Daddy Issues

When I hear the father of a young woman point out all the clichés about his daughter’s future with men, and how he’s going to threaten each and every one of these unfortunate sods--usually involving a shotgun--, I shut out the mere thought that he has a daughter. “Well, isn’t that kind of the point?” you italicize, “Isn’t he protecting his daughter from pansies, like you, that get easily threatened?”

First of all, I’m not easily threatened. If a guy like that were to give me the same attitude for anything else, I’d do my best to make him feel like a thoughtless neanderthal that should go back to the woods or die, and leave civilized society better off without him. Even if he ended up shooting me, at least I wouldn’t have to be around the spiritual stench of his apehood, anymore.

A father who goes to lengths to make sure his daughter’s companion feels less than he is, in any way, is a man who has become insecure to his very core. The real issue, it seems to me, is an issue of control. If a man truly believes that he controls whom his daughter chooses to be with, then there is an ulterior motive, outside of provision and protection; it’s about Alpha vs. Beta. It’s about who’s going to be in control over the girl who's stuck in the middle, once the war is over. And, it’s completely natural, and even expected, for a man to gradually become insecure when he has children. 

Having a daughter is especially frightening to a father, because girls seem far more precious and fragile than boys. That same father realizes his daughter is bound to grow up, and he knows what men will think of her, being a man himself. The primal urges and instincts of boys and men suddenly become the greatest menace in the father’s imagination. His cute, little, innocent girl is now an object of living, breathing men’s desires and affections. I understand that all of this--and much, much more--goes on in the minds of nearly every father whose daughter has grown to be a woman.

Each of these fathers that continue to feel this way, unchecked, are forgetting an essential detail: their daughters are human beings, too. No one is perfect, not even women. Women have the same primal desires and instincts men do. But, they also have a far more developed sense of maturity than their male peers. They can sense when someone is untrustworthy, and they have a social network within their schools and other organizations which will let them know, very quickly and often in great detail, whether or not a guy is trustworthy. Granted, this is an imperfect system, often riddled with misinformation, poor judgment and gossip, but it’s a living thing on its own, and girls/women of all ages go to this social network.

By the time she’s 18, the average woman in a developed country knows most men are idiots. And, in underdeveloped countries, women know these as "zygotes" (at the very moment the chromosomes combine, the embryo immediately realizes, I’m going to be born into an unfair, impoverished system because the men in charge are bigoted morons.)

Women, everywhere, also know that in order to survive as a species it falls on them to focus on the practical aspects of procreation. Luckily, they have the natural sense of how to do this, and are mostly adept at finding a good person to father their children. They also have the natural sense that--and this is key information--they are in control. What’s terrifying for the men that understand this is the truth, they see that women actually know women are in control. And women use this control in the worst way possible: they carefully guide the idiots around them to a better life.

So, put your guns away, stop fronting and shut your mouths, overprotective fathers. Your daughters and wives are just fine without you hounding them on every facet of their lives. They don’t even need you. They just let you live around them because you’re out of the house a lot, and the fact that you make some money is more of a perk than anything else. You’re also occasionally amusing.

Wait, is the real issue that you already know all of those things? Are you just forcing your purpose because the insecurity is eating at you? Is your self-esteem a rotten shell of what it used to be, and you’ve taken to hiding behind conditioned rage to protect what’s left?

Don’t worry, your daughter will be fine. You’ve made it so no one wants to date her, anyway.