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Fathering Daughters:
Reflections by Men Pedophiles?
Edited by DeWitt Henry and James Alan McPherson
review by Richard Leader
Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men (1997) is a significant
book. Its date marks a historic moment in the fatherhood movement.
It was published the same year that the Promise Keepers would reach
their zenith (holding a rally that drew over one million men) and
rapidly crumble. While the Keepers disintegrated, their energy sent
out reverberations throughout the political spectrum. Fathering
Daughters is a product of that energy.
Dads and Daughters, widely believed to be the most pro-feminist
of the fatherhood groups, is also part of that energy. In light
of that fact, it’s important to note that they’re now
the only pro-feminist group that currently receives any funding
or national attention. Dads and Daughters created their first website
in 1999. At the time, Fathering Daughters was one of the
few books they recommended and attempted to sell to their site’s
viewers.
The book is currently recommended by the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services and their Head Start program. Or what’s
left of the Head Start program after the Fatherhood Initiative,
a corporate effort by Bush Administration cronies, decided to take
it over. It was a bit of revenge for putting children — and
by extension, their “bonbon eating” mothers —
first.
If that weren’t enough, Fathering Daughters is
also likely the preferred treatment on fatherhood by pedophiles
throughout the world.
While that’s a bombastic beginning for a book review, it’s
necessary to slow down a great deal to fully describe the complexities
of the work. It’s not an easy volume to fully contextualize.
So please bear with me as I backtrack a bit.
No one needs to consider me a pro-feminist of any sort. I’m
not complaining: that’s exactly as it should be.
It’s an entirely different story for males who choose the
privileges of matrimony and fatherhood though; so very much depends
on their status as one of the good guys. Wives and daughters have
an intense need to see their husbands and fathers as being the sort
of men who do the right thing. For most of us in this world, myself
included, being the sort — or merely being seen as
the sort — tends to take precedence over actually doing the
right thing. Still, no one has ever called me a feminist for picking
up my socks every morning.
Seeing the different standards in place for men and their anti-sexist
work has made me skeptical of the pro-feminist fatherhood movement:
who can tell, precisely, where the Promise Keeper ends and the “Dads
and Daughters” father begins?
Feminism has not yet overthrown the patriarchy but it has changed
the role of daughters, female children, within it. This presents
a paradox in that daughters are now much more useful to individual
patriarchs, if not the system they uphold. Daughters have been transformed
from chattel to perfectly acceptable vehicles for the transmission
of the masculine ego beyond one’s own life expectancy.
Wanting the best for your daughter isn’t necessarily the
mark of a feminist consciousness: even Dick Cheney loves his lesbian
daughter. Because of that love, he’ll do whatever he can to
make sure she can bloodily triumph over the daughters of his rivals.
While the pro-feminist side of the fatherhood movement can protest
the advertising industry and celebrate Title IX, all worthy endeavors,
it’s otherwise apolitical. Male privilege, like class and
race based privileges, isn’t something you fight against for
the benefit of your own daughter — it’s something you
have to do for the benefit of other men’s daughters, your
rivals. Doing so might even hurt your own daughter as she’s
in many ways dependent upon your privilege. That’s a profoundly
difficult thing to choose.
The absence of truly feminist politics in groups like Dads and
Daughters hasn’t seemed to stop most of more prestigious pro-feminist
writers from flocking to it. Men like Michael Kimmel and Jackson
Katz have signed on. Many of these eager beavers don’t even
have children of their own. In the process, they’ve largely
abandoned their former positions with groups like the National Organization
for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS), a fatuous crowd that has somehow
managed to grow even more epically pointless.
While NOMAS molders, Dads and Daughters becomes ever more glossy
by the minute, picking up one famous endorsement after the next.
It’s a solid career move for those who make the switch: Parents
buy a lot of shit.
I live in a small town with a small town library. The books are
artifacts, not because they’re particularly old or worn, but
because they’re mostly there to keep children occupied while
their parents take advantage of the free internet, a precious resource
in our area. It’s a place strongly aware of the demographic
it serves: an entire wall is dedicated to “Inspirational Literature,”
a genre that mostly consists of Christian doomsday tracts, Left
Behind and its imitators. Still, the town librarian has some
strong feminist tendencies. Many of the short shelves have Margaret
Atwood’s books standing on top in stark defiance.
It was in the parenting section that I found Fathering Daughters:
Reflections by Men (1997). It was given special treatment,
standing on display with its face puffed with pride. It was another
bit of the town librarian’s feminism; a small attempt to better
her community. I thought I’d honor that effort by taking her
up on it.
