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.{74} 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.
