Warmduscher I appreciate what you’re saying but I read it differently.
I don’t know if you’ve come across women on here saying that when the scales fall from your eyes and you see the extent of the misogyny that still surrounds us in the world today, you can’t then unsee it. I don’t know if you feel like that yourself.
I do - and I feel the same about child abuse, especially emotional abuse. Not that emotional abuse is worse than other kinds, just that it’s more invisible, more normalised, more accepted and acceptable.
We don’t see it, a lot of the time, just as we don’t see a lot of the misogyny around us - we’re so used to this being the way the world is that it doesn’t register as abuse in the same way misogyny often doesn’t register as misogyny.
But once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
And I see it here.
Here’s the dialogue:
He’s still your dad…. He’s your dad and you’ll miss him when he’s not around. My dad died yesterday… I miss him. And I’m old. You love him, don’t you?… Course you do, he’s your dad.
In the context of a father being emotionally abusive to his daughter in plain sight, this is apologism. He’d just asked her, a teenager, if she wanted to “play dollies”, FFS. Using her as an accessory for his fetish/delusion. And he’s invited round the local press to do a feature on him which will inevitably bring awful shame and embarrassment for her because some people in the community will know she’s his daughter whether she’s mentioned by name in the piece or not.
He is treating her as a service human, just like so many men treat women as service humans. And when a parent does that to their child, it’s emotional abuse.
Yes, she says she loves him - but that’s one of the things that is so particularly awful about emotional abuse from a parent: the child does indeed love them, and wants their love, and that’s what makes the whole dynamic so difficult and twisted and damaging.
Also, she doesn’t say that until he prompts her to do so. And what about all the “you’ll miss him when he’s not around” bullshit? What is that if not “shut up and put up”? You see him empathising with her. I think that’s what you’re meant to see.
But I see him denying the reality of the emotional abuse she’s living with, now. I see him doing what countless “sympathetic” adults do in fiction as in RL, and offering a semblance of empathy that actually serves to invalidate and shut down the experiences and voice of the young person they’re talking to.
Imagine if we’d just seen the father physically assault her. Would the same dialogue have ensued? I doubt it. Once upon a time, physical assault was regarded as being as unremarkable by many as emotional abuse still is today: that, thankfully has changed considerably.
But we still have the narrative as a society that multiple emotional assaults should just be shrugged off and accepted as normal (as wallopings once were), and the child should take the responsibility for maintaining a healthy relationship with the parent instead of the other way around - as it should be.
Obviously this scene is fiction - but art and life inform each other, and this piece perpetuates the same old unhealthy narrative, IMO.
And of course these scenarios are happening in real life. Real teenage girls are being asked by their transitioning fathers to go bra shopping with them. Real teenage girls are being pressured to support their fathers on their “journey”, at the expense of having space to explore their own feelings on the subject. Real teenage girls are not being listened to, and told how much they’d miss their dad if he wasn’t around so they just have to put up with their own needs being neglected.
There is real abuse going on. It needs a real response.
I know I’m in a minority with my views. I imagine most people watched it and reacted the same way as you did. I’d be surprised if just one person agreed with me, tbh. But these are my views, and I just wanted to express them.