Fathering Daughters, edited by DeWitt Henry and James Alan
McPherson, is radically different from most fatherhood screeds.
It doesn’t cater to the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t
try to sell itself, not even to its own captive audience. It never
had a chance of becoming a hip, mass-market offering. The men included
in the anthology are all highly literate individuals who can get
away with using words like “rotogravure” or “legato”
without an editor striking them out and laughing at the attempt
to sneak them through. Most of them work as professors at prestigious
schools.
The daughters they raised attended even more prestigious schools;
Berkeley, Yale, and others, two went to Harvard. One left for college
at 14. Many grew up with yearly visits to places like Korea and
Germany, or spent their summers in England, watching dad use his
entire season of freedom to run theater productions. The ever-young
part of me can’t help but be jealous of the adventures —
and horses! — the girls had, even as my adult side envies
the careers of their fathers, talents that blossomed despite rampant
alcoholism, depression, and one failed marriage after the next.
Many of contributors became fathers at an older-than-average age:
two were a hairbreadth from 50 when they impregnated a much younger
partner. I say that not just to disparage them for it — though
I obviously do — but to add that to a mountain of evidence
that says that the average father in my small town library might
not relate much to Fathering Daughters. Most of my friends who stuck
around in the Rust Belt to raise children became parents during
high school or soon after: if they could write as well as these
men do, and several of them once dreamt of making an honest effort,
it seems doubtful they’d write nearly the same book.
Nevertheless, the unassailably elite nature of Fathering Daughters
is also its most redeeming feature.
Whereas Dad and Daughters tried making money off of Fathering
Daughters in 1999, by referring potential buyers to Amazon.com,
a decade later they’ve switched to direct marketing instabooks
written by their own staff. Or, at least the high-muckamucks on
their staff. Titles like 54 Fun Activities to Help Build a Great
Relationship, 200 Ways to Raise a Girl’s Self-Esteem,
and Chicken Soup for the Father & Daughter Soul would
do Thomas Kinkade proud.
For all the literary grandstanding that Fathering Daughters
does — where nearly every contributor earnestly writes first
for his own satisfaction and not his readers’ — at least
it doesn’t treat raising a female human being like an exercise
in motorcycle repair (there is a text called Fatherhood: an
Owner’s Manual) with step by step instructions.
It does, however, treat it like training birddogs.
Don’t be worried though, Rick Bass, in his chapter “My
Daughters,” telegraphs your alarm (p. 59):
I may have it all wrong. I may be the most sexist father left
in this century. I can see hyperfeminists wondering to themselves,
Daughters as bird dogs? [emphasis original]
Bass admits he’s a sexual essentialist (that gender is a
fundamental part of natural fact), but reconciles it with his belief
that we can all learn from each other. He’s one of the good
guys because he makes room for both highly linear and femininely
squishy modes of thought, something that he thinks real feminists
give a shit about. Granted, in the mid-90s, such stuff was a popular
academic motif so it’s hard to fault him for the mistake.
He seems to genuinely believe that the average feminist worries
about her daughter falling into a linear mindset, even though such
things are actually a preoccupation of antifeminists. It is, after
all, a demographic that doesn’t have to do any actual activism
to advance their platform — thus they have all the time in
the world to dote on the more ethereal notes of feminism.
My complaint with Rick Bass and his birddogs doesn’t have
anything to do with his comparison, right or wrong, but with his
framing and tone. His “hyperfeminists” divides women
into two groups: reasonable women (some feminist, others not) who
think he’s swell, and unreasonable women (always feminist)
who don’t find him especially worthwhile or interesting.
When the word patriarch is used in Fathering Daughters,
and it is many times, it’s always with irony, laughing at
any reader who could ever meet the word and find it sincere: I might
be sexist for saying this, and look how very smart I am for knowing
that, but I’m going to say it anyway and no one can tell me
I’m wrong.
Rick Bass certainly smiled as he dared us to object to his words.
So does Nicholas Delbanco in his “A Prayer for the Daughters.”
(Many of the contributors modeled their chapters on William Butler
Yeats’ poem, perhaps at the instigation of editors Henry and
McPherson. This, among other things, gives Fathering Daughters
a peculiarly religious veneer. I find such literary embellishments
excruciatingly boring; many mainstream readers will likely find
non-religious people wielding vestments of faith in that way to
be offensive.)
Delbanco writes, in defense of the institution of marriage (p.
114):
So, yes, I am conditioned by tradition. “And may her bridegroom
bring her to a house” the poet writes, and however limited
or patriarchal it seems I find myself in sympathy with that future-facing
desire.
