Richard Jeffrey Newman

(Author’s note: This post was orig­i­nally pub­lished at The Good Men Project. I am post­ing it here so that peo­ple read­ing this other post–which con­tains all the back­ground infor­ma­tion – who don’t want to click through to TGMP’s site can read the poem if they’re interested.)

 

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In his recently pub­lished mem­oir, 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…. 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 — one that, for him, was clearly about a kind of truth-telling that only 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 rather that, 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 only about feel­ings and thoughts. The daughter’s body and how she uses it — in sex, in mar­riage — and how that reflects on the father as a man, 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 the cus­tom of giv­ing a bride away on her wed­ding day is an echo of it. Still, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that there are immi­grant sub­cul­tures in this coun­try — and think, also, of the Chris­t­ian insti­tu­tion of purity balls—where it is still a father’s duty to man­age his daughter’s sex­u­al­ity, at least 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, what they imag­ine my rela­tion­ship with my sis­ters should have been like when we were younger. I am think­ing specif­i­cally of how most peo­ple react when I tell them about the time I walked in on one of my sis­ters, who was six­teen at the time and should have been in school at the time — she is six years younger than I am—in fla­grante delicto with her boyfriend.

I did not care that she was hav­ing sex, but the cir­cum­stances in my fam­ily at the time meant that I did need to con­front her about play­ing hooky. So I closed the door and asked her and her boyfriend to get dressed and come out into the liv­ing room. I waited for a cou­ple of min­utes, but noth­ing hap­pened. I knocked again, receiv­ing this time a muf­fled reply from my sis­ter, as if she were sick in bed and my knock­ing had roused her from sleep. I opened the door and there she was, alone, with the blan­ket pulled up around her neck. “Where is he?” I asked.

“Where is who?”

“Michael. I saw him.”

“Michael? No. No one else is here.” Her voice cracked as if she had a hor­ri­ble sore throat.

“Come on. Don’t bull­shit me. I know what I saw.” I started to look around the room and even­tu­ally opened her closet, where I found Michael try­ing des­per­ately to dis­ap­pear behind the clothes that were hang­ing there. It was hard not to laugh at him, but I didn’t. I just asked again for them to come out into the liv­ing room. When they did, I told Michael to go home, that my sis­ter and I had to talk, 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?” That made me laugh out loud. I told him no, why would I. He said thank you and he left.

More often than not, the peo­ple to whom I tell this story, and it doesn’t seem to mat­ter how old or young they are, are as sur­prised as Michael was that I sim­ply let him leave. When I ask 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. It was your job to pro­tect her. And if I ask them what they think she needed pro­tec­tion from, they tell me, From guys “like that,” by which they mean, of course, exploitive, sex­ual oppor­tunists who tally the women they have sex with by mak­ing notches in their bed­posts and brag­ging about it to all their friends. But why should I have assumed that Michael — a decent guy, a guy I liked, a guy my sis­ter clearly trusted — was “like that?” 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 most, but not all, leave the next ques­tion unasked: You wouldn’t want your sis­ter to think it was okay 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 unde­servedly acquired the rep­u­ta­tion of or, worse, actu­ally become, a “slut.”

The peo­ple with whom I have these con­ver­sa­tions usu­ally try to avoid using that word, because they are afraid it will offend me. Or, to be more pre­cise, because they are afraid I will sud­denly feel the need to defend my sister’s “honor,” even after all these years. Yet it’s not really, or at least not only, my sister’s “honor” that they think I should be wor­ried about. Inevitably, when we get to the point in the con­ver­sa­tion where they real­ize that they’re not going to change my mind, that I truly do not think there was any­thing wrong with my sis­ter hav­ing sex, they get down to where the brass tacks really are. What kind of a brother were you, any­way? What they mean, of course, is What kind of a man are you?, and their logic is not so dif­fer­ent, really, from 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. Granted, no one has ever sug­gested that I should have killed my sis­ter, but they clearly think I should have seen the fact that she didn’t “keep her legs closed” as a threat not just to her, but to myself as well.

