just a dumb bitch who can’t handle the truth because you have daddy issues,” and that’s it. End of story. He got you, right? Wrong.

What these self aggrandizing mouth breathing cockmuppets conveniently fail to realize is that the trope of the absentee father only exists because of humanity’s silent and collective witness to the ineptitude of men as a whole to step up and be active in the lives of their children. Within the patriarchy, we’ve accepted and normalized fathers as failures to such a point where men can throw this ‘daddy issues’ line around with full confidence that it will stick — and thats not just the premium grade audacity talking, it’s the statistics too. Across the board, men often leave behind entire families and face little to no consequence. On top of that, they seem to be well aware of this immunity, which is why they assume it to be the case for the fathers of most women; if it’s acceptable for a man to desert his family, why wouldn’t he? Her father must have left her. I know I would have.

Yeah bro, we know…

Beyond their biological, emotional, and intellectual inferiority, the consistent failure of men as fathers is directly linked to society’s lack of interest or desire to punish, shame, and hold men accountable for abusing and/or abandoning their families. In the same fashion that we’ve rebranded issues like rape and domestic violence (statistically most commonly perpetrated by men onto women) as women’s issues, the absentee father is just yet another issue of men projected onto women in order for men to avoid any type of accountability for their statistically proven incompetence, irresponsibility, and cowardice. I typically don’t engage with people who come at me with DadDiscourse, because going back and forth with someone who has enough cognitive dissonance pulsing through their veins to kill a whale guarantees nothing but a headache and a massive amount of time wasted. Though truth be told, it still does actually piss me off to see the careless admission of man’s renowned ineptitude being so lazily mutilated and transformed into a weapon used to silence and shame women. Why randomly bring up the mutual failings of men in the middle of a conversation with a woman by mentioning ‘daddy issues’? My brother in christ, it is men’s constant failure that is driving this narrative, not women’s behavior. ‘Daddy issues’ is not a mic drop, it is a self inflicted fourth degree burn — and if men had any self awareness whatsoever and weren’t completely addicted to hating themselves, they’d remove this phrasing from their vernacular posthaste.

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I think of my dad pulling the sled up the hill in the dead of winter just for me to turn around and come right back down five minutes later. I think of him driving around the neighborhood and letting us ride in the open back of his pick-up truck while we ate our ice cream. I think of him sitting on the edge of my bed when I was a little girl and asking me, “What do you think love is?”. I think of him letting me hold onto his shoulders while he swam underwater so I could pretend I was a mermaid. I think of him teaching me how to ride a bike and how to care for the thick curly hair I inherited from his side of the family. I think of him making a peanut butter and banana sandwich in the kitchen, smiling and saying, “now this is living large.” I think of his closet full of neon floral shirts and his six layer Pandora beaded bracelet he wears whenever he goes out to dinner. I think of him always with an anecdote or a life lesson in his back pocket, never missing his chance to impart something to me that he sincerely believes will add color and magic into my life.

In a way, I suppose all those men are right and I do have ‘daddy issues’. The issues being that, since the day I was born, my dad has treated me as a human being and not as an object or property, and now I’m a fully grown woman with self prioritizing boundaries and high expectations of how I should be treated. Men pretend to resent my father for being absent or shitty, but the truth is that they actually resent him for being present and teaching me well enough to know what I deserve. So before fixing your fingers for this supposed lethal verbal lashing, just know in advance that my dad thinks you’re an embarrassing fucking idiot—and maybe it’s genetic, but I fully agree with him.

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