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
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.{65}
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.{66} 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.{67}
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…{68}
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.{69} 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
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.){70} 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.{71} 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.{72} But in a study that came out the same year, published in
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.
