The High Priest of his home

I hung out with someone I'd rather I didn't tonight. Being polite is great, but chivalry really gets under my skin. Opening a few doors is nice, but excessive assistance creeps me out considering the fact that I still have all of my limbs. We started talking about our parents rules when we were in high school, comparing and contrasting how different genders are raised.

“I was never allowed to have boys in my room. Ever. If they were male, they was staying on the couch downstairs,” I informed him, considering this a norm for many teenage girls.

“Oh, my room was on the other side of the house, and what me and my girlfriends did in there was my business,” he replied, stating a parenting standard I usually heard for men.

I reminded him that boys and girls have very different rules when it comes to parental units and the dating world. The girl will always have a tighter leash with few exceptions.

“Well, yeah,” he said, “If I ever have a daughter, and she has a boy over, I’ll set his ass straight. If he even makes a move on her, his dick will be ripped off in a matter of seconds.”

For whatever reason, this did not sit well with me. At all. Yes, I’d heard that statement made many times before, even by my own father, but it just hit me in that moment that this attitude was not okay.

Why can the girl not be the one to “make a move?” Is it because they are supposed to remain pure, tight, chaste, until their wedding night? Do parents really find it effective to remain blind to the fact that it isn’t always the boy who gets to make the move? Of course not. Girls are not supposed to feel any signs of sexuality. Exchanges and embraces and fluids are supposed to be disgusting and limited to a man’s world. Since we are girls, we may not enjoy sex, we may not have it at all, and if we do, we must lay there and take it. We must not enjoy it.

The idea of the father attacking a boyfriend for having sexual relations with his daughter disturbs me as well. I think it is pretty fucked up, in all honesty, that fathers guard their daughter’s sexuality. It is, in many ways, perverted. I picture the image of the daddy who slips the purity ring onto his virginal daughter’s finger and reads a purity pledge out loud, promising to guard her from the big bad world. The following is an actual pledge read out loud at purity balls, up-and-coming trends in the world of abstinence where fathers and daughters attend a dance and make a “sacred” promise to one another.

I (Daughter’s Name)’s Father, choose before to God to war for my daughter’s purity. I acknowledge myself as the authority and protector of my daughter’s virginity, and pledge to be a man of integrity as I lead, guide, and pray over my daughter and her virginity – as the High Priest of my home.

Sure, most fathers do not go as far as to make such promises to their daughters, but the jokes that dads make about killing the boy who has sex with his daughter is all in the same vein. It’s such an obvious double standard. 

If his son gets fucked, he gets a pat on the back. When little Susie does the fucking, she gets grounded and chastised.