Marriage worked for him, it must be good, and thus his good-deserving
daughter should have it too is the full extent of his reasoning
on that matter.
Again, it’s not so much what he says, right or wrong, but
how he positions his words. He’s imagining an audience of
people that he wants to speak over, past, anyone who might have
experience (or empirical research) that would contradict his own;
most notably, his feminist oppressors; those women who want to ruin
his daughters’ lives by ruining his life.
The entire book is designed as a warning salvo to that audience.
Men know that other men don’t really read their books:
each man cares only for the story of his own life and works to tell
it as often and as loudly as he can. Even Warren Farrell, antifeminist
hero and the author of The Myth of Male Power, has admitted
that he writes his books for women, the people who read books. Men
benefit from the existence of books, not the consumption of them.
This becomes quite clear in the introduction of Fathering Daughters.
The message is, like it or not — and we’ll really get
off on putting you in your place if you dare to say “not”
— fathers need to have greater than equal share in framing
the “conversation.” An equal share would give both sides
the ability to suspend the conversation and go on their separate
ways. Big daddy’s not going to give you a choice.
…
To prepare for our task as editors of this collection, we visited
bookstores in Harvard Square to become acquainted with books on
the shelves. We found a vast women’s studies section in
each bookstore and a conspicuous absence of men’s studies,
other than a small section of gay studies.
We felt self-conscious about drawing stares. Here we were, two
grumpy old men, clearly middle aged, one African-American, one
WASP, browsing the feminist shelves in evident astonishment. Studies
by women touching on fathers ranged from psychology to sociology,
to cultural criticism, to fiction and poetry. Women’s studies
questioned assumptions about everything from the female body to
the psyche, from home to the workplace, all seeking to remedy
a widespread discontent and pathology. Women exhorted women to
childless careers, to recovered memories of abuse, to celibacy,
to “wildzones” of creativity. A virtual industry of
ideology was in place, and where were we, as fathers, in this
call for change?
In volume after volume, fathers were identified as embodiments
of “patriarchy,” and were portrayed as abusive, tyrannical,
overpowering, predatory, absent, distant, shadowy, irresponsible,
and victims themselves of traditions that denied women full human
potential. According to many daughters, fathers were at the heart
of their unhappiness as women. Historically, of course, fathers
favored sons. Adrienne Rich was frequently invoked as a woman
who looked past the personal to the cultural figure of her father:
“There was an ideology at last which let me dispose of you,
identify the suffering you caused, hate you righteously as part
of a system, the kingdom of fathers” (“Sources”
in Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems).
We were glad to find other books addressed at least in part to
fathers, texts by women to help daughters and fathers talk and
work together to “reframe the relationship.” These
writers, instead of taking a divisive stand, have adopted an earlier,
Betty Friedan style of feminism that called for equality rather
than blame between the sexes.
…
Just as Rick Bass invented Hyperfeminists, Henry and McPherson
create the classic spectrum of blame and praise. Women are dared
to run afoul of their taxonomy. While Betty Friedan came out victorious,
her name and history is irrelevant: in her place, they might as
well have said Betty Boop. When whites set up a dichotomy between
Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we’re not doing
it because we really love Dr. King. Dichotomies do not spring from
love. Instead, such rhetoric serves to set rules of acceptable behavior
for our audience.
Dominant populations never fear being hated but being disposed
of, forsaken, and rendered irrelevant. The White idea of Dr. King
is that we marched too; we gave the other freedom; our
whiteness was and is still necessary for Black survival, we cannot
be abandoned.
In that same way, the men of Fathering Daughters fear
abandonment. They cannot abide a world where they’re a choice,
rather than the choosers. They believe that their manhood and fatherhood
(rather than their personhood and parenthood) is necessary for the
survival of their daughters. The idea of political separatism brings
with it great anxiety: tragically, they fear losing their gender
identity more than they do losing their children.
Feminism, even of the meanest sort they attribute to snake-haired,
dog-faced furies like Adrienne Rich, certainly “addresses”
men. Fathers too. What then did Henry and McPherson mean? While
they stopped short (whether by intent or by ignorance) of using
the antifeminist division of “gender feminism” and “equity
feminism,” it’s abundantly clear they somehow believe
in sexism but not in patriarchy. This leads to a strange hypocrisy
when it comes to the idea of identity politics.
While they can be endlessly self-indulgent in their own work, that
selfishness never becomes an “industry of ideology”:
they can’t see themselves. They are, as Marilyn Frye would
say, the foreground. As the contributors are all subjects, perhaps
radically so, the offense they take at identity politics is laughable.
