In his recently pub­lished book, Kayak Morn­ing, Roger Rosen­blatt writes:

The lit­er­a­ture involv­ing fathers and daugh­ters runs to nearly one thou­sand titles. I Googled. The Tem­pest. King Lear. Emma. The Mayor of Cast­er­bridge. Wash­ing­ton Square. Daugh­ters have a power over fathers, who are usu­ally por­trayed as aloof or mad. The father depends on his daugh­ter and he is often iso­lated with her – the two of them part­nered against the world. It is a good choice for writ­ers, this pair­ing. It may be the ideal male-female rela­tion­ship in that, with romance out of the pic­ture, the idea of father and daugh­ter has only to do with feel­ings and thoughts. Unal­loyed. Intel­li­gent. A girl may speak the truth to her father, who may speak the truth to her. He anchors her. She anchors him.

Rosenblatt’s book explores his grief at the untimely death of his own daugh­ter, Amy, and this pas­sage, in the form of a short-hand lit­er­ary analy­sis, mourns the rela­tion­ship he had with her – a rela­tion­ship that, for him, was about a kind of truth-telling that hap­pens between men and women when the pos­si­bil­ity of romance does not exist. Rosenblatt’s grief is his own, and I would not pre­sume to sug­gest that his rela­tion­ship with his daugh­ter was any­thing other than what he says it was. His asser­tion, how­ever, that the father-daughter pair­ing is a “good choice for writ­ers” because it allows us to deal with issues between the sexes solely in terms of feel­ings and thoughts, with­out the messi­ness of romance, gave me seri­ous pause. It’s not that I think he has mis­char­ac­ter­ized the father-daughter rela­tion­ships in the works that he cites – it’s been long enough since I read any of them that I sim­ply do not remem­ber – but because, in a male dom­i­nant cul­ture, and we still live in such a cul­ture whether we like it or not, the father-daughter rela­tion­ship is never about feel­ings and thoughts in the abstract. The daughter’s body and how she uses it – in sex, in mar­riage – and how that use reflects on the father’s body as a man, and on his rep­u­ta­tion and the rep­u­ta­tion of his fam­ily, is always already con­tested ground.

I doubt most peo­ple in the United States see the father-daughter rela­tion­ship explic­itly in these terms any more, though there are sub­cul­tures here – think, also, the Chris­t­ian insti­tu­tion of purity balls–where it is still a father’s duty to man­age his daughter’s sex­u­al­ity until she is appro­pri­ately married. In my own life, where fathers have been con­spic­u­ously absent, these atti­tudes have man­i­fested them­selves most obvi­ously in the assump­tions peo­ple make about my rela­tion­ship with my sis­ters. Or, more specif­i­cally, about what my rela­tion­ship with my sis­ters should have been when we were younger. I am think­ing specif­i­cally of how most peo­ple react when I tell them about the time when I was twenty-two and I walked in on my sis­ter, who is six years younger than I am and who should have been in school, in fla­grante delicto with her boyfriend. A fully detailed telling of the story is for another time, because it is funny. For now, but suf­fice it to say that when I finally found the boyfriend, he was hid­ing in my sister’s closet try­ing des­per­ately to dis­ap­pear behind the shirts and other hang­ing clothes he was pulling around him­self. It was very hard not to laugh at him, but I didn’t. I just sent him home, and I will never for­get the look of sur­prised relief and grat­i­tude on his face when he real­ized that I was not going to beat him up. He even asked me, “You mean you’re not going to beat me up?” When I said no, he said thank you and left.

Most peo­ple to whom I have told this story, and it doesn’t seem to mat­ter how old or young they are, have been as sur­prised as he was that I did not beat him up; and when I have asked them why – since the idea of beat­ing him up never even occurred to me – they always give the same answer. “She was your lit­tle sis­ter,” they say. “It was your job to pro­tect her.”

When I ask them what they think she needed pro­tec­tion from, they tell me, “From guys like that.” And when I ask them why I should have assumed my sister’s boyfriend was “like that,” since he was a nice guy whom she’d been see­ing for a while, a guy I liked, a guy she clearly trusted, they tell me, “Okay, so maybe you didn’t have to beat him up, but you should at least have put the fear of God into him, just to keep him honest.”

Hon­est about what? I ask.

“Well,” they say, “you wouldn’t want your sis­ter to get a rep­u­ta­tion, would you? You wouldn’t want him, or any­one he told, to think your sis­ter was just giv­ing it away, right?” And then most, but not all, leave the next ques­tion unasked: “You wouldn’t want your sis­ter to think it was okay just to give it away, would you?”

Clearly, it was not her boyfriend from whom my sis­ter and her rep­u­ta­tion really needed protection.

