Mike Adamick - Raising Empowered Daughters: A Dad-to-Dad Guide

T HE PROBLEM NEVER lay buried. It was everywherea creeping haze, a fog, an atmospheric river atomized into breathable vapor.

You couldnt avoid it.

A generation after the question, Is this all? it was still interrupting to offer the answer, ghostlike and haunting, a pervasive specter mumbling Well, actually, in the background for boys to overhear, boys through it all turning into men. Were dads now, raising yet another generation today with the original problem still serving as the template.

It was what stirred us in the morning through boyhood, dream-dazed and groggy, suddenly aware of a new song thrumming from our older brothers room.

Oh, cant you see, it warbled, you belong to me.

It glared up at us from the morning paper, a black-and-white parade of dads and grandpas in the news section, all suits and ties, cigarette teeth, and sprayed hair. It popped out of the sports pages with the mullet heroes, and the business pages with the old mustached bores.

It arose in the morning flush of the suburbs, all created from some TV show template of clean-street, picket-fence patriotism. The white moms, with maybe one or two black moms out of a hundred homesProgress. See? Things are better nowwove through streets named for famous men, Founding Fathers, men like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln or Lee, some slavers and some actual traitorsliterally anyone but a woman. And the moms would all assemble at the school drop-off line, honking and griping, while all the dads went elsewhere, somewhere; they were very busy and important.

It blared out in the soundtrack of the everyday commute, the same pounding anthems that woke us played on the radio for everyone to hear. It resounded in songs about girls who belonged to someone, someone who watched them or followed them. They couldnt escape: Every move you make, every step you take. It repeated in songs about how these girls were actually someone elses, some guy named Jessiebut not if some other man altogether could help it. Wed sing along from the backseat, sweetly, proudly, learning about love. This is how adults did the romance. Ill be watching you. The dads, meanwhile, when we sometimes rode with them, had their own soundtracks on talk radio, all those bloviating, angry men: And another thing!

It crept into the classrooms, where our teachers, mostly women, called on the smart boys and the good girls. No one pulled us from class, measured the length of our shorts or eyed the cut of our tank tops, but they pulled Penny out one day and sent her home, called her a distraction, and we got the messagewe knew why everyone was there and that Penny, dirty, unclean, was somehow disrupting it all. Even in the hallways it was apparent: the teachers, the secretaries, the school nurse, and the lunch ladiesall women, while the tough jobs, the real jobs, the physical jobs like janitor, or PE teacher, or principal were all filled by men.

It enveloped us in the schoolyard nomenclature, the slurs, the language passed from schoolboy to schoolboy.

There were boys. Then there were pussiesa feminine class, a lower class, the very worst thing a real boy could be.

Oh, cant you see?

No men ever followed us home after school, slowing their car to a crawl beside the sidewalk, whistling, yelling, gesturing. No men told us to smile or called us names, threatened us if we didnt, and Id wager good money that right now, if you thought about it, you probably never considered for a moment wearing a different blazer or tie for fear those slow-crawl, creepy whistlemen might consider your attire an invitation to rape you, knowing youd probably get blamed for it anyway because, look at the cut of your suit, the polish on your shoeeveryone knew you were asking for it. Liar.

No boy ever called you a slut. They asked if you scored with one.

It seeped out of after-school sports: the moms on the sidelines, chatting, and the girls nearby doing cartwheels, perhaps picking flowers or even cheering, while the boys gathered in the dirt with men, communing in sport.

It bellowed from the evening news: images of kindly white grandpas speaking assuredly in voices that belied their horrific mythologies, mythologies that vaporized and then seeped into every home. America, one of them began, all sunny and warm and white, and then suddenly snarled and warned us about welfare queens. Everyone knew the code, even kids.

It oozed off the screen in the TV shows and the movies, the stories about funny men, about action men, about tough, violent, angry menthe real heroes, the men who fought. They fought aliens. They fought ghosts. They fought each other. Nowadays they fight robots, computers. But back then they just fought other men in fake suits. And, oh, how they fought, cramming down anything they might be feeling in order to man up for duty, for country, for all of mankind, by which they meant everyone, obviously, like the Constitution. And then theyd not only win but theyd somehow also win a girl in the process, a real prize. A trophy. No one ever called these men boys, unless they were not white.

It sloshed out of the cocktail parties and neighborhood picnics, the men drinking beer in stumbly groups and lowering their voices about the problem with women when you approached or just holding forth endlessly on anythinganything at all, people, even, and what they should be happy for,