What Daughters Need to Know About Dad Psychology
It’s not you he hates, it’s all the things about himself that he’s been trained to hide away.
The women who take my Gender Studies course at Temple University often ask me to explain their fathers’ hypocrisy. After spending a semester surveying feminist theory, queer theory, and masculinity studies, they struggle to understand how it is possible for their dads to love them so much, support them whole-heartedly, but still parent in ways that reveal blatant sexism and misogyny. I offer those students — and all other daughters of dads — the following explanation:
Your father adores you. I know he often treats you in ways that feel demeaning, but that’s only because he has been taught to despise femininity. He can’t help but project unconscious scorn onto you. He’s spent so much of his life conforming to social expectations that he now struggles to love you in a way that validates your worth and recognizes your independence. He continues to hurt you because, like most men, his commitment to masculinity prevents him from addressing his own mental health challenges.
The first thing you need to understand is that the rules of male comradery require men to hate femininity. Each time a boy is called a little girl, it knocks him down a rung on the ladder of…
