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Authors: Kerry Cohen
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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
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
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