Your gypsy joke is actually a good example. Here in the U.S., most people don’t really think much about gyspies. But in Europe it is different. If your joke actually involved stealing, being dirty, or other negative things that we might think you actually mean, would you still consider it just a joke?
Jonathan
Huh. You never thought to ask “are you serious” I read over the list and given what I knew about most of the posters, believed it was hyperbole (expecially since they were done when the thread was in IMHO, and not the pit).
Where did I say I knew her?
I have had many close relationships with girls who are or have been teenagers, and it is extremely common for them to react in this way. Surely you are aware that statements of probability or likelihood (such as the one I made) are not at all the same as statements about individuals. (In other words, “members of class X are likely to adopt the characteristic Y” does not at all mean the same thing as “Shodan’s daughter is a member of class X and is therefore Y.”) Perhaps you missed that statistics class?
Er, no, I didn’t say that either. Fact is, I don’t feel comfortable talking about sex with my dad, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
If I had problems that I wanted to share with him, he would have been quite open to it, because he loves me and is a good father. However, I didn’t volunteer and he didn’t ask.
I have never heard of a father effectively “defending” their daughter from such things. I have, however, heard many cases of daughters who do not have good relationships with their fathers, and who actively withhold information from them.
Did you even read my post? Where did I say anything to do with a street fight?
Why do you want to laugh or feel sorry for me? Is it because I have a great relationship with my father even though he never threatened (openly or otherwise) to beat up my boyfriends? If that is the case I feel sorry for your daughter.
Now that I have done my best to answer your questions in good faith, will you answer mine? Namely, if it’s not your daughter’s vagina (or vaginal virtue) that you are protecting, then what is it? And do her girlfriends get the same firm handshakes?
Your question is leading. If it did…but it didn’t. I wasn’t talking about gypsy jokes in general (good thing b/c that’s the only one I know), but about that joke in particular.
But ok: the joke is funny to me because it involves a double meaning for “balls.” If other groups, like Apaches or young Republicans or Nader’s Raiders or…or…or…were associated with crystal balls, substituting that group in for gypsies would be just as funny.
Sometimes you can get away with jokes by substituting “ethnic” for the group. You might have heard it as a blonde joke, but a Norwegian friend of mine in college said, “In Norway, that would be a Swedish joke…and in Sweden it would be a Norwegian joke.” And in parts of India, it’s a Sikh joke. In the Midwest where I grew up, it was a polack joke but go to where my sister lives in Iowa and they sometimes phrase them as Dutch jokes.
Ask why an “ethnic” woman doesn’t breast feed (it hurts too much to boil the nipples) and you may get away with it.
Right, but the jokes in this thread were not about word substitution, they were about overacting to the negative aspects of two groups (boys as sex fiends, and girls as helpless flowers). A Norwegian can joke about a Swede the same reason a Yank can joke about Brit, because the relationship is equal and in most cases there is no true hostitity. The tone of the thread got weird because the jokes were about fathers controller daughters by physically dominating adolescent males. There is an imbalance of power and an element of truth in these jokes/not jokes that put off myself and others.
Jonathan
You were predicting the behavior of someone you have never met, and know nothing about.
Actually, here’s what you said -
Looks rather like a reference to an individual to me.
Either that, or you are now denying having said what you did.
Hm. Well, now that’s funny - you are giving me advice on how much better your father handled it than I am doing, yet you don’t feel comfortable talking about any of the issues raised in this thread - sex, problems with dating. And you have no children.
But I should be taking your advice. Uh huh.
Might want to read a little more closely. Pay particular attention to the part that says “Originally Posted by Strassia”.
Mostly for the reasons listed above - predicting behavior of people you have never met, denying what you have said, misattributing quotes - stuff like that.
I see that reading comprehension is not your strong suit.
Perhaps you should ask your mother to read my post to you.
Not your father, obviously - it may have to do with sex. :eek:
Regards,
Shodan
I’d like to know this, too. How many dads are giving their sons serious talks, I don’t just mean ‘Use a condom,’ just because they can’t get pregnant or are less likely to bear a ‘slut’ label?
It wasn’t too long ago that my own girlfriends with brothers had their parents magically change their approach to child-rearing based on gender. I actually had a friend whose younger brother was constantly told to watch over her at parties and school. Not exactly a purity ball, but the message is the same. And, if anything, it did less to instill the self-worth and decision-making skills you want your daughter to have so she can weed out bad dudes and survive on her own. (I was lucky enough to have a dad who supported me in everything I did and didn’t for a second question my judgment. But then again I’ve been a strong feminist surrounded by pretty decent boys since I was a wee child.)
Also, the ‘papa with a shotgun’ joke just isn’t funny, unless you write for According to Jim. It’s sad and old and creepy when you realize that too many men aren’t joking when they say the exact same things.
Right, your point is well-taken. I’m just suggesting that we not borrow trouble by extrapolating something that isn’t there. 
It may be a case-by-case thing, but I don’t read the posts as “Look at how macho I am,” because I don’t think they expect anybody to be impressed. Maybe I’m naive about that, but I don’t see the payoff. If they bragged to their neighbors or someone IRL, maybe, but here?
