Recently 15-year-old Ricarra Schock in Bangor,
Wisconsin posed with her equally young date for a homecoming dance photo taken
by her mom Sharee. Ricarra’s father Benjamin then jokingly stepped in and clasped
his arms around the boy in a similar pose for a pic which they later captioned,
“Whatever you do to my daughter, I will do to you.”
Funny, right? Not if you are a humorless
feminist who believes protective fathers shouldn’t stifle their daughters’
sexual autonomy.
The Shocks’ photo subsequently went viral,
racking up nearly four million views on Imgur and receiving quite a bit of
good-humored media attention. Buzzfeed, for example, found it “hilarious.” Sharee explained, “We hope that above
anything else this picture shows the love and protective nature of a dad with
his little girl, but in a playful and not-so intimidating manner.” Even
Ricarra’s date appreciated the joke.
Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon was not amused. “Who wants to break it to dads that their
teenage daughters are not their property?” she asked. “I’m sorry, does
a girl get a vote in what happens in her romantic life? It’s called
agency. It’s called bodily autonomy.”
Someone needs to break it to Ms. Williams
that it isn’t a matter of treating daughters like property. It’s simply a
matter of protecting your child – and a 15-year-old is still a child – from
potential harm or the life-changing consequences of making an unwise choice,
which teenagers have been known to do. It’s sad that this even needs
explaining.
At least Williams understands, or at least
pays lip service to, the notion that fathers are supposed to protect and love
their children, and to guide them to become adults with the maturity to make
their own decisions. But she couldn’t let the phrase “what you do to my
daughter” go, because it “implies that what happens in dating is something that
is done to girls, who are mere passive recipients. It depicts boys as
inherently predatory — and even if it’s in a jokey way, that’s insulting
to them too.”
Ms. Williams’ beef is not so much with the
Schock family. She concedes that the “Overprotective Dad trope is a
timeless punchline” and that “not every moment of joshing around is an act of
oppression by the patriarchy.” And that is where she should have let it lie, but
she couldn’t help herself; she had to “step in to play Humorless Feminist Mom
to the Hands Off My Daughter Industrial Complex.”
Her complaint is primarily with the media,
which she castigated for treating it as “cute when a father steps in to police
a girl’s private life,” and for reinforcing and legitimizing “the old message
that a girls’ sexuality is somehow a negotiation between her father and her
boyfriend.” She found it “creepy and gross” that the media would endorse “the
notion that adolescent female sexuality is something to be guarded by daddy
from outside invaders.”
In fact, adolescent female sexuality should be guarded – the alternative is
irresponsibly to allow a 15-year-old girl potentially to find herself in a
situation for which she may not be mentally, emotionally, morally, or
physically prepared (the same goes for a 15-year-old boy, but we’re focusing on
daughters). How does that square with Williams’ acknowledgement that fathers
should guard and guide their children?
Williams herself notes that the girl in
question is 15 years old. Fifteen –
the same age as her own daughter. Would she allow her own adolescent daughter
unfettered “bodily autonomy” and consider that to be good parenting? Is she
truly concerned about what’s best for her daughter, or is she willing to risk her
child paying for the mother’s unrealistic ideological ideal?
A father’s protectiveness toward his daughter
is grounded in love, not ownership, and it is not based on the assumption that boys
are inherently predatory. It is based on the wise understanding that his daughter’s
sexuality is not a matter to be left to teenage impetuousness and surging hormones.
Pretending that teens can and should be trusted to make unsupervised decisions
about their “bodily autonomy” could very well result in the girl’s emotional distress
or possibly worse: sexual assault or an unwanted pregnancy.
I have three daughters myself, all too young
to date. But when that time comes, you can bet that I will not blithely and
irresponsibly send them on their bodily autonomous way. I will raise them to
make smart, safe choices for themselves, but I will also be there to protect
them from youthful naiveté, impulsiveness, and choices they may regret – for their
sake, not mine, and not because they are my property, but because I am their
father.
From Acculturated, 10/23/15
