Protective Father With A Shotgun

A girl brings a boy home for the first time. A beer-bellied father appears, looks at the boy and says “I have a shotgun and I know how to use it.” Or sometimes it’s “I have a gun, a shovel, and a lot of land upstate.” We all know the image: a protective father “protecting” his daughter from boys, “who only want one thing.”

This scenario seemed like a dusty, old myth until recently, when a Washington man was charged with assault for pulling out a gun when he found three boys at home with his teenaged daughter. One was her boyfriend, who was found naked, and the two others were friends. According to the charge the man pointed his gun in the boys’ faces and beat one of them in the chest (he also slapped his daughter around, but that’s another issue altogether).

There are so many things wrong with this scenario. It brings up the painful reminder that the old, sexist idea of a daughter needing protection is still taken seriously. Letting young women grow up around this stereotype places so many negative ideas in their heads: that they are weak victims who need to be protected, that their bodies are a secret, and that all men are perverts who want to “take” something from them. And this stereotype is just as unfair to men as it is to women; not all guys are jerks who want to sleep with you and leave.

Not to mention that we still can’t get it in our heads that young women like sex too (or kissing, or whatever teenaged boys are doing with them). We’ve let go of so many useless stereotypes, so why not this one? If we joke about fathers pulling out shotguns, it makes it justifiable for someone like this Washington man to actually put people in danger.

Contact the author here: jennY@morningquickie.com