How Fathers Matter
I’ve spent my life trying to replace my dad who had nothing to give me, who never even tried.
Sarah, now in her late twenties, has slept with seventeen or eighteen guys, all in about five years. Three-quarters of them were one-night stands, and she can’t remember all the names or what order they came in. One was a professor in the college she attended. Three or four of the guys were actual relationships that lasted a year or more. Sarah didn’t have sex until she was twenty-one which is later than the average for girls (which is seventeen). In high school she was into sports and schoolwork and not so much into boys. She did have a boyfriend her senior year—but she believes she messed that up when she started looking to her best friend, a girl, for emotional fulfillment instead of him. All of this sounds perfectly normal.
But then, Sarah’s best friend had sex with Sarah’s father. From then on, everything changed. She said, “I like to blame my father and my shitty genes for my promiscuity, but I know this is just an excuse.” True, but her father’s behavior was also a reason. Sarah has more recently been in therapy because, twelve years after the incident between her friend and father, she still finds that her depression is uncontrollable.
Breanna had a military dad, and his job required him to travel overseas for the majority of her childhood. When she was nine years old, he left again for a one-year tour of duty overseas. A friend’s father was known for taking the neighborhood children on camping trips, with and without their parents, and Breanna’s mother thought it was a nice gesture, especially since her father was gone. It was on that camping trip that she says she learned about her body and her friend’s father’s body when he molested her. Her father returned several months later only to tell her mother that he wanted a divorce. The two events, both terrible disappointments and betrayals for Breanna, led her down a desperate path to feel loved by a man.
Stories like Breanna’s, and to some extent Sarah’s, are the stories we expect when looking for narratives behind loose-girl behavior. We expect loose girls to have problems with their fathers. Why? Well, the assumption is that a girl who seeks attention in men has daddy issues.
A number of readers have asked me whether I’ve found that the majority of girls who contact me have absent fathers (I haven’t). Google the words girls, promiscuity, and reasons, though, and you will find many articles and blogs noting that the reason girls are promiscuous is that their fathers were absent or otherwise unavailable. Fathers don’t give girls what they need. They pull away when a girl hits puberty, perhaps frightened of the girl’s emergent sexuality or put off by their sudden attitudes. Or they left long ago, a shadow in the girl’s life. We assume that girls look for that elusive father figure in other men.
As one preacher writes in his blog:
They will become teen girls and start looking outside the home for what they cannot find inside the home. They will turn to peer boys to meet their unmet need for affection, attention and love…These girls are often abused by boyfriends. This changes their life. And more than 90 percent of all teen girls who get pregnant, report that they did not have a close, loving relationship with their father.1
I searched and searched for the source of his statistic that 90 percent of teen girls who get pregnant didn’t have loving relationships with their fathers, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. This type of lack of evidence crops up repeatedly in discussions of daddy-daughter issues. I don’t doubt that it can be a part of the picture, but I fear we tend toward giving fathers too much responsibility for their daughters’ sexual lives.
A communications professor wrote in an article on AskMen.com that girls with “daddy issues” exhibit sexual aggressiveness, excessive flirting, and clinginess.2 Here lies the issue that we’ve discussed in previous chapters: cultural assumptions weigh down the terms he uses. Girls who want sex are “aggressive,” and girls who want more than sex are “clingy.” Would we say that about boys? But what’s key here is that he provided no real evidence that girls with daddy issues possess these traits. It’s just another cultural assumption.
A psychologist who devotes much of her career to actively preventing same-sex marriage writes on her own website (syndicated on a Catholic organization’s website):
When a girl doesn’t have a father to fill that role she’s more likely to become promiscuous in a misguided attempt to satisfy her inborn hunger for male attention and validation.3
Again, the author provides no source material as evidence, and her comment is entirely presumptuous. Yet another psychologist writes:
Perhaps the arena in which the most painful process of learning how to deal with the early lack of a father is played out is in that of relationships. If a girl has not been assured of her value as a woman by that early relationship with the father, she finds it difficult to relate to men precisely because she may often unconsciously seek to find that recognition in the eyes of the beloved… and this may lead her down an early path of promiscuity…4
Keep looking, and you will find the same sentiment again and again. The actress Megan Fox said that “girls are awful” because they all have daddy issues.5 And, still, where is the evidence?
