What Daughters Should Know About Dad Psychology

Article here. Excerpt:

'He wants to love you unconditionally, but your father can’t toss aside the shock-collar of patriarchal operant conditioning. The rules of manhood have become second nature for him. Now, when he looks at you, he sees an insufferable little girl version of himself. He feels an unconscious jolt of social rejection. That’s why he’s overprotective of you, but not your brothers. He has spent decades policing and imprisoning the supposedly feminine parts of himself, the things he considers weak and fragile. But he lets the supposedly masculine parts roam free. Leftover boyhood trauma distorts his parenting decisions. Please remember, it’s not you he hates, it’s all the things about himself that he’s been trained to hide away.

Unfortunately, we have very few protocols for deprogramming masculinity. Most of us end up supporting misogyny even when we try to fight it. Here’s an example: You know those social media videos of #girldads getting makeovers from their daughters? Those memes depend on people understanding the don’t-be-a-girl rules of manhood. We all mistakenly assume that it’s a great sacrifice for a man to be painted with lipstick, blush, and eyeshadow. So, we click "like" to commend Dad for taking a high-stakes risk. Our sentimentality feels like resistance—a celebration of disrupted gender norms—but it’s just concealer, masking the blemishes of patriarchal masculinity. The truth is that even those proud #girldads hate femininity, and the rest of us are all complicit in the online virality that rewards them for it.
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It's tragic that you’ve had to contend with the lingering effects of your father’s boyhood trauma. As a result, you’ve probably internalized many of his narrow-minded ideas about femininity. I bet you’ve felt your own electric shocks, tremors of shame tingling up your spine, when he refused to walk down the grocery store tampon aisle. You’ve likely wondered if your body is as ghastly as the look on Dad’s face when he cringes at the mention of menstruation. I assure you it’s not; you’re perfect.'