If a straight woman is unlucky in love, she has daddy issues. At least, that’s what pop culture has always told us. The same diagnosis is given to those of us who’ve ever dated anyone more than five years our senior, musicians with good hair but bad morals, and men who ride motorbikes. It’s hackneyed but, like so many cultural stereotypes, it persists.
I know this because I am one such straight woman. And on Father’s Day this coming Sunday, unlike millions of people around the world, I won’t be spending it with my dad. I’ll spare you the details but in short: he doesn’t live in the UK and our relationship has been fractious for as long as I can remember. I’ve also had my fair share of romantic disappointments, mostly thanks to my relentless pursuit of unavailable men. It doesn’t take much to put two and two together.
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But however applicable it might be, the label ‘daddy issues’ is one I’ve always resented. Not least because of how it manages to shift the blame; the phrase itself refers to the consequences of a man’s actions and yet women are the ones with the label. There’s also the basic infantilising sexism of it all, with the word ‘daddy’ reducing us all to little girls, stomping our feet, and throwing toys around because we can’t find a decent partner. And then there’s the sexualised element, perhaps most astutely exemplified in Blonde, the fictionalised biopic of Marilyn Monroe. As the starlet, who famously never knew her father, Ana De Armas asks her husband, Arthur Miller: ‘Am I your good girl, daddy?’ He replies: ‘Yeah, you’re my good girl darling.’
I can’t bear it. Mostly because the cultural dominance of ‘daddy issues’ and its accompanying flippancy has robbed us of a very important conversation about father-daughter relationships, one we really ought to have considering just how vital they can be in shaping who we are and how we move through the world. Many of my female friends have difficult relationships with their fathers; some don’t speak to them at all, while others have learned to quietly tolerate them with the help of excellent therapy.
These aren’t just bad dads, either, or men who’ve abandoned their families and created new ones with women half their age. Often, the cases are far more complex, wrought with decades of deep-rooted trauma and mental health issues that have left a lasting impact on who these women have become. And of course, in some instances, those fathers are no longer around at all, leaving a very specific kind of grief that somehow only becomes more poignant over time, turning every milestone into yet another marker of their absence.
In other words, despite the triviality we associate with ‘daddy issues’, there’s often nothing trivial about it at all. And yet, this is the prevailing message across so much of pop culture. It’s both endorsed and parodied by Sex and the City; in ‘A Vogue Idea’, after Carrie reveals to an older male editor that her father left when she was just five, he hits on her. ‘Your father leaves you without the answers and you spend your life asking questions about men,’ he says, uttering a sentence that has haunted many of my own sleepless nights given how much of my writing fits neatly into that description. But that’s by the by.
My point is that there are plenty of examples of women – both fictional and real – who’ve been framed in such a manner because of their relationship with their father. The narrative is inescapable. Take Britney Spears, whose struggles are almost always spoken about in relation to her estranged father, who famously enforced a conservatorship that put almost every element of her life under his control.
Other high profile women who’ve spoken about complex relationships with their fathers include Angelina Jolie, Adele, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, and Meghan Markle. Of course, these are celebrities whose stories we’ll never really know beyond those told by headlines. But the stories we do hear tend to follow the same sort of ‘troubled woman because of her dad’ narrative. It’s tedious, it’s unhelpful, and it means we’re asking the wrong questions, usually revolving around the romantic habits of these women.
Here are some of questions about father-daughter relationships I wish we were asking instead. Why is it that fathers let their daughters down, and what drives that kind of parenting? What makes a good father to a daughter, and where are those role models in pop culture? Why are women so viscerally affected by fatherly abandonment, and how can they overcome it without resorting to making clichéd choices in their romantic lives?
Perhaps one upside of the daddy issues concept is that, when considered and interrogated properly, it can elicit some truly excellent art. No, I’m not talking about Taken, Clueless, or Father of the Bride. I’m talking about Sofia Coppola’s comedy, On The Rocks, Charlotte Wells’ astonishing debut feature, Aftersun featuring Paul Mescal, and the somewhat-on-the-nose-named TV series, Daddy Issues which stars Aimee Lou Wood.
There are plenty of prominent examples in literature, too, though the most famous is obviously Sylvia Plath, whose father died when she was just eight years old. Her poem, ‘Daddy’, addresses him directly, using a mix of violent imagery and rhetoric to convey his oppressive nature. And yet, Plath insists on her unrelenting love for him. Because as much as we might like to think otherwise, women need fathers. And when we don’t have them, or at least the ones we need, it can cause irreparable harm. And it’s a harm that should be taken seriously.
So this Father’s Day, my thoughts will be with those women, none of whom deserve to be reduced to caricatures. But who will, in all likelihood, find the day quite difficult, as I do each year. Because even though Plath concludes her poem with the memorable line, ‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through’, any reader with a modicum of empathy comes away knowing she’s not through at all. None of us ever really are.
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