But there you have it: Because I was her older brother, these peo­ple seem to think my sister’s emerg­ing sex­u­al­ity was my prob­lem, not out of con­cern for her health and safety – and even then it really wouldn’t have been my prob­lem – but because if I did not keep a watch­ful eye on her she might have acquired the rep­u­ta­tion of or, worse, actu­ally become a “slut.” Accord­ing to this logic, my respon­si­bil­ity towards my sis­ter is really not so dif­fer­ent from the respon­si­bil­ity felt by the fathers and broth­ers who mur­der their daugh­ters and sis­ters in so-called “honor killings” – and, just to be clear, there is noth­ing hon­or­able about them – because even the hint of female sex­ual impro­pri­ety is a stain on her and her family’s rep­u­ta­tion that only her death will remove. (Indeed, I am reminded of the doll I was given buy a lover so that I would remem­ber her when I left South Korea in 1989, after my stint as an Eng­lish teacher was over. The doll’s dress iden­ti­fied her as a Korean noble­woman, right down to the knife on a belt around her waist, that her real life coun­ter­part was sup­posed to have used to com­mit sui­cide in the event that she was raped.) Granted, no one has ever sug­gested that in my case the right course of action would have been to kill my sis­ter, but the idea that I should have beaten her boyfriend up is clearly as much about the mes­sage it would have sent to her about the need to “keep her legs closed” as it is about the belief that I should have let him know that keep­ing his life was con­tin­gent on his abil­ity to “keep it in his pants.”

A less vio­lent way for me to have got­ten this mes­sage across to my sis­ter, of course, would have been for me to explain to her that I knew “what guys are like” and that she, there­fore, had good rea­son not to trust her boyfriend’s motives for want­ing to be sex­ual with her, that, in fact, she shouldn’t trust them because, at heart, all guys are “like that.” Leave aside, for the moment, the fact that there really are guys who are “like that” and that it is pos­si­ble for an older brother to sniff this out about his younger sister’s boyfriend before his younger sis­ter does. Focus instead on where the author­ity comes from that I, in this script, expect my sis­ter to rec­og­nize and accept: the fact that I, too, am a guy, that I know, first-hand, the truth of what I am say­ing. More to the point, since being “like that” is, in this way of see­ing the world, in the very nature of guy­hood, being “like that” is part of whom I am too. In pro­tect­ing my sis­ter from her boyfriend, in other words, I am also pro­tect­ing her from another ver­sion of myself. Or, to put it per­haps more kindly, from a male imper­a­tive that I know her boyfriend feels because I have felt it too: the (tra­di­tional) male imper­a­tive to use women for sex as a way of prov­ing manhood.

There is, in other words, a level of self-hatred involved in the vio­lence I was, accord­ing to this logic, sup­posed to have done to my sister’s boyfriend, as I pro­jected onto him the part of who I am that I would never allow myself to express with my sis­ter. More­over, there is an irony embed­ded in this self-hatred, because not to feel it, not to see some­one like my sister’s boyfriend as a threat to her, and there­fore to myself, is to fail as a man. By way of con­trast, con­sider that if I’d been an older sis­ter, and strong enough to do so, no one would have thought for a moment that beat­ing my younger sister’s boyfriend up sim­ply because he was hav­ing sex with her was the thing I ought to have done. As a woman, it sim­ply would not have been my job to police my sister’s sex. As a man, how­ever, within this logic, that was pre­cisely my job and, to the degree that I didn’t do it, it was as a man that I failed. The peo­ple who ques­tion why I didn’t beat him up know this intu­itively. “What kind of a brother (read: man) were you?” they ask. In all hon­esty, I don’t know how to answer them, not because I don’t have an answer, but because it often feels to me like we are speak­ing dif­fer­ent lan­guages and I don’t know how to trans­late from mine to theirs.

A great deal of work has been done to expose the sex­ual dou­ble stan­dard for what it is, a way of con­trol­ling women’s sex­u­al­ity, and if you under­stand the story I have told and people’s reac­tion to it as being pri­mar­ily about my rela­tion­ship with my sis­ter, then it is clearly the dou­ble stan­dard that is at stake. On the other hand, if you under­stand the story as being about my rela­tion­ship to her boyfriend – man to man, so to speak – which means it is also a story about my rela­tion­ship with myself, then what is at stake is how that dou­ble stan­dard struc­tures men’s inter­nal expe­ri­ence of man­hood and mas­culin­ity, how it forces on men a divi­sion within our­selves between the man we are (tra­di­tion­ally, stereo­typ­i­cally) given per­mis­sion to be with women who are not our sis­ters or daugh­ters, etc. and the man whose man­hood depends on pro­tect­ing those women from what that per­mis­sion means. To be both those men at the same time, in an inte­grated way, seems to me impos­si­ble, mak­ing it a quin­tes­sen­tial exam­ple of self-hatred.

I don’t really have any­thing more to say about this right now. I just think it’s a start­ing point for what could be a very inter­est­ing discussion.