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Dads Against Discrimination Inc ABN 82 053 905 623 FEMALE POWER AND THE FORGOTTEN FATHER| Back to Articles | Sunday Telegraph Magazine (Britain) 24 September 2000, p020 Female Power and The Forgotten Father
By Professor Anthony Clare
Everyone needs a caring and involved father. This may seem self-evident, yet it is not so easy to prove. While social science and family-studies research literature bulges with statistics demonstrating the importance of mothers, conclusive research on fathers is only now being done.
This neglect has fuelled the assumption that fathers do not really matter. Moreover, in spite of the fact fatherhood is the most common experience of adult men, fathers are difficult to find. In more and more families there is no longer an adult male to be seen.
Between one in six and one in seven fathers are not living with any or all of their dependent children. Why, at the beginning of the 21st century, are so many men removing themselves, or allowing themselves to be removed, from their children's lives? Would we be better off acknowledging the role of the father is redundant, and today's mother, with the help of sperm
donation, a decent welfare system, and appropriate alterations to the work situation, can expect to do perfectly well on her own?
If men do still have a role as fathers, what is it that fathers are? What do they bring to society that society can not do without? How do they become good fathers? Before I consider the possible answers, let me talk about men, women and hatred.
As a man, I love women, enjoy their company, admire their emotional frankness. I grew up an only son with two sisters and, although I went to a single-sex Jesuit school, the main influences in my earliest years were female.
Perhaps that is why, in so many ways, I feel more comfortable in female company and recognise that the number of close male friends I have is modest. Many men I know feel similarly, although others clearly prefer and seek out male camaraderie at work, in clubs, pursuing sporting and other interests.
But all men, myself included, do not just love women. We do not see them only as colleagues, friends, lovers - as sexually desirable, physically attractive, mentally stimulating. We fear them, hate them, marginalise them, denigrate them and categorise them. And we continually strive to control and dominate them.
Power and control are the twin themes that reverberate through the analysis of male sexual aggression, male culture, male preoccupations, indeed every aspect of male life. Stereotypical male activities - drinking like a man, fighting like a man, striving to win like a man, dying like a man - involve the assertion of the self against constraint, against control.
Collaborating, yielding, submitting, crying are for women. Many men sneer at and denigrate what they see as suburban in the lives of child-bearing and child-rearing women.
The characteristics of marital family life - commitment, dependability, loyalty, self-sacrifice, tolerance, love itself - are seen as soft, limited, boring, threatening.
Fear of losing control
Much of the introspective male literature of the late 20th century (Richard Ford and John Updike in America, Britain's Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons) is an exploration of male inadequacy, of men's failure as husbands and fathers, of fear of the constraints and chains of the intimate and the domestic, of personal commitment and of children remorselessly reminding the man of the passage of time, of ageing and mortality - and of an overwhelming, inchoate terror of losing control.
Increasingly, in my life as a man and my work as a psychiatrist, I find myself wondering why men need so much to be in control. Perhaps it is the nature of male sexuality that dominates so much of a young man's life - the anarchic penile response to trivial erotic stimulus, the autonomous,
insistent, itching sexual urge that dominates so much of a young man's life - which holds the key.
One of the biological imperatives of being a man is that he feels compelled to go on proving his manhood to women. At the heart of much male sexual fantasy - of domination, bondage, flagellation, rape - is control in the service of phallic narcissism.
Yet at the same time men know only too well how tragic they appear, know too the extent to which they feel enslaved by their libidos. Men in thrall to sex exhibit self-disgust and disgust with what is seen to be the cause of their degradation: women. Men know they need women, depend on them. But for some men, many men (all men?), the female fulfilment of adult male dependency is shameful, with its connotations of a return to infancy and helplessness.
Such disgust varies from man to man. When we attempt to answer the question of why men rape or engage in the molestation and sexual assault of women and young children, we again encounter the issue of masculine control.
The most consistent finding in recent years is that most sexually abused children are abused by an adult they know and trust. The second most consistent finding is that there is less reason than was once thought to see the child molester as a sexual deviant or as somebody with severe
psychological problems. Instead, it is his non-sexual motivation, such as the desire and need for domination and control, which is emphasised.
In the past, men were more than brutal. Men were in command. Today's male carries around in his head notions of manhood that, while forged over centuries, flowered in the 19th century when to be a man meant to be a leader in public life, a patriarch at home.
The stereotype of the successful man did not just embody a succession of positive, virile attributes, it existed in the presence of an opposing cluster of attributes - fragility, weakness, vulnerability, emotionality, impetuousness, dependence, nervousness - the stereotype of the typical woman.