The truth is, the idea that promiscuous girls have daddy issues comes directly from Sigmund Freud. He put forth the Oedipal complex, which theorizes that boys unconsciously want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. Carl Jung then coined the Electra complex, which is the psychosexual theory that girls develop a sexual attachment to their fathers. They carry this attachment into adulthood, always searching to replace their fathers with other men.
The Electra complex has made its way into plenty of literature—most notably in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” We see it in self-help books and movies and television shows. In the second season of Tough Love, for example, the matchmaker Steve Ward had the women explore their daddy issues by writing letters to their fathers. The message here is that until the women resolve their issues with their fathers, they won’t be able to have healthy relationships with men. Almost all the “slutty” girls on television have absentee fathers—Serena on Gossip Girl, Tyra on Friday Night Lights, Rayanne on My So-Called Life. Girls are abandoned by their fathers and look to replace them with men.
When we finally look more closely at the research, we find that one of the largest predictors of teenage pregnancy and early intercourse is indeed a single-parent home, and most of those homes, of course, are fatherless. (Single-parent households are also correlated with all sorts of risky behavior for children, including alcohol and drug use.)6 There is also some evidence that fatherless households, or households with marital strife, particularly when the father withdraws, are correlated with earlier puberty, but only in higher-income households.7 The assumption is that the presence of fathers provides a sort of protection against growing up too quickly, and without that presence, girls might be hardwired to go out and find themselves a protective mate, although that doesn’t account for why this seems to only hold true in higher-income families.
A 2003 study was able to find evidence of increased early sexual behavior and teen pregnancy in a group of 242 U.S. teen girls without fathers living at home, but not other behavioral problems, which suggested a causal relationship between absent fathers and sexual behavior. In the same study, 520 New Zealand girls did not show this individualized behavior increase; rather, many behavioral problems increased.8 But in a study that came out the same year, published in Child Development, researchers found that boys and girls living in two-parent homes with irritable, impulsive fathers had more behavioral problems than those living with just their mothers.9 So, although there does seem to be some evidence that fatherless girls will become more sexual, there’s also the suggestion that those with “bad” fathers wind up with behavioral problems.
I certainly don’t want to suggest that fathers don’t ever influence their daughters regarding sex and relationships, because they likely do. Exactly how, though, is more of a mystery. There are plenty of studies that reveal some sort of correlation between sexual behavior and absent fathers. The problem is that most of what we find seems informed by cultural ideals, which makes this sort of research hard to wade through. For instance, many studies claim that girls are more likely to be promiscuous, but then those studies don’t define promiscuity. Do they simply mean that girls seek out more sex? Or do they mean that girls seek more sex that will make them feel bad? None of these studies distinguish the two. They say girls are sexually active, as though that by itself means something negative to be avoided.
Likewise, it’s consistently not clear whether the teenage girls in such studies engage in riskier behaviors because there is a father missing or simply because one of their primary caregivers is missing. One study, performed by a researcher who was concerned with the ways prior research was often used to argue against same-sex marriage, looked more closely at the dynamics in a range of families and found that the gender of parents in child-parent relationships has minor significance when it comes to children’s psychological adjustment and social success.
Because of these various biases, we can’t assume that absent fathers by themselves lead to loose-girl behavior. To say so oversimplifies a complex, culturally cued issue. Certainly, I’ve found this in my own interviews with various girls. Loose girls—girls who act out sexually in ways that are self-harming—come from single mothers, single fathers, intact families, happy homes, and even experiences of sexual abuse and incest. Whatever type of home you can imagine, loose girls grow up there. All it takes is for a girl to have some sense that she isn’t good enough, isn’t lovable, isn’t right. And that is too easy for a girl to feel when every image reflected to her reminds her that she will never be as pretty as she should, when every message she’s given about who she must be to be worthwhile is confusing, ambiguous, and contradictory to the others.
Still, fathers matter to girls, and perhaps it goes without saying that when fathers are absent or abusive or otherwise not present and loving, girls will probably feel they aren’t good enough, aren’t lovable, and so on. Put a different way, a girl’s relationship with her parents—whomever and how many of them there are—matters. And if there’s a father in the picture, that father can do things to better ensure that his daughter won’t engage in self-harming promiscuity.
