Any Man Can:Â Race, misogyny, familial ties, and the issue with idealizing father-daughter relationships
It was never about recognizing that misogyny came from âevery manâ, just about âany man.â The fact that it can come in various forms and ways from any man is enough. For it to be concerning, it doesnât have to be âevery manâ, the fact that it can be âany manâ is concerning enough.
Itâs weird to me that there was so much emphasis on father-daughter relationships in media and real life to the point that so many mothers and mother-daughter relationships were erased or left out. It somehow doesnât matter to people that the mother did 9 months of labor making and delivering a child in agony, some becoming permanently disabled in the process, took care of and nursed and raised the child with her blood and sweat in real life. All it took was the child being female for everyone to try to push down the mother and pretend like the father was the maker, which was not only insulting but just...hm
Iâm also making clear that Iâm not trying to say something like âall mothers good, all dads badâ, no. I recognize that in many cases, there are good fathers. My issue is that the line for being a âgood fatherâ is relatively low compared to the line for being a âgood motherâ, and a father doing a normal thing (like paying attention to his kids in the slightest) is often treated with greater approval and exaggerated âstatus-givingâ than if a mother does much more hard work.
Nothing wrong with being close to your father but. It used to depress me, seeing all this media and societal pandering that âfathers are the biggest supporters in a girlâs lifeâ or âdads are their daughtersâ best friendsâ because I wasnât close to my dad and I was heavily attached to my mom, and I wish my mother had that recognition - for being my supporter, my best friend. And it mostly stemmed from the fact that I knew that in reality, no girl I knew in my community actually had a good relationship with their dad, or at least, not one that superseded the slightly better relationships they had with their mothers (even if those werenât too good on their own for some people either). Even the âbest father-daughterâ relationships was a basis of pure transaction, not unconditional love. Itâs always not the horrific physically abusive relationship either, thank goodness. Itâs just. dehumanizing in other ways.
Thereâs a difference between âone or two women have good father-daughter relationshipsâ and âall women must be close to their fathers because women have to be some manâs property, even if itâs not sexually relatedâ and itâs disgusting because you find this in both the East and West. The idealization of fathers and the dehumanization of mothers. The same girls who idealize their fathers at their expense of their mothers for no other reason than the public perception that itâs âbetterâ end up being wives to men like their fathers and then realizing how it was like to be treated as a mother, a woman.
Even when youâre not married, youâre not actually allowed to be anything to your dad other than a very specific kind of woman, nor does your dad actually, truly defend you if you âgo astrayâ. I still remember the time a security guard looked at my 13-year old sister (who was fully-covered in pants and a long-sleeved shirt) exactly once, and my dad noticed. He could have glared at the security guard. He could have told him not to look at her. He could have just moved the car or stayed quiet. He could have asked my sister how she felt. But instead, he hissed to my sister that if she wasnât wearing a headscarf and abaya the next time we go out, heâd break her legs.
He calls my mother an idiot routinely, even though he is the reason she left her career and studies - to take care of us because he sure as hell couldnât. He spends all day on his political talkshows as she is forced to cook, clean, take care of the kids, and then he makes fun of her for not knowing much. For destroying her life.
He screams at the top of his lungs if my sisters and I so much as disagree with him over simple things.
He constantly denies anything we accuse of his family, even when our cousins and uncles were abusive to us.
My mother tells us weâre lucky to have him because at least he provides for us. At least he didnât get married to someone else.Â
My mother idealizes her own father over her mother, but never mentions how her father got her married to this abusive man, and how her older sister was married as a child and nearly died in childbirth, and my âpreciousâ maternal grandfather didnât do jackshit to help her. My mother realizes that sheâs become the woman she looked down on, and now thereâs no other way to reconcile with this horrific fact other than continue to idealize and apologize for men. Excuse my dad, excuse her dad, excuse everyone elseâs men.
One of my friendsâ father constantly yells at their wife for giving him 4 daughters and threatens to marry another, while another already had a secret second wife in another country. All the women in my community were once qualified doctors, engineers, lawyers and accountants, now forced to sit or slave away at homes and develop depression, diabetes, fibroids, even cancer because of difficult births, bad conditions, drug abuse from their husbands. Their families donât support them to go work or study, and the place we lived forbade women of specific backgrounds and races to work anyways.Â
Some girls in my age group didnât even get to go abroad to study in university (as the country we lived in didnât allow to study in local universities). Their families took them back to Pakistan to get married, and theyâd get some admission at a small university there while their husbands and brothers got to go abroad, travel, and later on drag their wives with them as little house slaves. I consider myself extremely blessed that my parents let me study in the West. I consider myself extremely blessed that I donât have brothers or a husband.
If thatâs not bad enough, other women are brainwashed into supporting misogyny and abuse against girls. They hold their little religious circles or tea parties bashing so-and-soâs daughter for getting divorced and not even mentioning that the husband was abusive. The man or boy is never at fault. Such women - gossiping about and looking down at other women- disgust me too.Â
Every conversation about a woman or girls somehow ends up making her seem like a failure or a villain. Every conversation about a man or boy has to end up praising him in some way or overlooking his flaws.
