Fathers have their own set of challenges.
Chapter 5
DADDY ISSUES
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.{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 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.){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.