Chantal lives in a single-father household, which is how I spent my adolescent years as well. She was close with her father, who was concerned that Chantal would miss having a mother in her life. He did everything with her and her younger brother. He took them camping, to baseball games, to festivals and on road trips. He didn’t date, which upset Chantal. She wanted him to find a partner, to have someone he could share with. When I pressed her, she admitted what she really wanted was for him to stop sharing with her. He spent too much time with her, she said, and she wished he would focus on someone else. There wasn’t anything inappropriate going on; he just didn’t seem to have much of a life beyond his kids and his work, and that frustrated her. “So many of my friends complain that their dads are never around,” she said. “I’d love it if my dad were never around. He’s a loser.”
Chantal is seventeen and has had sex with fourteen guys. When I asked what it is she wants, she said, “Something different. I just want some way out.” She began to cry. “I’m scared that I’ll never get away from him. It’s like he needs me or something. It’s gross.”
Chantal’s relationship with her father—though close and loving—suffocates her. Her story is an example of how the Electra complex isn’t solely responsible for girls using sex to fill something inside. It’s also an example of how ineffectual a father can sometimes be when he is simply trying to love his daughter. In Chantal’s case, she felt her father was too close. As she said, it felt “gross.”
In the single-father household I grew up in, my father often commented on women in my presence in ways that taught me what made girls and women desirable. He noted when women on television were pretty. He told me my friend had a cute body. He said he liked to take walks past cheerleader practice at the high school across the street from our home, and he encouraged me to try out for cheerleading, too. He also touched his girlfriend’s ass in front of me or made sexual noises when he looked at her body.
My father was the main man I turned to in order to understand the male species. I looked to him for a sense of what men liked in women. My father’s immense inappropriateness showed me that men liked girls who were pretty and sexy. He also let me know that men preferred girls who didn’t make waves, who didn’t need too much. Meanwhile, I needed so much that he wasn’t giving me. Because my mother was gone, I needed him to give me emotional attention. I needed him to care about my feelings, to guide me down a positive path. I needed him to listen—really listen—to what I had to say, to not demean my feelings, and to show interest in what I did.
Fathers don’t need to be physically absent to abandon their daughters. There are many ways to leave. Many fathers worry about how to negotiate boundaries—particularly regarding physical contact—with their sexually blossoming daughters, but they often set up bigger boundaries than necessary. Some physically withdraw, unwilling to provide affection anymore. Others become more controlling with their daughters. Both reactions set a girl up to feel left out, misunderstood, and treated unfairly.
Many fathers also make the mistake of stepping away from their daughters because their daughters pull away from them first or because they suddenly don’t understand who this angry, easily hurt girl is. For many fathers—my own included—girls are overwhelming creatures, so different from boys. Many fathers don’t know how to handle them.
My sister’s room and my room were down a long hallway, and I remember my father racing past that hallway. It seemed to us like he didn’t want to know what was down that hall. He was terrified of us. We exasperated him. Two teenage girls! He had grown up with brothers and didn’t have a clue as to how to deal with our outbursts, our needs, and our sadness.
In these situations, though, fathers must find ways to do the opposite. They need to actively engage their daughters, to ask them about their interests, their hopes, and their feelings. They must find ways to push past the discomfort and awkwardness that can at times accompany such interactions. Daughters need their fathers. They need every possible person who might love them—who might care about how they feel or might care what happens to them—to actively show them that they do.
Fathers are likewise in an excellent position to teach their girls about the various ways our culture degrades and disrespects females. They can clarify that they will not treat women that way and that they won’t stand for people treating their daughters that way either. They can address how girls are expected to look good rather than do good. They can encourage them to get involved in something that isn’t about what boys want from them, and they can support their daughters’ talents in sports, arts, and intellectual pursuits.
At the same time, they can be understanding that many of their daughters will want to be attractive to boys, will concern themselves with “typical” girl interests, such as clothes and makeup. They can both be careful to not judge those interests and make clear that what makes their daughters special in the world is who they are, not what they look like. This is a hard one, because every last message girls get from mainstream culture suggests the opposite. Every last message tells girls that they are the sum of their physical parts, that they can tell whether they matter in the world by whether boys like them. Fathers are in a unique position to show them that men can feel otherwise, that girls can be wholly loved simply by being themselves.