Itâs one of the reasons why I distrust men and boys in general. Why I donât forgive easily. Why I donât partake in so much woman-bashing even if the woman has made a mistake. In my experience, there is nothing more unforgivable than the horrible things men enforce and perpetuate in society. The way they make everything revolve around entirely them. The way they have for centuries.
Iâm not talking about your âcute, progressiveâ dad with sandals and âyou can wear anything you like, dear!â exception. Iâm talking about the majority of men and boys that I have seen in my life. Fuck them. Fuck the ones who are strangers and fuck the ones in my family, equally. Iâm done believing that I can pick out specific men and boys who are good and bad, that whatever the males in my family are is probably better than âthose unnamed men outsideâ. Nearly none of them can be defended.Â
I wasnât surprised that when I came to live in the West again and made new friends, they had similar stories, despite how differently I had imagined things.
One of my friends, atheist, was abused by her grandfather and her father knew but said nothing. Another one of my friends, Mormon Christian, talked about modesty standards and how her father had once physically beat her so badly it left scars. And yet another one of my friends, who comes from an atheist African family, was sexually abused by her teacher. Another was disfigured by an acid attack from someone she had refused to marry. One of my best friends almost got roped into an arranged marriage with a misogynist in America, who planned to cut her off from family, friends and university so she could be his obedient housewife. Yeah, the âland of the freeâ also has its fair share of misogynists too.
What the leftists in the West trying to perpetuate misgoyny and pick and choose âwhoâ gets to do it fail to understand is that âMuslimâ men arenât better than âChristian menâ, and âatheist menâ are not better than any other men either. In general, American and European men and African men and Arab men and Desi men arenât different when it comes to their treatment and views of women. I donât fall for the fallacious arguments that one group thinks of women better than the other group, that one group of men is acceptable and another isnât. That itâs okay for one group of men to be misogynyists and not for the other. Misogyny is wrong, period. Itâs wrong for African and Desi men to abuse women and girls no matter their skin color or racial background, just as itâs wrong for any other man to abuse women and girls.Â
Back to family, I cannot in good conscious even think about the media pushing how âfather-daughter relationships are so pureâ when my dad and other peopleâs fathers just showed how men in the real world think. How girls like my friends, my sisters and I were trapped under men like this as the rest of the clueless world gushes about how men who become fathers are so good to and for women. Yes, Iâd still say that my father is a better man than some stranger men Iâve come across - that doesnât mean I defend what he does or thinks about other women and girls, and that doesnât mean I donât acknowledge that there are men and boys like him.
We always look for ways to justify at least some men or find a way to sympathize with them, and itâs depressing. I believe that nearly anytime we idealize a relationship with a man in it, we reflect this mentality so much.
âSure, most men are like that, but Muslim/Christian men donât - !â
âSure, you might mean men like that, but your father/husband is someone who protects you, heâs different-!â
âThis group of men canât do that, theyâre also oppressed-!â
Itâs why I believe you shouldnât hesitate to criticize a man who deserves to be criticized. Itâs why I believe you donât need to make convoluted reasons to defend a man or call out his crimes. Itâs why I believe in the rights and dignity of women and girls above all else, even if I donât agree with many girls either.
Iâm not saying women and girls are angels who do no wrong - far form it, unfortunately, so many women and girls either enable men and/or actively abuse other women and girls too.Â
If saying âmen and women should be equalâ means denying how much of an unfair edge men have held over us for years and erasing the sex-specific oppression and injustices that women and girls have had to face, I wonder if true equality is possible.
Iâm saying that regardless of how many women and girls you find who are toxic, nearly none of them will cause the wide-scale societal humiliation, horrors and subjugation that so many men and boys, as a class, have unleashed for generations. Itâs why the whole âwomen can be worse than menâ shtick does not at all make sense to me, given what Iâve seen. You will never find a woman who is allowed to have multiple husbands because sheâs not happy with the kids she had with a previous husband, you will never find a woman who became a dictator and ordered an army of women to rape and enslave men. You wonât find men gang-raped by groups of women and said groups of women let free. You wonât find a woman who threw acid in the face of a man who didnât want to marry her. You will never find a woman who has the legal authority to limit and cut down menâs education or healthcare. You do not see women trading off boys in marriage and expecting boys to pop out daughters, you do not see men and boys having their bodies ruined by childbirth and forced intercourse and the depression that results from losing your studies, your career, your life.
But you will find men and boys who can do nearly all of these things. In some cases, who have done all of these things to women and girls and continue to do it.
No, not every man does. But any man can. Thatâs the danger. And when they do, itâs even more dangerous.
I think if we want to confront the abhorrent sexism against girls and women, we need to be able to acknowledge that it comes from everywhere and, simultaneously, that men and boys perpetuating it makes it much worse.