Unlike the logic that seems to hold in so-called “honor killings,” how­ever, where the exis­ten­tial threat to fam­ily (read: male) honor is embod­ied by the woman, the threat in this case — at least as per­ceived by the peo­ple I have these con­ver­sa­tions with — was embod­ied by my sister’s boyfriend. His “suc­cess” in hav­ing sex with my sis­ter, in get­ting around the pro­tec­tion they tell me I should have been pro­vid­ing for her, is clearly some­thing they see as a stain on my honor that only some form of vio­lence against him would have removed. The fact that I chose not to com­mit that vio­lence, or even to threaten it, is bewil­der­ing to them. How could I have let Michael get away with some­thing so serious?

♦◊♦

I real­ize I am being reduc­tive here. In fact, the threat to male honor in cases like this comes from both the man and the woman, which is why the male part­ners of women mur­dered by their fam­i­lies in so-called “honor killings” are also often killed or beaten; and I have com­pletely left out of this essay the ways in which women — moth­ers, aunts, sis­ters, cousins — are expected to pre­serve this male honor by polic­ing other women’s sex lives. It’s not that the lay­ers of com­plex­ity here are not worth writ­ing about. Rather, it’s that these lay­ers of com­plex­ity tend to obscure the rela­tion­ship between the men whose job it is to demon­strate their man­hood by pro­tect­ing their family’s honor (in this case, me) and those whose job it is to prove them­selves as men by doing what­ever they can to get around that pro­tec­tion (my sister’s boyfriend).

Leave aside, for exam­ple, the fact that there really are guys “like that” and that it is pos­si­ble for an older brother to sniff this out about his younger sister’s boyfriend before his she does and con­sider the con­ver­sa­tion I might have had with my sis­ter in order to get her to stay away from Michael. You don’t under­stand what guys are like, my part in this dis­cus­sion would go — and it’s a part we have seen played in movies and TV shows over and over again by count­less broth­ers or fathers, cousins or friends—but I do under­stand, and I am telling you that when it comes to sex you shouldn’t be so trust­ing. Some­times the man who speaks these lines will explain what he means in more detail and some­times he will not. In each case, how­ever, he is ask­ing the woman to whom he is speak­ing to rec­og­nize that, because he is a man, he is more of an author­ity on men and male sex­u­al­ity than she is. More­over, in doing so, whether he real­izes it or not, he is admit­ting that this author­ity comes from the fact that, even if he him­self is not “like that,” he nonethe­less has first-hand knowl­edge of the truth behind the assump­tion that most men are. After all, in this way of see­ing the world, being “like that” is part of what being a man is all about, and so it is inescapably part of every man, even if he con­sciously lives his life in oppo­si­tion to it.

There is, in other words, a kind of self-hatred oper­at­ing here. Had I tried to pro­tect my sis­ter in the way I have just described, or even if I’d resorted to the vio­lence so many peo­ple seem to think I should have used, I would also have been try­ing to pro­tect her from a ver­sion of myself, or at least from the kind of man I knew I was sup­posed to be if I’d fol­lowed the tra­di­tional, stereo­typ­i­cal man­hood script. To put it another way, what­ever beat­ing Michael up would have meant to him and my sis­ter, it would also have been a denial of my own com­plic­ity in that script’s def­i­n­i­tion of get­ting sex from women as proof of man­hood. So, if you under­stand this story not from the per­spec­tive of my rela­tion­ship with my sis­ter, but rather of my rela­tion­ship with Michael, it becomes a nar­ra­tive that is less about the sex­ual dou­ble stan­dard — though it is of course also about that — than it is about men’s inter­nal expe­ri­ence of man­hood and mas­culin­ity as an iden­tity divided against itself. On one side is the man we are (tra­di­tion­ally, stereo­typ­i­cally) given per­mis­sion to be with women who are not our moth­ers, sis­ters or daugh­ters; on the other, the man whose man­hood depends on pro­tect­ing our moth­ers, sis­ters and daugh­ters from what that per­mis­sion means to all the other men who are not us. To be both those men at the same time, in an inte­grated way, seems to me impos­si­ble — which raises the ques­tion of what forms mas­culin­ity might take if it were truly unmoored from a notion of man­hood that requires us to hate a part of who we are.