An odd response to this effort, though, is the purity ball, which we explored briefly in chapter 3. Purity balls are Christian ceremonies in which girls pledge their virginity to their fathers and fathers vow to protect their daughters’ chastity. Girls wear white gowns, fathers wear tuxes, and they slow dance after their vows. But the reasoning behind the creation of these ceremonies might not be what you expect. In a TLC special about them, Randy Wilson of Generation of Light, the Christian organization that founded purity balls, noted that all girls have the same questions: “Am I beautiful? Am I worth pursuing?” He said that fathers needed to answer this question for them so they didn’t go out into the world to find out from someone else.10 While I can get behind the idea that fathers need to be an active part of their daughter’s self-esteem, this idea that girls need to feel beautiful—and therefore worth pursuing—distresses me. If fathers focus on their daughter’s appearance, just like the rest of the world is already doing, they miss out on the chance to teach their daughters that they are worth pursuing for much better reasons.
Worse, the purity balls drop all the control over who a girl can be as a sexual creature into fathers’ laps—into men’s laps. The message is this: “Men know what’s best for you. Your father decides who you can be sexually.” It would make much more sense to me to have mothers and daughters in such ceremonies, where mothers pledge to share their wisdom and guidance regarding sex, and where daughters vow to communicate with their mothers about their sexual exploration.
Janice’s story is a good example that shows how purity balls, and the intention behind them, miss the mark on what girls need from their fathers. Her father died from cancer when she was eleven, just as she was in the throes of puberty. She has many positive memories of him comforting her when she was scared, playing games with her, and reading to her at bedtime. Janice’s mother was devastated after his death, and Janice remembers those first few years as grief stricken and painful. Her mother was a mess, barely capable of taking care of Janice and her younger brother. But over time, the grief softened, and their household felt less dreary. That is when Janice began to find boys. Her mother started dating again just as Janice did, too, and her mother fell immediately for a man whom Janice didn’t get along with. Soon, he became her stepfather, which only made Janice feel lonelier. He was nothing like her father, and Janice didn’t understand why her mother would choose him. Janice started hooking up with boys, which was not really satisfying but gave her something to look forward to. She experienced a sort of high, she told me, when a boy turned his eyes to her body and she knew she had some sort of control over him. She loved the feeling of connection, of her body pressed against someone else’s, the sense of safety, of solidity. A boy’s presence felt like the opposite of having lost her dad. Janice did not want a relationship with any of them. She only wanted those brief moments of connection.
The problem was that she felt awful afterward. Every time they went their separate ways, Janice felt the familiar pain of abandonment. In other words, she craved a momentary sense of intimacy, much like the intimacy she was now missing from her father, but she didn’t want the long-term responsibility of a relationship with some boy. Add to this that the boys at her school began to talk, and soon she became known as a girl who would put out.
In college, Janice finally had a chance to start over, but the pain she held in her heart about her father never went away. She felt desperately confused. She still had never had a boyfriend, and she wasn’t sure she could ever trust a boy to not leave her, especially after the way they treated her in high school.
Janice’s story is an example of how complicated father issues can be. They are rarely straightforward. For Janice, so many issues were at play. The first, of course, is that she lost her father and was left to struggle with her grief in a way for which no one was to blame. Then Janice faced cultural expectations at her high school about her sexual behavior. Over time, this too affected who she would wind up as in relation to boys. Finally, there is the fact that her mother remarried a man with whom Janice felt no connection. Those three wounds entangled themselves inside Janice’s experience of herself as a sexual person and as a person who could have a relationship.
Would a purity ball have saved Janice? The question is outrageous enough to reveal how impotent such a solution is for most people. Most girls don’t live the fairy-tale lives such a ceremony promises. They lose people, their parents divorce, they are sexually abused, they are made fun of and excluded. When they grow up, men rarely arrive on white horses, like they did for Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Men rarely show up at the father’s door and offer to take over caring for the father’s daughter. And why would we want that for our girls anyway? Why aim to treat our girls like helpless princesses when they can instead relish their competence as surgeons, welders, artists, scientists, and teachers? When they can do something worthwhile in the world, not just look good on someone’s arm?
Such an approach has the power to keep our daughters safe from all sorts of self-harming behavior, not just promiscuity. In the next chapter, we look at these other means of self-harm.