I tend to say that I was raised by a single mom. My father wasn’t entirely out of the picture especially not in my youth, and my mother remarried and I had a stepdad from the age of eight into my twenties, but I have issues with both that I have written about extensively in my autobiographical anthology I Fucked Up. I don’t have harsh feelings for either my father or my stepfather, even though they have both caused me traumatic pain at various times in my life, but I tend to look at both of them as examples of masculinity that really made me question the value of masculinity as an identity, and the things that “men are supposed to do.”
One aspect of this that I have thought about for a long time, and have struggled to write down effectively in words before is why I get so upset and uncomfortable with the very common meme that “fathers make sacrifices for their families.” I don’t know if I am going to be able to do better with this blog post than I have with my attempts at story telling and poem writing in the past, but I am going to try, because I think some aspects of this have come up in watching Adolescence, but also, I see the “Father must do anything for the family” to be an absolute root lie of patriarchal misogyny and Trumpism both. Like my aversion to the value of Loyalty, I will acknowledge up front that “A father will do anything his family” is probably one of the first things people think of when they say “family values” and that there are centuries of media, from around the world that reinforce this idea as one of noble character and high moral value. As a whole, I think my complaint is really more directed at the reality that this value almost never actually means the “I would take a bullet for my child” extreme that a lot of people think of when making a statement about a father sacrificing for their family, but instead that fathers actually very rarely even act in the actual interest of their families, and instead can get wrapped up in a whole lot of bullshit trying to convince themselves and their families that fathers are the ones who best know and speak for the interests of their families.
This is the situation that I feel like drives so many men who have relationships fall apart into the arms of patriarchal misogyny. I think a very central pillar of socialization as a man is the belief that, as a man, your highest purpose in life is the creation of some kind of family that will come to define your identity, but which also represents your identity into the world. I think this is why so many men are attached to having their partners and children adopt their last name, and where that tradition came from. I think it also underwrites a lot of the laws (both from religious law and secular) that have established property rights into the hands of a father, not only of properties like possessions, land, and titles, but also wives and children. I am arguing that the idea that a man is supposed to see his family as the ultimate representation of himself and his legacy is pretty much the root concept of patriarchy, and it has a deep stranglehold on the construction of a masculine identity.
It is not a difficult value to romanticize, especially if you ever end up a parent, or have dreams or aspirations to become one. In its noblest aspirations it can be a model for many people on how to unselfishly love beyond the boundaries of yourself, or at least it gets spun that way over and over again. But I just don’t believe that learning to see yourself represented in your family, in your partner and your children, is really experiencing a love bigger than yourself, it is just projecting your sense of self beyond the confines of your own body and mind. I especially don’t believe that there is any altruistic selflessness in the projection of valuing family that I see in the most public proponents of patriarchal misogyny, like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, etc.
Even I the nobler projections and fantasies of this story “the father sacrificing some aspect of themselves for their children or family,” these stories of sacrifice almost never include the family collectively coming together to discuss what is best for everyone individually and for that to be what drives the father into action. It is almost always a father acting unilaterally to do what he alone really understands what needs to be done, because it will end up being the best for everyone. This is the fiction and the fantasy that I have personally seen drive many a man into a horrific spiral of feeling exploited and undervalued by their families, their children and especially their romantic partners. Because sharing the labor of figuring out what the family needs is seen as an act of burdening the family with the often messy and ugly realities not just of survival, but of prosperity. And this is where I really think the idea of “a father must do anything for their family” really gets harmful and dangerous for society, for the family, and every single person in it. Especially because the needs of most families in the United States almost never come down the moments where anyone must do some thing terrible for the family’s safety or survival. Instead, the absolute atrocities that the United States continues to engage in, and that men wanting to be model father who will do anything to support their family continue to condone and support, are almost always about misplaced expectations of sharing wealth and prosperity. When the dirty deeds of “doing anything to support the family” are no longer really justifiable, that is exactly when not revealing them to the family isn’t really about protecting the family from the horrors of the world, but about protecting the acting father/man from potential value judgment from their families. This is the situation that the United States keeps putting itself into, at home and around the world, and is a big part of why I think patriarchal misogyny is such an attractive ideology to people on the right who think they are pushing family values.
Nothing is actually lost when people value and wish to protect their communities, not just their immediate families. There may be extreme times of hardship where everyone in a community cannot be supported, fed, protected and cared for, where really difficult and ugly choices may have to be made, and where people might decide “my family, not yours.” But those times are so much more rare than the fear mongering rhetoric that the right pushes relentlessly would have us all believe. It only becomes possible when there are a sizeable base of people fully buy into the idea that any attack on their own right to have everything they want is a violent attack upon their own person. And when each man can count their entire family, and prosperity of their entire family into that same self-serving dominion, that is when you have the zealous foot soldiers that will condition themselves to see everyone else as an enemy out to destroy their very sense of identity.
Family values in the hands of patriarchal misogynist are identity politics. They are used to create a sense of self, with specific, coded radicalized and gendered ideologies that justify violence and dehumanization of anyone that isn’t willing to step in line and give themselves, their bodies and their labor, to the cause of supporting the next biggest patriarch up the chain.