Yet the growth of what continues to be a particular problem of modern family life - the separation of home from work and, with it, the beginnings of the isolation and diminution of fatherhood - was well under way.
Mother knows best
The father may have been the formal head of the family, but he had in effect lost to his wife the roles of child adviser, moral guide and decision-maker.
In the 20th century, the belief began to take root that men were biologically designed to play little or no part in the nurturing of children. By the 1960s, fatherhood as a social role had shrunk and paternal authority had become reduced to two tasks: head of the family and breadwinner. It shrank even further in the 1970s.
During the 1980s and 1990s efforts were made to resuscitate the male role within the family with the emergence of the so-called "new man" embodying traditional "feminine" virtues. The majority of fathers, however, remained incorrigibly "old".
At the same time, changes occurring in the structure and solidity of the family were starting to imperil the very role of males as fathers and family men. One of the most remarkable changes in personal life in the developed world in the 20th century was the increase in divorce.
Between 1970 and 1996, the number of divorces in Western countries almost doubled, and in a vast number of cases, children ended up losing regular contact with their natural fathers.
Many divorced fathers establish new families. Some escape, freed of responsibilities and duties. Others drift away, embittered. More than 40 per cent of men who don't live with their children don't even mention they are fathers in British surveys. Some have never been involved with their
children.
Up to 30 years ago it was universally accepted children needed a father as much as a mother. The fact that many men did not wish to be fathers - and were deficient, destructive and damaging - in no way invalidated the conviction that a father was important to his children. Now the notion of a family without a father is becoming widely accepted and even promulgated.
Yet the evidence showing there is a substantial price to be paid for divorce and the loss of a father, and that it is being paid by many of today's children, is massive and can not be ignored.
Contrary to much popular opinion, fathers do matter. There is evidence, powerful and persuasive, that two parents - a father and a mother - are better than one. Children growing up without fathers have been shown to be more likely to fail at school, have problems needing psychiatric
intervention, and develop drug and alcohol problems.
Boys reportedly experience difficulties in the areas of sex-role and gender identity, school performance, social skills and the control of aggression. Some sociologists believe poorly fathered young men become so vulnerable to - and incompetent with - women that they end up avoiding them, brutalising them, or both.
Life without a father effectively alienates sons from their own sense of themselves as men. Disconnected young men are most likely to prove their manhood in crime and by violating those who represent outwardly the shameful, hated, feared feminine part of themselves.
There is persuasive evidence in support of the view that men deprived of a father's influence are more likely to engage in crimes against property, child abuse and family violence. Adolescent males who attempt suicide appear more likely to come from homes where the father is absent.
Fatherhood remains a central civilising force in every society. The responsibilities, opportunities, duties, emotional demands and rewards involved can and, in many cases, do help young males develop into mature, constructive and caring social beings.
Fathers can help sons learn to be better men, daughters to feel better about themselves. They can protect their families and their communities from the depredations of unattached and poorly socialised fellow males. And they can, through the process of becoming fathers, develop and cultivate empathy, altruism, sensitivity and emotional expressiveness in themselves.
As a psychiatrist, I was contacted by the wife of a middle-aged company director. He was becoming unpredictable, irritable, drinking heavily and on occasions was physically violent, which she attributed to strain associated with a takeover bid for his company.
She doubted he would come to see me, but he did - exuding the air of a man in a hurry, and answering questions tersely. He saw himself as the provider and protector of his family and insisted he was a good father. He told me he was the youngest of five, that his father, a farmer, was over 60 when he was born and that he was never close to his mother.
He then suddenly admitted that, when he was growing up, he had always felt there was something odd about his family. Of all the children, he had the most drive and determination and was the only one to obtain a university education.
Some weeks later, he telephoned for an appointment and eventually blurted out that he had discovered his father was not his father, nor his mother his mother. His real mother was his "eldest sister". After our first interview, he had gone to get his full birth certificate and discovered her identity. No father was stated on the certificate.
No father, no identity
He said he had been wondering about his identity since the time of the takeover, when there had been much praise of his talents. He had pondered the origins of these talents and felt uneasy when he considered what he termed his "genetic inheritance" - the rural simplicity and homespun habits of his father and the lack of drive exhibited by his mother and siblings. He had begun to feel depressed, started to drink heavily and to argue with his wife and children.
I did not hear from him for several months. Then he made an appointment. He had traced his father's family and had discovered that his father had killed himself at the age of 23 after making his mother, then a 16-year-old schoolgirl, pregnant. His father had been about to qualify as a doctor.
Members of his father's family were successful and politically powerful; his mother's poor. His maternal grandparents sent their pregnant daughter away to have her child and, when she returned, made out that he was theirs. He had lived this lie his entire life.
