poliphilo | Fatherhood

I absolutely believe that. And I think you've exactly hit on why fathers are becoming so idealized. The ones who haven't been able to step up feel guilty, and the ones that have, well, the ones who write screenplays consider themselves saints. And they may well be.

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Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we need all these films about loving fathers. Maybe us men will learn from them.

A friend of mine just said that one of the greatest things John Lennon ever did was to set an example (with Sean, not Julian) of loving fatherhood.

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I think that's true that we need these stories about good parenting.

My Evil Twin (the person most like me in the world) is a divorced father of two. His kids are in their mid-to-late 20's now, but he's told me stories of the divorce and the aftermath. I think it takes a lot of patience and courage and love to keep a good relationship with your children during and after a divorce--perhaps after more than during.

In the case of my ET, he has a lot of mothering instincts, too, perhaps more than his ex-wife. We've talked about this, mothering and fathering. They are clearly different attributes, if not skills. We had a lot of trouble quantifying them, though, and gave up, though we agreed that neither is gender-specific. Good parenting is clearly a combination of both.

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I've wondered who the E.T. was :)

Yes, I've been particularly hard on fathers, but I know that good mothers are also a rare commodity.

I think good mothering has to do with what happens inside the home and good fathering to do with what happens outside. (This is off the top of my head.) I agree that neither is gender-specific.

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I've wondered who the E.T. was :)

We are best buds and more than that. (And less than that since he lives in NY state and I live in Texas.) I don't remember what my life was like before I met him, and I caught myself once looking at old family pictures and wondering why he wasn't in the picture...

But anyway. The division of inside the home and outside the home is superficial. What happens inside the home affects your life outside in a profound way. The best managers I've had, for example, were also good parents. (They want their children to grow up to be autonomous, healthy, loving, individuals.)

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"autonymous, healthy, loving"- yes, that's the goal. And too many parents find that a big challenge- especially the "autonymous" bit.

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Oh, there are days when *I* find it a challenge, too.

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Of course, since I am the child my father ignores, while adoring my brothers and sister, I don't think it's all that great an example of fatherhood to love one child and not another. That's ego, not parenting. I feel for Julian--it sucks to realize that your deadbeat dad is capable of being a good parent--just not to you.

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Point taken.

My friend is a great fan of Lennon's. My own attitude is, well, he was an endlessly fascinating guy....

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Very much so. But when you decide to be a good parent to your new child and never make an attempt to fix what you did wrong with the old, no longer interesting one, that's not being a good parent, that's preening over how good a father you are because it makes you feel good about yourself. A good parent doesn't play favorites just because there's a new mommy around.

I'm a fan too, just not of his personal life. Music is separate from the person.

I did find this a fascinating post, though. There is a big emphasis on fathers--I'm not sure if it's because society is trying to encourage it or enforce it or what...but single mothers are almost always shown as somehow deficient in film, and single fathers are noble, self-sacrificing, and kind. It's really a load of crap--but of course single mothers are the spawn of the devil. Especially if the child in question is a boy--we all know that a woman cannot raise a man effectively--she'll just make him a sissy...

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My friend Judy (not an LJer) comments that we've had this spate of films in recent years (Mrs Doubtfire, Three Men and A Baby) which seem to be setting out to prove that men can be better mothers than women. "Motherhood, pshaw, it's a piece of cake. Now if I really set my mind to it...." Men are just so damn competitive.

But actually, I think it's fuelled by fear of redundancy. Single mothers have to be rubbished because if they can be shown to be doing a good job it would mean that men simply aren't needed any more.

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Oh yes. No one ever talks about a child being damaged if tey grow up without a mother figure--in fact, "mother figure" isn't even a viable phrase the way "father figure" is. But we hear all the time about the lack of father figures and how awful that is, how terrible it is for children to be raised by women alone--look at the mother hatred in Fight Club, for example. Mothers are the root of all men's problems.

Of course, no one even considers the damage done to a daughter without a female role model. We don't have personalities to damage.

So, basically, men are better mothers and better moneymakers and better artists. Why not abolish the woman entirely? I mean, what use is she?

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"Anything you can do I can do better
I can do anything better than you."

Sometimes I hate Hollywood with a profound hatred. Women and women's issues are all but invisible in so much of the output. Spielberg (whom I admire enormously in other ways) is typical in being blind to women. They exist as adjuncts to men- as (bad) mothers and characterless vamps and sweethearts.

I haven't seen Fight Club. My son keeps praising it to me, but I know I'd hate it so I've kept clear.

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"We are a generation of men raised by women. I'm starting to think another woman isn't the answer."

--Fight Club

Ironically, that comes after a speech about how the character's father failed him, in which the mother isn't mentioned at all.

It's a film about male rage, and as such made a big splash among men of a certain age and persuasion. It's also a good movie. But it's intensely and vigorously misogynistic.

I love movies. I really do. I don't fall into the "I don't watch TV/movies" nose-in-air crowd. I love books, I make them for a living, but I love movies too. And it kills me that there are so few movies that portray any kind of normal female sexuality, motivation, psychology, or identity. We are on the sidelines--unless the point of the film is to say something about the wickedness of angry feminists or the wickedness of any other kind of woman who takes the spotlight from a man. And sadly, women themselves make a lot of these films. Spielberg is perhaps the most pernicious kind, because women are simply invisible to him--they are rewards or punishments, and they have no psychology. It's easy to spot the hatred in fight Club--they just come out and say it. Spielberg is harder to accuse.

But didn't you hear? The feminist fight is won. Now everything can go back to normal--what a relief!

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I love movies too. And TV. TV is often ahead of the movies in giving women a voice and a presence. My favourite show of recent years was Buffy (but I loved Willow best.)

Currently I'm hooked on Deadwood. OK, it's a boy's show- guns and stuff- but they've allowed the women to be other than appendages. There's Calamity Jane for starters- foul-mouthed and ballsy and utterly unglamorous- and wonderfully played by Robin Weigert.

On the whole I prefer my films to be non-Hollywood. I'm crazy about Ingmar Bergman for instance. And Bergman gives his actresses real roles. In many of his best movies- Persona, Cries and Whispers, The Silence- it's the men who are the appendages. Yay!

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Well, living out here I don't really have access to too many Hollywood films--the base theaters show one or two movies at a time and those are rarely ones I want to see. I had to spell Jane Eyre for the video store so they wouldn't think it was a basketball movie.

I can't actually decide whether I like movies or the fun of picking them apart better. It's like dessert or main course.

I haven't seen Deadwood--no TV--but I love Buffy--and Willow. Of course, I could say something about the portrayal of academic lesbians as evil, but I'll just keep that to myself...

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Academic lesbians? You mean professors seducing their innocent blonde proteges?

There's a Brit show going on at present called Hex. It ain't Buffy- it's both sillier and darker. There's a very appealing, frumpy, lesbian ghost in it who seems to be turning into the central character- a kind of dead, teenage, Miss Marple if that makes any sense.

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Academic women who are also lesbians--at the same time! Willow was the only one of the gang--the kids, mind you, not the grown ups--who valued book learning, and she, of course, goes down the dark path, because that's what girls who step out of the helpmeet role do. ;)

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Ah, yes, of course. She lacked a firm guiding fatherly hand.

But good old Giles got her straightened out in the end.

I identified strongly with Willow. What with me being a geek and all.

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