#sudfemdad

[sudfemdad]

You Are Supposed to Take Care of Your Kids

Image source: jimrome.com

When a disgraced or unpopular athlete tries to improve his image by painting himself as a loving and caring father, my favorite sports radio show host Jim Rome is always unimpressed and always says the same thing: "You are supposed to take care of your kids!"

I sometimes hear Rome's voice in my head when people (especially people who don't know me) tell me I'm a great dad. I don't feel like there's anything exceptional about what I do: I feed my daughter, I play with her, I read to her, I change her diaper, I sing to her, I watch Sesame Street with her, and I post way too many pictures of her on Facebook. To me, this is just stuff that parents do. It doesn't make me a great parent; it just makes me a parent.

Now, I don't want to indulge in false modesty. Raising a healthy and happy child is something to be proud of, and I am proud. But I can't help feeling a little like a kid in tee ball being awarded a participation trophy when I receive gushing praise for stuff I think is just parenting 101. 

What's more, I can't help noticing that mothers -- my own wife included -- don't seem to be getting the same treatment. The things for which I get this attention rarely seem to warrant even the raising of an eyebrow when a mother does them. When was the last time you saw someone stop a mother in the grocery store to tell her what a great job she's doing with her kid?

I'm not alone in this. Last summer, Chaunie Brusie, in a piece entitled "My Husband is Not a Hero for Taking Care of our Kids", asked, "Do we have to make husbands out to be heroes for being active participants in their own children's lives?" Rethink Pink's blog recently asked its readers to "consider what we are teaching our girls when they see their fathers praised for the same tasks their mothers are ignored for". I feel pretty confident, therefore, in saying I'm not making this up. I think that we as a culture have become so used to the distant and uninvolved father that we have created a double standard for what constitutes praiseworthy parenting.

Now, uninvolved fathers are a very real and growing problem in America, so we do, of course, need to be in the business of praising and encouraging fathers. But for the sake of our girls, we need to find a way to do that without creating a double standard. I don't want my daughter to grow up in a world that showers men with praise but then barely notices her own efforts.

So what do we do? As usual, I don't have an ultimate answer, but I suspect giving moms a little more credit might be a good place to start. If we must praise parents, let's praise them all.

Thanks for reading.

[sudfemdad]

SudFemDad is Now on Medium

You can now find most of the writing I do here on Suddenly Feminist Dad also on Medium at https://medium.com/@SudFemDad. If you haven't experienced Medium for yourself yet, I highly recommend it. There's a lot of great stuff to read.

But start with my stuff, of course.

Thanks for reading.

[sudfemdad]

Figure of Speech Friday I

Friend Zone (n, v)

Top UrbanDictionary.com definition:

What you attain after you fail to impress a woman you're attracted to. Usually initiated by the woman saying, "You're such a good friend". Usually associated with long days of suffering and watching your love interest hop from one bad relationship to another. Verb tense is "Friend-ed".

Why we should stop using it:

This first edition of FoSF is an easy one, because Nice Guys of OKCupid has covered this figure of speech pretty extensively. Here's a snippet:

The “friendzone” is a term used, particularly by “nice guys”, to refer to women who don’t want to have sex with them. It’s based on their idea that every relationship with women has its ultimate goal as having sex with them and you move up to the “next level” - from acquaintance to friend to partner - by doing enough nice things for them, buying them gifts, spending time with them etc. Therefore, when a woman isn’t interested in a relationship with them even though they feel they’ve done all the right things, they feel they’ve been somehow cheated out of something and done a disservice.

They can’t see being a friend as a good thing, so they refer to it as being “friendzoned” in a negative context. They treat the whole time they spent with the woman as a waste.

Needless to say, the whole theory is sexist, misogynist and dehumanises women. Anybody who uses the term seriously is an idiot.

So you've been nice, and helpful, and generous to her, and now she wants to be friends with you? You poor thing.

There's really no way to use this figure of speech without suggesting that a woman's friendship has no value of its own except as a stepping stone toward the goal of a sexual relationship with her. That's called dehumanization, and it should be pretty obvious why it's a bad thing.