They believe themselves to be all just simple individuals (though
of varying racial backgrounds), living their own lives — lives
that can be wrecked if those other people don’t stop it with
their goddamn politics.
Only other people are political. And yet they want feminists to
honor them not as those blank individuals, who relate to the world
uniquely, but as men, living man-lives, decent man-lives made more
precious by fatherhood. I believe that is what Henry and McPherson
mean by “addresses” and it’s what they require
from feminists. If manhood and fatherhood are inevitable facts,
with their social and biological senses ever swirling into imperceptibility,
violent clashes with womanhood are equally inevitable and equally
without fault.
Editor James Alan McPherson doesn’t believe in patriarchy
but in a “gender war,” a dance of yin and yang where
both sides are mutually complicit. He writes of his daughter’s
holiday travels in “Disneyland” (p. 139):
She had no money, and was being obliged to sleep in a chair or
else on the floor of the airport with the other children of divorce,
tagged like Christmas gifts, who were serving out their obligations
to distant parents. I heard in my daughter’s voice, that
cold December evening, the quiet desperation of the many millions
of young people who, through no fault of their own, had become
casualties of two decades of gender warfare between selfish adults.
This belief, shared between him and Henry, so manifest in their
introduction, led to their most outlandish inclusion in Fathering
Daughters. In the interest of charity, I’ll allow them
to describe the chapter first, as they describe it on the dust jacket:
Mark Pendergrast writes harrowingly of daughters lost to the
Recovered Memory movement, daughters accusing him of sexual abuse.
The chapter was not written for Fathering Daughters but for a book
Pendergrast had written years earlier, his 1995 Victims of Memory:
Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives. He later reprinted
this same section in a literary journal, the Sun. Pendergrast
uses a lengthy editorial note in Fathering Daughters —
where he invokes “gender wars,” no less — to describe
hostile reader reaction to its inclusion in the Sun. These
reactions would lead him to cut any personal material from a second
edition of his book:
Many of the resulting letters to the Sun editor were surprising
and disturbing to me. One typical response called my piece “a
self-serving terrorist attack on his daughters” though it
is instead of loving plea for reconciliation. Most of the letters
— and some reviews of the book — concentrated on “Did
he or didn’t he molest his daughters?” rather than
the scholarly investigative work that constituted the bulk of
the book.
Mark Pendergrast makes it clear that DeWitt Henry actively solicited
him for the chapter but doesn’t specify where Henry first
encountered the material. While readers of the second edition of
Victims of Memory might be spared the reasons he wrote
it, we are not so lucky. The chapter is a pastiche of happy memories
he has about his two daughters from their youth, daring readers
to intuit something creepy about the “feet games” he
used to play with them (a deliberate red herring he offers), mixed
with tales of a startling transformation.
When one of his daughters came out as a lesbian during college,
he was cool with it; the sex part anyway. He found something else
much more troubling, if only in hindsight, “By that time,
being a lesbian — particularly on college campuses —
was also a political statement about the patriarchal society and
generalized male oppression.” He claims his daughter began
seeing a college counselor and, out of the blue, “initiated
a search” for repressed memories of abuse.
Later, she would tell him of her first recovered memory, of how
one of his housemates had molested her when she was nine. Helpfully,
Pendergrast offered to kill the man for her. Discouraged from that
course of action, he bought a book for his daughter, The Courage
to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child and Sexual Abuse.
While he thought the text made a great deal of sense at the time,
in retrospect, he believes that the authors, Ellen Bass and Laura
Davis, “had an agenda against parents —all parents.”
[emphasis original]
Pendergrast then launches into a tale about his daughters both
cutting off contact with him. The reasons offered form a neat progression
that he takes great care in crafting. They are at first mysterious
hints (and thus suspect), then they are simple misunderstandings
(thus easily explained), and finally they are the utterly ridiculous
(thus absolving him of the former more mundane charges).
He writes that it all became clear to him when he joined the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation: after talking to its leaders, he found
that his daughters were following a predictable script offered to
them by feminists. He was the one being victimized. He was a statistic,
and he found solace in attending a conference with six hundred other
perfectly innocent parents, each accused of sexual abuse.
The chapter concludes with a personal letter written to his daughters,
his “loving plea for reconciliation.” In brief, he calls
them both dupes of a great conspiracy and wonders why, now that
they’re older and wiser, that they’re still unable to
see his truth. He uses scare quotes no less than five times in the
letter to reinforce that truth. (“I’m not saying that
you are necessarily miserable in your new identities as ‘incest
survivors.’”)
