My daughter begged us to go, but my face gave away my dread; she continued to plead until I got over myself and relented. She wanted to attend the father-daughter dance at the local Methodist church. I’m not the best dancer, sure, that comes with being a middle-aged dad who grew up not being allowed to move my body in fear of the Holy Spirit seeing my hips swivel too much. Yet another reason for my lack of excitement was the strong purity culture vibes this event was giving. I dreamed of busting through the doors and the gold streamers and onto the strobe-lit dance floor, screaming, “You do not own my daughter’s body!” I didn’t think my daughter would fully understand or appreciate my valiant protest, as in her ten-year-old world, she was excited to dance with her friends and get uninterrupted time with her dad. So I held my tongue and tried to put that energy into my awkward dance moves.
I do want to be the type of dad who shows up and enters into my daughter‘s desire and her world rather than only being consumed with my own. So we went. We got all dressed up, we did the photo booth, played with all the balloons, and ate sugary, stale snacks. The DJ was fire, this dance had it all. After about five dances of the Macarena, YMCA, Justin Bieber’s Baby, Baby, Baby, and The Cupid Shuffle, I decided to take a break and observe (i.e., judge) from the sidelines (my happy place).
This observation got me thinking about my work with men and the ongoing conflict within the masculine between objectifying and honoring the beauty of the feminine. When we are taught and spend much of our lives learning that we are entitled to beauty, that it is ours for the taking, these messages create tension within us when we father our own girls. As young boys, we are taught (if not explicitly, then implicitly) that female consent is not nearly as important as male confidence. A woman will smell weakness, so it is important to project strength.
You have all these men who are trying to be good fathers and love their daughters as well as they know how to, but who also simultaneously carry another narrative inside of them that has been created by decades of the normalization of porn culture and purity culture (which are essentially the same thing). This marination of these toxic messages gave birth to a pornographic mindset and a pornographic style of relating, where men are taught that women are objects to be consumed. Yet now they don’t know how to engage with their own daughters.
This is where the conflict arises as young girls begin to become women, as their bodies change and breasts begin to grow, and men are confronted with a duality they have never faced. I hear it time and time again from the men that I work with in my practice: “I want to get sexually healthy because my daughter is becoming a woman, and I don’t want to objectify her.” It seems that when these men are confronted by their own flesh and blood, they become aware of their own cognitive dissonance around their sexuality. They realize they have categorized women as either “pornified” or “parentified,” and they do not want to do that to their own daughters.
Men, have you asked yourself: why do women only become “human beings” when you fear sexualizing your own daughters but not someone else’s daughter? It is only when they come face-to-face with their own daughters, the ones they love, that they begin to realize that women are, in fact, humans, holy image bearers of God, and that they should have been honoring them all along.
So here I was at this father-daughter dance, surrounded by about 60, 30- to 50-year-old dads trying to be present for this one night with their daughters. Yet who is addressing their socialization? Who is talking to them about their relationship with beauty? Who is warning them about the projection of their own unprocessed sexual shame onto the way they parent?
The truth is, as men, our own daughters (and sons, but this article is about our daughters) are in the crosshairs of our own underdeveloped sexuality. If we do not do the heavy lifting of healing our unprocessed sexual wounds, many times it will come out sideways, often through hypervigilance and control. Trying to micromanage how our daughters dress. Becoming hyper-protective of our girls from “those types of boys.” The truth is, you have been that “type of boy” who only thinks about sex and wants to consume and devour women. And you are scared that your daughter may get into a relationship with a man who also has a pornified mind. Am I right?
You have to start being more honest with your fear and your own darkness. Not all men (or boys) have been raised on porn, but yes, many of them have. What are you doing to unlearn all the toxic messaging you have absorbed? The work of unlearning is just as laborious as relearning new ways of being and relating. If we look deeply at ourselves, we can see that our daughters are giving us a gift by exposing our sexual unhealth.
I withheld the temptation to stand up, grab the microphone from the DJ, and cause a scene. Part of me wanted to preach a sermon about the dangers of sexualization and objectification of our daughters in the church, but I held back and decided to write this article instead. But what I did do was have a blast being present with my daughter. Though there were many cringe moments, to her ten-year-old mind, this was one of the greatest nights of her year.
How do I reconcile that?
The good and bad intertwined, depravity and glory coexisting. It seems like most things I am confronted with in this healing journey. I am so glad it can be both/and rather than an either/or. The church can do a better job of addressing the shadows within male sexuality and entitlement, and we can also have a blast dancing with our daughters without making it weird or possessive. I am glad I went to the dance with my daughter, and I continue to grieve the lack of sexual health and a widespread underdeveloped masculinity within Christian contexts that continues to bring more death rather than new life.