The other problem with complaining about being in the "friend zone" is that you are imagining a woman as a game that you win if you score enough points. "I did X,Y, and Z for her and I've been nice to her all this time -- why won't she date me?"

Maybe because she just doesn't want to. Maybe because you never asked (a thing most "friend zone" denizens seem to have in common in my experience is that they expect to be offered a relationship without ever articulating their interest). In any case, nothing you did -- and nothing you can do -- entitles you to her affections. No matter how nice you were, you have no right to feel that you are being denied something that is rightfully yours.

Men of the future, if you ever feel that my daughter has put you in the "friend zone", consider the following possibilities: (1) that she actually does want to be your friend, which you should be happy about because my daughter is awesome and would be an awesome friend, or (2) that my daughter is trying, as nicely as possible, to drop you a hint that she is repulsed by you and that you don't have a chance. As one visitor to Nice Guys of OKCupid once put it, sometimes it's "more like the ugh not this guy again zone".

Thanks for reading.

[sudfemdad]

Preview: Figure of Speech Friday

If you know me personally (and, if you're reading my blog only a week into its existence, you probably do), then you've probably heard my rant that so many young people today don't read, and therefore don't really understand their own language. These young people grow up into adults who say things like "for all intensive purposes".

It occurs to me that some of this sexist culture I keep complaining about is probably being kept alive unintentionally by these people who genuinely don't understand what they are saying. With this in mind, I'll be starting "Figure of Speech Fridays" this coming Friday. It won't happen every Friday; I'm shooting for, say, two Fridays a month.

For every FoSF, I'll select one figure of speech that I think is sexist and explain what people who use it are actually saying and why I think they should stop using it.

Most of my posts on SudFemDad to this point have followed a pretty clear model: Hey, it turns out that this thing I've been seeing/saying/doing my whole life is actually sexist and contributes to a sexist culture I don't want my daughter to grow up in, but I'm not entirely sure what to do about it. If it sounds to you like FoSF is going to be a departure from this model, you're right. But I promise it will only come a couple times a month.

Thanks for reading.

[sudfemdad]

Getting Things Started

I never gave much thought to feminism before I became the father of a girl.

Sure, I believed in equal rights for women and I did my best to treat women with as much respect as I treated men, but I didn't really see what all the feminist fuss was about. For all I could tell, the world (or at least the enlightened, educated Western part of it I inhabited) seemed to have the gender equality thing mostly worked out. Sure, the entertainment industry, the internet, the rural American South, and much of organized religion were still a little behind the curve, but I generally believed my world was well on its way to the post-misogyny era.

But then I was suddenly saddled with the responsibility of raising a girl. As I began to take to heart my responsibility of teaching this girl that she is as capable and as valuable as any boy, I began to see myself and my world in a different light.

I began to notice subtle messages being sent about women by the TV shows and movies I watch, the music I listen to and play, the internet company i keep, the video games I play, and the books I read. Even worse, I began to notice I was sending some of these messages myself (as I observed here in my old martial arts blog).

So what's a suddenly feminist, recovering sexist dad to do in a decidedly un-feminist world? To be honest, I don't know. But I do know that there's a vibrant e-conversation about gender playing out on the internet, and I'd like to join in. So here I am.

Things to expect from Suddenly Feminist Dad:

Dry, pedantic writing

More questions than answers

Occasional observations about how cute and/or awesome my daughter is

Lots of borrowing from and linking to other bloggers and internet writers

Opinions that change over time (no matter how strong they appear to be when I first write them)

Things NOT to expect from Suddenly Feminist Dad:

Endorsement of particular political candidates or pieces of legislation

Parenting advice (let's not pretend I know what I'm doing)

I hope there are other dads out there like me who might be interested in reading a blog like this, and women who might be interested in hearing what a dad like me has to say. I'm planning on starting up a Suddenly Feminist Dad Twitter soon; I'll have the information about that up as soon as it's ready.

Thanks for reading.