Mark Pendergrast’s chapter, “Daughters Lost,”
offers several possibilities of meaning, none of which are mutually
exclusive.
At the very worst, his chapter could be, as a Sun reader
so elegantly offered, a self-serving terrorist attack on his daughters.
His words could be the ravings of a man so egotistical that it’s
only natural he’d be unaware of the harm he inflicted upon
his girls, ignorant of the boundaries he’s crossed time and
time again, this time in ink. Good parents, one might think, when
accused of crimes by their children, don’t join associations
filled with pedophiles; it’s not as if any of the parents
at the conference Pendergrast attended could be vetted.
At best, one must certainly allow for the possibility of his innocence,
that his daughters really were misled by a rogue psychologist. One
could believe that his entire family was victimized by a brief phenomenon
in the 1990s. However, this phenomenon received media attention
in a panic that far outstripped any evidence that could prove there
was an entire industry devoted to wrecking lives with hypnotism
and false memories.
Mark Stanton covers the media’s infatuation with the False
Memory Syndrome at the Columbia Review, and his 1997 “U-Turn
on Memory Lane” is recommended as a definitive source on the
subject:
A Harvard Law Review article in January 1996 argued
that while scientific evidence proves the existence of delayed
memories, biased reporting has helped create a social climate
in which people, including some judges, have come to believe just
the opposite. “Stories highlighting dubious-sounding or
clearly mistaken memories have replaced reports of more plausible
recollections,” two Northwestern University law professors,
Cynthia Grant Brown and Elizabeth Mertz, wrote in the Review.
“The abusive parents of earlier media accounts have been
replaced as the villains of the story by self-serving therapists,”
they said, and wondered “why it is apparently so difficult
to contemplate the obvious but more complicated possibility that
there are both accurate and inaccurate claims of remembered sexual
abuse.... To the degree that the media has an effect on public
opinion, including legal professionals’ opinions, there
is cause to doubt that the public is hearing this more balanced
message.”
How does Pendergrast’s story serve the average reader of
Fathering Daughters? What message can they be expected to take from
it?
Is it a simple narrative speaking to the archetypal theme of “loss,”
as Pendergrast suggests DeWitt Henry saw it, telling of the “fragile,
magical, vital link between fathers and daughters” and the
pain that comes when it is severed?
Or does it suggest that readers should avoid therapists and, more
importantly, keep their daughters out of the clawing and catching
hands of feminists?
The latter seems more likely. “Daughters Lost,” at
21 dense pages, is nearly 10 percent of Fathering Daughters.
Rather than a side note in the message of what fatherhood means
to men, editors Henry and McPherson allowed — and encouraged
— it to become the dominant theme of their text. This is what
they believe fathers should be thinking about, a grave concern for
all dads. They reinforce this with the monitions they give about
the “gender wars” in their own chapters and introduction.
While Henry and McPherson supplied that antifeminist context for
“Daughters Lost,” their framing of Pendergrast’s
work is far from unique. There is an AOL website dedicated to Victims
of Memory that has all the earmarks of being official (it takes
great liberties with displaying large swaths of text and includes
an AOL email address for contacting Pendergrast). Along with information
on ordering the book, and long excerpts from each chapter, there
is a long list of recommended hyperlinks.
Among them are antifeminist Men’s Rights websites (often
a marketing tool used by child custody lawyers), Christian fundamentalist
groups, and so-called Equity Feminists. Such feminists are seldom
seen as anything of the sort by other feminists, but they are highly
successful at being published. Men can’t resist helping them
get their message out.
The first Equity Feminist group offered up by Victims of Memory
is the Northwest Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force. Contrary to
their name, the organization never had anything to do with fighting
censorship. Their mission, as they state it, is to “create
social services which serve to reform child abuse legislation”
and to “make the system accountable and to assist those falsely
accused.” They post reviews of books with grand names like
Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of Modern
American Witch Hunt, by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker.
Debbie Nathan made a career out of writing about False Memories
in the 1990s. She even wrote an article for Playboy called
“Cry Incest.” The provocative title — to cry rape,
from to cry wolf, to lie — was a perfect fit for Playboy,
that favorite magazine of good fathers everywhere: women are whores
and when they’re not whores, they’re liars. This is
the crowd that supports Mark Pendergrast and his work. They are
his people.
DeWitt Henry and James Alan McPherson joined those same people
when they constructed the narrative flow of Fathering Daughters.
While many of the contributors are simply guilty by association,
of running in social circles that all but guaranteed that they’d
be published in the anthology, it was Henry and McPherson who worked
to guide the reader down a foxglove path. That path is well-worn
by less literate and less privileged antifeminists.