He said he felt for the first time "authentic". He believed much of the ambition and energy that drove him to compete in business originated in his deep sense of insecurity and self-doubt, and at last he could relax as he no longer had anything to prove.
I have not seen him since, but I received a letter from his wife, indicating he was much improved and had not hit her. This man needed his father's identity to help make sense of himself. We can be as shaped by the father we never had as by the father who is ever present.
Today's fathers carry in their heads the recollection of their own fathers and their experience of being fathered. But they also have expectations concerning their own need to be a just father, a wise father, an accessible and involved father, a loving father, a stern father, a good father. While they struggle, all around them rages the argument over whether it makes all that much difference what kind of father they are.
Reviews in the 1980s concerning the involvement of fathers in the lives of their children suggested the effects were minimal. More recent research strongly suggests preschool children whose fathers are performing 40 per cent of care within the family are more competent, more self-confident and, most striking, less stereotyped in terms of gender roles.
Many young men are apprehensive about being parents because they feel they will be unable to secure the kind of job that will enable them to fulfil what they still see as a crucial marker of being a father, namely the breadwinner role. The issue is desperate for men with limited educational or work skills. In reality, however, the value of the modern father has less to do with breadwinning and more to do with such qualities as involvement, consistency, awareness and ability to care.
Get involved with your kids
Involvement means time - time spent with children, playing, helping with homework and worries, conversing and sharing interests. Consistency is important: children need to be able to depend on their fathers to be predictable and reliable, if they are to grow up secure and confident.
Emotional consistency seems to be crucial. Awareness concerns the extent to which fathers take note of their children as individuals in their own right. Some children feel that their fathers hardly know them. Caring involves the formation of intimate bonds and is expressed in touching,
encouraging, comforting and affirming. At the heart of such caring concern is discipline.
Problems arise, however, if discipline is provided in the absence of awareness, consistency and true affection. Some fathers believe it is only as disciplinarians that they have a role; the consequences are almost invariably catastrophic.
A father's strongest influence on a son's development occurs as part of his gender maturation. Boys start out with a close physical and domestic relationship with their mothers. But at some point every son has to redefine himself and prepare for the extra-domestic role as man and father.
Access to a father's warm, close guidance promotes this growth. A father's support for his son's physical, athletic, intellectual and emotional development facilitates the transition from childhood to adolescence and later enables him, as a young adult, to turn to his father for advice.
Sons of fathers who are physically and/or psychologically absent can not make the transition from mother's son to father's son. They leave home, find girlfriends and wives, but bring their dependence on the mother and their identification as sons, rather than grown and independent men, into their relationships and turn their partners into surrogate mothers.
For daughters, a father's provision of safe, secure excitement in a girl's infancy and childhood contributes to her sense of trust and autonomy. There is strong suggestive evidence that a father's influence on her development is most crucial during adolescence - when the negative effect of a father's absence begins to impinge.
By inviting their adolescent daughters to participate in "non-traditional areas of mastery" - such as physical play - fathers can help them to develop autonomy and launch out of the mother-daughter orbit into the outside world.
Research into high-achieving women students has found that the typical father was described as encouraging, stimulating, involving her in joint endeavors, showing trust in her growing abilities; a playful and enjoyable companion.
Concern is expressed that the spectre of child sex abuse has made men fearful of getting too close, especially to daughters, and anxious about showing affection. In fact, while some of the most appalling cases of sexual abuse have been of children by their biological fathers, there is
powerful evidence to indicate that the presence of biological fathers in the home reduces, rather than raises, the risk.
In 1981, 43 per cent of children reported as abused in America were living in female-headed, single-parent families, compared with only 18 per cent of children in the overall population.
So where do men go from here? We need to recognise that the private, personal, intimate domain of children and family and extended family and friendship and community is as valid, important, satisfying and fulfilling a world as the arena of power, achievement, status and money.
Too often the talk is of the demands of family, the costs of children, the frustrations of parenthood, the burdens. Yet the rewards of family life are substantial, in terms of health, satisfaction and happiness.
We need to rekindle in men a belief in the importance to themselves and to their children of fatherhood. For most men, to be a father will have a more positive impact on their health and happiness than career achievement.
Politicians must take much more seriously the impact of policies on marriage and the family. Some two months before the birth of her son Leo, Cherie Blair declared: "Our children need their male role models as well as their female ones."
And even better was her demand that men should start "to challenge the assumption that the nurturing of children has nothing to do with them". The problem is that most governments so arrange their working hours and choose their political priorities as to make it abundantly plain that the nurturing of children has nothing to do with them.
How wrong they are.
Fathers show they care
NEXT WEEK
Are high-testosterone men doomed to divorce?
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