That quickly morphed into the realization that what we have lost since then has been, most of all, the father figure. In the 1950s, even TV comedies whose stars portrayed un-fatherly figures — such as the eponymous lead character of "The Jack Benny Program," played by Jack Benny, natch — were surrogate fathers to their retinues of satellite characters.
Imagine my surprise, then, at this synchronicity: today's column by Kathleen Parker in The Baltimore Sun is about daddies. (The column can be read online here.) Parker's topic is the recent finding by the American Psychological Association that girls in America are overly "sexualized," meaning that their self images depend too heavily on their self-perceived attractiveness to the opposite sex.
Parker writes, "We can now assert with confidence that most of the primarily girl pathologies — eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression — can be linked to an oversexualization that encourages girls to obsess about body image and objectify themselves."
Think of it. In the wake of feminist advances rooted in the notion that girls and women should never be taken as sex objects comes a culture in which girls and women objectify themselves.
What can have gone wrong? I blame, in part, feminism's deconstruction of male gender roles, particularly that of the father.
Parker notes that "missing from the report" issued by the APA is
... the single factor that seems most predictive of girls' self-objectification — the absence of a father in their lives. Although the task force urges "parents" to help their daughters interpret sexualizing cultural messages, there's little mention of the unique role fathers play in protecting their girls from a voracious, sexualized culture.
Fathers, after all, are the ones who tell their little girls that they're perfect just the way they are; that they don't need to be one bit thinner; and that under no circumstances are they going out of the house dressed that way.
It can't be coincidence that girls' self-objectification — has risen as father presence has declined. At last tally, 30 percent of fathers weren't sleeping in the same house as their biological children.
We have such a big problem here, in my humble opinion, that almost no one wants to talk about it as such — with rare exceptions such as Ms. Parker.
Part of the size-of-the-problem issue is that the humongous lump of the problem has metastasized into smaller tumors in a huge variety of our cultural organs and tissues. A lot of us have vested interests in various of the tumors. As Parker herself notes, for instance, oversexualization affects — hurts — not just girls but also boys, men, and even women ... but even so, "there seems to be an unspoken sense that males are getting what they want with 24/7 sex messaging." Well, I admit it: I am clearly one of those males.
Meanwhile, feminists have also been getting a lot of what they want in terms of women's liberation from traditional gender, marital, and childbearing roles. I admit I simply don't have a clue as to whether, or how, the father figure might be resuscitated without imperiling those advances.
And it scarcely needs to be said that money interests are getting what they want, selling expensive attire and unnecessary cosmetics to underage "tartlets" and purveying "bling" to slightly older female victims of oversexualization. The ridiculous extent to which sexualization affects the world of grownups, meanwhile, is manifest during every television commercial break. The images of bodily allure used to sell everything from soap to bras to exercise equipment would never have been allowed on '50s TV, when brassieres could not be shown on live models unless there was another article of clothing between the bra and the skin!
How things have changed, and how all of them form a constellation around the black hole of the erstwhile father figure, would seem to be Topic #1 of this blog.
It doesn't seem to me to be a stretch to identify the cultural cancer of the demoted, debunked, and deconstructed father figure with societal problems such as the number of abortions performed annually. Reports have it that unmarried women facing unwanted pregnancies are being pressured by their boyfriends and families — yes, including their fathers, when not absent — to opt for surgical termination. It's my belief that these women have been placed in double jeopardy.
First, their sexualization by the prevailing culture has led them to express their erroneous self-image too often and too inappropriately, engaging in the wrong acts at the wrong times for the wrong reasons with the wrong "significant others."
Then, when nature takes its course and they wind up "in the family way," they face the ignominy of being disowned by the people they are closest to, unless they fulfill their own objectification by remedying the one condition that can put the lie to being naught but sex objects: expectant motherhood.
How grisly is that double whammy?
I bring this up not because I think abortions ought to be made illegal again — I'm presently in the midst of reevaluating my stance on legal abortion — but because I believe wholly discretionary abortions ought to be rare, even if they are legal.
If we in our culture were somehow able to resuscitate Daddy — the father-ideal of so recent fond memory — I believe the tumor of the voracious sexualization of girls would shrink and disappear, and with it the commonness of discretionary abortion.
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