It has occurred to me how wrong I was in the beginning of this
review. I believed that Fathering Daughters existed on
an elite paradigm that could ignore the command of petty capitalism;
that it didn’t cater to the lowest common denominator or try
to sell itself. Its deliberate voyage into antifeminism, always
a useful sales hook, proves otherwise.
While the blurbs on the back cover might talk up the genius of
the editors and contributors (“They have seen that the writers
shuck the subject of sentimentality and have given us the real core
of the relationship between fathers and daughters.” Ernest
Gaines, author of A Lesson Before Dying), the book as a
whole is not high literature but a cheap genre work. Henry and McPherson
made it so. Its message and focus is no different than any number
of books produced for the fathers’ rights market, even if
the editors of those tomes don’t discuss their meetings at
Harvard Square.
Professorships and Pulitzer Prizes do insulate Fathering Daughters
from being seen as an antifeminist work. They are successful men
who know, and fuck, successful women — women who are automatically
assumed to be feminist by virtue of that success, a popularized
misconception where feminists are held as the “tops”
in some sort of sadomasochistic relationship vis-à-vis other
women. These men have that seal of approval and more: enough published
work to prove they only dabble in complaining, that they’re
not the sort of losers who beat their chests as they howl about
the invisible matriarchy.
Still, Fathering Daughters is what it is: one of the most
interesting and well crafted books in the how to be a better patriarch
genre. What Fathering Daughters isn’t, however, is read.
Consider how controversial Mark Pendergrast proved when he was
published by the Sun. It was a firestorm.
And yet no one from Dads and Daughters or the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services seemed to take notice of his chapter before
recommending the anthology to the world. Did any of these fathers
even bother to read it? I suppose not. Men benefit from the existence
of books, not the consumption of them.
Various other thoughts on Fathering Daughters: Reflections by
Men:
I.
FOX has a new show called New Amsterdam. It’s about
an immortal homicide detective who solves crimes while experiencing
flashbacks from days of yore. It’s a story that’s been
done before and in far more entertaining ways. Somehow, FOX got
the notion that receiving one’s immortality as a thank-you
note from a Native American shaman is more “mainstream”
than the vampires detectives and Scottish Highlanders that only
achieved cult status. That they could think such a thing presents
an interesting commentary on racial fetish.
It’s a terrible show.
Before I stopped watching it though, I viewed one episode that
really brought home how powerful the “False Memory Syndrome”
or “Anti-Recovered Memory” movement is and how successful
they’ve been in their public relations campaign.
They’re a front-page antidote for a problem that’s
on the back-page, if it ever gets space at all.
The plot went something like this:
Immortal dude collars some shell-shocked veteran and gets him to
confess to a murder he didn’t commit; immortal dude feels
really bad about that and tries to make things right by finding
the real killer.
The murder victim was a psychologist who once helped people recover
memories but disavowed her work (In Pendergrast speak she’d
be “scientifically” labeled as a “retractor”)
after one patient accused someone of cooking a baby, something which
clearly didn’t happen. She was writing a book slamming a former
co-worker. He is another shrink in the recovered memory business
who didn’t want to lose his patients, people he ripped from
their “families of origin,” who are now loyal to him
alone. Thus he kills her for threatening to upset his life. All
of which, conveniently, ties thematically into the veteran who believed
he did something he didn’t do because of an intense interrogation
session.
This story shocked me because this is a show about a homicide detective:
every week some act of violence has to happen, each more intricate
and depraved than the last, in order to set the plot in motion.
The characters live in a world of intense violence where every other
person they meet is dripping evil.
How, in such a world, could one even suspect someone of inventing
fake crimes? Life exists for crime!
And yet false allegations of abuse were presented as more horrific
than the “real” violence depicted as entertainment:
false allegations are never sexy; real violence, especially against
women, is always sexy. The innocent-accused are always more
innocent than the innocent victims of violence; naturally,
the former are nearly always men.
Even a decade after the False Memory panic, a silly show about
an immortal dude can still recycle it to scare viewers once again.
This is a legacy that DeWitt Henry and James Alan McPherson helped
to sustain by dragging Mark Pendergrast into their book.
II.
Fred Viebahn writes in “Aviva’s World” (p. 100):
It’s hard to remember why I preferred a daughter over a
son, and I would never allow a psycho-plumber to snake through
my subconscious only to misinterpret the complexities of that
wish. I think I was a pretty good son to my parents, so there
was no denial and projecting going on, no fear of my own bad example.
