Feminist Dad: Dropping Trou in Front of the Kid
I have a daughter who is now just four years old. Any tendencies I have towards feminism are directly attributable to her, my mother and my wife.
When I look at my daughter, I feel an identification that I could be her that helps to strip away many ingrained layers of misogyny.
Every dad feels the anxiety of the potential sexual exploitation of their daughter. We hope against hope that our little innocent kids will somehow escape the very exploitation that we cheer on and defend every time we look at porn or stuff a dollar down a stripper’s g-string. How dads manage to compartmentalize this stuff is more than a thinking person can comprehend.
The other day my first opportunity ever to give her some idea about the evil of men came up, and I hope I handled it right. I don’t want her to be horribly afraid of the world, no matter how evil it is, even though I do want her to understand that evil people do exist and must be watched for and avoided as much as possible.
We were getting up; I was lying in bed in my pajamas and she was bouncing around in her sleeper, and I had to get up and make her breakfast and turn on the TV so she could enjoy her morning ration of TV, which she loves with a terrible love I find hard to oppose.
She usually runs around or leaves me for a couple of seconds at some point in the morning, but this morning she was adhering and I needed to get those pajamas off and put on my clothes. I have these terrible memories of seeing my parents naked as a kid. They didn’t flaunt themselves at me, but once each I did see their sex organs and each sighting was seared into my brain. We live in a culture that hides our actual genitals yet loves to highlight our artificial sexual differences to the point of insanity, i.e. boob jobs. So I’ve never allowed her to see me entirely naked, and never will, since in our culture, like it or not, such a thing would be considered a deviant sex act if we weren’t related, and is a controversial one even when you are.
I realized she wasn’t going to toddle off on her own.
“OK, I’m going in the bathroom for a second. Wait here and I’ll be right out to get you your breakfast.” I told her.
“I want to go with you, daddy” she says. After all, I’m always going into the bathroom with her to read her books while she pees, it was one of our techniques for potty training her.
“No, I need to be alone in there, I’m changing into my underwear.”
“Why can’t I come?” Her tone was just a touch emotional, and I knew I had to give her a good reason, and I paused to think exactly what I should say at this delicate juncture.
“A grownup man should never let you see him naked. If he does, he’s being very bad and you should tell someone right away.”
She looked at me and I saw that she got some of the idea.
“If they do, they should be punished. It’s very bad.”
My feeling is that such things should be constantly said, but never at length.
Was I right? Did I go too far? How much is too much when you’re trying to prepare your daughter for the evils of misogyny; evils that seem to be growing and expanding every day?
February 28th, 2008 at 1:19 am
Keep in mind that this is posted by a Dane and that our cultural norms may be slightly different to yours on this point.
To answer your question, I believe you where wrong in it, by keeping your daughter away and out you where making it into something sexual to a child that would not understand the meaning of it yet, for a child or a parent, to see each other nude is not wrong, as long as there are natural reasons for it and as long as it is non-sexual.
I can completly understand the desire and wish to protect your daughter, but I believe personally that nudity should not be connected to sex, why is it that our present culture continually seem to force it towards it? Ten years ago it was common for girls to take a tan on the beach here in Denmark topless, because there was nothing sexual about it, these days its becoming much rarer, simply because our culture is slowly changing so that even partial nudity should be connected to sex.
The human body is just that, a body, why should it always be connected to one of its basest instincts?
February 28th, 2008 at 9:33 am
I agree with you. If we lived in a world where the majority of people were as sane as you and I it would be wonderful. But if I tell my daughter that nudity is OK sometimes and a sexual act other times, depending on who the man is, it seems needlessly confusing.
I don’t need for her to see my genitals. It might be convenient sometimes, but I see no pressing, urgent need. Seeing them will cause a confusing set of conditional circumstances where she must be able to distinguish when it is bad and when it is good and to fathom the hundreds of kinds of motivations behind each set of circumstances related to each set of different categories of men for her to come to a decision as to whether she is being used as a sexual object in a fetish of exhibitionism or if someone is just sunbathing or changing his clothes.
This is all way too much for a four year old to understand. My motivation isn’t simple prudery, it is to help her understand that men who show their genitals to her are doing something they should be punished for. In order for this to be clear and without ambiguity that could be exploited by anyone, I shall decline to start her out by giving her a list of exceptions and allowances, starting with myself.
The reason why the body is connected to our basest instincts is because men like myself have been trained since birth to regard nudity as a sexual state. Denying this, as easy and delusional as it may be, simply does not change it at all.
I still think little girls should be allowed to go topless. And it makes me sad to think that most people need to create a sexual distinction where none exists. Doesn’t it seem like childhood was less sex-defined when we were young than it is now? A glance around the clothing section of a children’s store will reveal that little boys must where dark, depressing colorless clothes and girls must wear pink and pastel clothes. It looks like all the little boys are prisoners of their parents’ fears.
February 28th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
On the subject of children clothing I know that for a fact to have changed for the worse, for example a few years ago there was a case with a teenage girl who had gone into a store and pulled all the g-strings down into a box and removed them, she was offcourse stopped for this and there came media attention around it, wich was what she wanted.
The g-strings where designed for the age category of nine year old girls, when the board heard of this they unanimously dropped the charges and removed the product line, now a happy ending? I don’t think so, firstly the product line appeared in the first place showing that there is a market for this sort of stuff -things like this would not come into the shops if no one wants to buy them, I do not believe in the shops having any morality or any specific desire to promote sexuality, I believe them interested in one thing only: profit.
This means that there was a market for it, and thats scary in itself, the next part is that its in no way illegal to produce and sell this kind of clothing despite it promoting sexuality towards pre-teen girls, I write towards because they are too young to understand the meaning themselves, wich indicates an adult interest into this subject. Nine year old girls can’t afford to buy their own clothes yet after all.
Finally, would anything have happened to change the product line had there not been media attention around this? I think not.
On your daughter again, I can completly understand your reasoning, and I wish that the world we lived in did not need such a distinction, I still believe that you may take it a tad too far though in your approach, mostly because I believe it indirectly puts the childs attention on it as something sexual, wich it should’nt be at all in that age.
Then again, how else should one warn his or her child about abuse?
Not an easy problem to solve I think.
February 28th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
The reasoning behind nine-year-olds needing thongs is that they have mothers who think that pleasing men is the most important aspect of dressing. This is something women tell each other through approval/disapproval and which men tell women by showing lust. These mothers aren’t sensitive enough to make a distinction between pleasing men, pleasing each other, and the desires created by advertising and fashion.
This is just one reason why feminism is an essential tool for women to examine their world and culture with. The first concern of feminism is educating women, which some of the blogs on my blogroll do a good job with.