Jesse at Pandagon writes an amazing piece on father’s day — and conservatives do us all a serious disservice by defining a “father’s role” along traditional gender lines. I believe that parents are important — fathers are important, and mothers are important. But as Jesse writes, the measure of a good father isn’t how well he fits a traditional “masculine” ideal. A good father isn’t measured by his simple presence, or his ability to bring home a paycheck. It’s how well he parents.
The Independent Women’s Forum declares that women don’t need independence, they need princes. Again, whose fault is all of this? Feminists. Feminists were the ones who declared that there was more to female sexuality than baby production, who declared that women were more than mothers. And that, in the end, is the key to all this – women’s empowerment made the specter of fatherhood more challenging, but not in a bad way. It simply meant that the father wasn’t a paycheck with a disciplinarian’s aura around him, but instead that he and his wife/the mother would have to share in previously (and needlessly) gendered responsibilities. Fatherhood has been and will continue to be redefined – but rather than asking fathers to bow out, it’s demanding more of fathers. You can teach little Timmy how to throw a ball, but you also have to be willing to listen to him when he’s having problems, to cook for him, to care for him. The “feminist” challenge isn’t to destroy any sense of masculinity, but to have men realize that whatever masculinity means, it has to mean taking a full sense of responsibility for your children.
From someone who learned what a father is through not having one, I say to any conservative who believes this: you are destroying everything fatherhood is supposed to mean.
Read the whole thing. And check out the comments, too. Incredibly powerful. This one in particular got me:
My father committed suicide when I was two, unfortnately I found him dead.
My mother, an immigrant, raised my sister, my brother and I alone (with the help of the community we lived in and Social Security) until I was six, when she married an abusive asshole who liked to beat her and us.
Tonight my son, ten, asked if he could take me to McDonalds for dinner on Father’s Day. He had thirteen dollars he’d somehow saved from his birthday two weeks ago…
Tonight I had the best meal I’ve ever had and I’m a vegan.
I’m going to cry for years thinking about the joy in my son’s eyes when I said I would love McDonalds, and when he paid for his Dad’s supper. My supper.
Nothing means more to me than the love that little boy has for HIS Dad. Father’s Day?
It’s a wonderful thing.