I can only speculate: as a boy, I often preferred the company
of women. During family gatherings, when my father and my grandfathers
and uncles played cards in the living room, my boy cousins had
to drag me away from the women folk trading stories in the kitchen
so that I would play soccer with them. Even now, half a century
old, I frequently feel more comfortable chatting with women at
social gatherings. End of speculation.
While Viebahn shows the characteristic hatred of psychology required
for authors in Fathering Daughters, it’s significant that
he confines such talk to the realm of personality, rather than politics.
As often as feminists write apologias that they’re not “man
haters,” it’s interesting to note how freely and easily
distrust of men comes to males. We might sometimes apologize for
it, too, as Viebahn does, but we never really expect anyone to be
surprised by it. It makes sense to fear men, to watch your back
when amongst them, to prefer gatherings without them: males know
this easily, females have had it bred and beaten out of them to
the point where they often have to relearn the obvious.
Many pro-feminists have written passages similar to Viebahn. Typically,
they go further, urging males to overcome such fear as it hurts
women (who are burdened by us foisting our emotional lives on them
alone) and results in other phenomena such as homophobia. I find
such work, by John Stoltenberg and others, to be highly convincing
— at times. Other times, I wonder if it’s possible for
a male to be a separatist, avoiding men whenever possible, without
placing undue burden on women or barging in on sisterhood. It might
be possible. Or it might not.
III.
Scott Russell Sanders, in “To Eva, on your Marriage,”
writes about how his daughter’s birth made the “condition
of women” more personal to him. “Statistics on rape,
on poverty, on wife beating, on single mothers, on jobs and pay
for women, became disturbing facts about the society in which my
daughter would grow up” (p. 197).
His report is hardly novel. The belief that fathering daughters
compels a man to feminism is a common one. It’s exactly for
that reason that there’s so little skepticism of Dads and
Daughters. Everyone feels safe in assuming that they’re natural
feminist allies after their “Road to Damascus” experience
of being charged with a baby girl.
What makes Sanders different is another realization that he proffers,
how being heterosexual (in a way that might cause such a baby to
arrive), never compelled him in that same way (p. 198):
Even falling in love with the woman who would become your mother
had not inspired in me such troubled questioning, because she
was brilliant in science, in music, in writing and speech; she
was poised and confident; she was balanced on her own center.
She had found a husband with plenty of flaws, but one who would
never lay a hand on her except in love, never betray or desert
her. To my bedazzled eyes, this Ruth McClure seemed to have emerged
into womanhood unscathed. But you were just beginning. How would
you fare?
He writes similarly, here:
http://www.kenyonreview.org/interviews/sanders.php
I thought very little about gender as a child. I simply accepted
what was around me as the way things were. Then, when I went to
college, as I’ve written in “The Men We Carry in Our
Minds,” I ran into women who had radically different notions
about gender roles than anything I'd ever encountered. Trying
to figure out why these women were so angry started me on a long,
slow educational process. That process was accelerated through
my long courtship of Ruth McClure. Ours was an epistolary romance.
Living a thousand miles apart for five years before we got married,
we exchanged hundreds of letters. Then after our daughter Eva
was born, I became even more thoughtful about the fate of women.
What barriers would she run into? How would she learn what it
means to be female? Once our son Jesse was born, I had a burning
personal reason to reflect on how the world defines maleness,
as well. Then, when my father died, I realized that he had been
confined and even tortured by inherited notions of masculinity.
When I first recognized sex discrimination, I thought naively—as
I did with racism—that people of good will should be able
to talk about it openly and then grow beyond it. It shouldn't
be so hard to begin treating everybody fairly. Why shouldn't discrimination
go away in a few years? Now I realize the problems are more stubborn.
We carry a lot of evolutionary baggage, including some deep biases
linked to sex. Unless we acknowledge this biological inheritance,
we'll be trapped by it.
I am unsure of what he means by “evolutionary” and
“biological inheritance.” Creative types, or at least
those celebrated as such, can usually get away with being essentialists,
whether by design or by accident; the rest of us generally need
to learn to be precise with our speech, lest we be punished.
Still, the interview is certainly more nuanced than his chapter
in Fathering Daughters, where his wife was some shining
white beacon of effortless grace and perfection (not to mention
where he appears to think he deserves special credit for not being
a batterer). It seems that he either knew her rather poorly —
to be unaware of her own struggle against sexism — or that
some women are simply so wonderful that they couldn’t possibly
inspire a mate to take up feminism.
Where does one sign up to date them? I’m sure demand is through
the roof.
My intent isn’t to pick apart Scott Russell Sanders or his
relationship, or even his status as a feminist ally (indeed, his
chapter is one of the best in the anthology), but to use his admission
to investigate another common trope:
“Beware those men who use feminism to get laid.”
People seem confident that impregnating a woman and raising a resulting
female child can drive a man to become a feminist loyalist.
People seem equally confident (although not in Scott Russell Sanders
case) that regularly fucking a feminist woman can inspire a man
to take up the cause.
And yet thinking about feminism before those two steps
is grounds for suspicion?
That’s probably the time when it would do the most good!
IV.
I don’t deal very much with adjectives in my writing; I seldom
need or choose to describe people. That’s a copout in a way,
as it lets me sidestep a problem that the contributors in Fathering
Daughters didn’t seem to acknowledge they had: how do
you write about your daughter’s appearance without falling
into patriarchal patterns of speech? How do you counter the male
gaze when it’s your own?
What words are appropriate? What words invariably place a girl in
a police lineup of sorts, comparing and contrasting her with other
girls and standards of acceptability? And what of those other girls
— those spectral children, not your own — who are summoned
to that lineup, what responsibility does a proud father have to
them?
Gary Soto, in “Getting it Done,” describes his nearly
adult daughter as “five foot even, a hundred and six shapely
pounds, bright, kind and thoughtful, well read, and shy as a pony”
(p. 119).
Mark Pendergrast presents the daughters who would accuse him of
sexual abuse as being “exceptionally attractive, intelligent,
creative, caring young women” (p. 153).
What shape are those pounds? What shape, out of many, is the incarnation
of shape itself? Why does the physical always precede the internal,
as if excellence begets excellence?
The white writers seem to pay special attention to the “differences”
they find in their adopted and biracial (or even technically white)
children.
Philip Lopate writes of his daughter Lily’s delivery (p. 17):
The doctor passed the newborn to her mother for inspection.
She was (I may say objectively) very pretty: like a little Eskimo
or Mexican babe, with her mop of black hair and squiting eyes.
Something definitely Third World about her.
I can’t speak for the Inuit, but most Mexicans I’ve
met would disagree with his “Third World” assessment,
whether out of nationalist pride or anger that an American would
feel perfectly safe to make such a bizarre assertion about his child
out of the blue, anticipating that his readers would reward him
for it.
In “A Story for Ancient Moon,” Adam Schwartz tells
of his trip to China to meet his adoptive daughter (p. 21):
Her eyes stared calmly back at the camera, a look so clear and
knowing that she truly did have an ancient countenance. Her eyes
were exactly like the “ancient, glittering eyes” of
the Chinamen in Yeats’ poem “Lapis Lazuli.”
…
Li Li told me that the shape of Annie’s eyes was considered
very beautiful in China. I had actually heard the same comment
from other Chinese women. Before we left for China to adopt Annie,
I passed her picture around to my classes, and all the Chinese
students remarked upon the beautiful shape of her eyes. Li Li
explained that no woman in China would want to give up a daughter
with such rare and beautiful eyes, and that no doubt the birth
father gave the orders.
It is beyond me how such infinitely rare eyes could have been possessed
by all of Yeat’s “Chinamen.”
Samuel Shem (pen name of Stephen Bergman), also adopted a daughter
from China. His chapter is called “A Prayer for Connection.”
He writes (p. 39):
I sit in the balcony looking down at Katie in gymnastics class.
Up here, distanced, it is suddenly as if I’m watching a
group of five year olds whom I don’t know, Katie among them.
She is the only Asian. I notice her trim, lithe body with long
legs and not an ounce of fat, her coordination, her popping energy.
I bring her back to being ours for a second, remembering how,
after our being with her for the first several months, Caucasian
babies’ eyes seemed strange to us, too round, foreign. Our
world was china, Chinese, eyes shaped like teardrops on their
sides, pupils as dark as history. We became a family of color.
We felt the joy and encountered the racism.
His structural composition allows the perception that her thinness
and coordination logically stems from her Asian status, the topic
of each of the two sentences surrounding his brief mention of her
talent. Where does that leave the girls standing around her, clumsy
in comparison, lacking in ancient heritage? And what of Asian girls
who don’t fit that model of diminutive grace?
And joy? Good grief.
It’s easy for me to pick apart all of these descriptions.
After all, I’m not personally tasked with finding a solution
to this problem; I can easily avoid it if I like.
I fault the contributors of Fathering Daughters not for
failing to arrive at a solution, but for refusing to acknowledge
that there is a problem. It’s hypocritical to blame the advertising
industry for creating body image problems when a bunch of literary
greats can’t even talk about their own daughters without objectifying
them
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