Rather, we are dopers and therefore verbally creative, so I read each as a colorfully phrased “I want to protect my daughter.” Some (many? most?) would probably be the first to admit it’s difficult to change the mindset, but so was seeing them off to kindergarten and such. Better to vent it rather than act on it. If this were a therapy session (which for some it may be), they wouldn’t get far by holding their feelings in.
A young man of a particular religion asked me if I knew the difference between a pitbull and a mother of his particular religion. It turns out that the answer is: a pitbull will eventually let go. I found it funny, in a misery loves company sort of way: my mother isn’t of that particular religion and yet…?
I absolutely know what it’s like to be oppressed by a parent (of the opposite sex, if that matters). I hope that the fathers who posted things that ruffled feathers are the sort who don’t really mean it but if they did, they can reevaluate. If, from reading this, they can see that they’re hurting and possibly crushing their “little girl,” that might make them realize they MUST back off.
But I know from personal experience that that doesn’t always carry the day. :(:mad:
To be fair, overprotective moms bother me, too. Not moms caring about who their sons date, but the situation where a kid is lost or falls down and hurts himself and a well meaning stranger tries to make sure everything’s okay and the mom reacts by biting the guy’s head off because he could be a molester, oh no!
I dream of a world where kids have two parents present and functioning well individually.
If a boy only wants sex and he comes to the house, the girl’s father is most likely to spot that. Forget the “my girl is lily white” shit; if the father knows that his daughter is sensitive and in love with the boy and all that, he may correctly believe that she’s just headed for heartache. I can see why he’d want to protect her. How to proceed from there is difficult, but it’s a valuable observation and a place to start.
And likewise, if a woman sees that the girl who is after her son is just conniving, seeking to manipulate him, using him, yadda yadda yadda, it’s the same thing.
THEN, wouldn’t it be great if the parents compared notes privately? The father might be furious that the boy just wants in the girl’s pants, but he should give a lot of weight to the mother’s opinion because it’s probably more objective. Also, she’s a female who has already had to find her way through dating and knows that she didn’t fall to pieces when a boy got too fresh. And hopefully she’s close to her daughter so she knows how daughter feels about father, whether that relationship is being damaged, and so on.
Likewise the father could be the “leash” for the mother when she’s infuriated about the young girl that her son finds enthralling.
Husband/wife can provide checks and balances for each other, IOW.
I agree. It would have been a much different thread if the jokes had started with “girlfriend/wife’s dad” did this as opposed to I will/do do this. Instead of clearly coming of as lambasting the over protectiveness parents can fall victim to, it seems as if some were relishing telling us what bad-asses they were.
I think the real underlying problem is that you send messages to you children you do not intend. I have seen overprotecting mothers turn their sons into useless sacks that can’t even do their own laundry in their 40s. I also know many women who choose career paths they later regretted because they had absorbed the idea that they were independent and capable up to a point, but a man would always be their to help them out. My wife realized a few years ago that she took a low paying, but fulfilling, career track because she had internalized the idea that her father would provide until she got married. She never thought in terms of doing only living on what she had. This not the exact same lesson this imparts, but it does seem to suggest that she needs someone capable of violence to protect her.
Jonathan
Jonathan
You would really, really dislike this woman. (In short an elementary school teacher discovers ‘I heart’ graffiti devoted to her eight-year-old son in the school washroom and… goes ballistic. Just as creepy if the genders were reversed, of course).
She is talking about her young son and a little girl. She sounds fucking nuts. But so does some of the stuff on this thread, even if it’s in jest.
Aha, so someone finally fished out that thread from a while back. I remembered it but couldn’t find it… And yes, I remember the same guys as before where doing the same posturing macho thing. Too bad, I was hoping maybe they’d changed.
I don’t find anything weird at all in the father/brother/cousin/uncle/any close male relative’s feeling’s about their little girl growing up… nor about their desire to protect her from unwanted and undesired attention.
The problem is when they, not the teenager/woman, are the ones who want to decide which is the undesirable attention, taking over the choices that should be left to her.
If (God forbid) I ever end up in an abusive relationship/end up attacked/mistreated, and I do have male relatives living near by… I do know that they would be very angry at whoever hurt their lil KG and would like to do some revenge themselves. And that feeling, I understand (and heck, depending on the circumstances I would say “Go ahead, be my guest.”).
But putting themselves on a pre-emptive posturing doing threats about things that have not happened, may not happen? FUCK THAT!!!
See, I don’t see doing those threats would prevent the bad things… Like someone above said, eventually someone who truly is worse than what you ever want for your daughter will defy you (and her, perhaps).
My dad, whom I don’t talk much about sex either, but a lot about life in general, said to me something like the following: “I did not raise meek girls. I do no want females who are totally submissive (not necessarily respectful) of their father. I do not want that because when they grow up, all they’ll know is how to be submissive to a man they love, and they’ll end up with someone who treats them as submissive as the father. And I don’t want my daughters with that sort of man.”
As a daughter (I’m 21 and in college, so a little bit out of the targeted age of “protected daughters” I suspect), I’ve been reading this and laughing a little.
If my dad ever had these thoughts, he certainly never expressed them. I am fully capable of taking care of myself, and was thus never a point of concern for my parents. My sister (who is older than I am, ironically) has somewhat less self-confidence than I do, may have caused some worry, but nothing my parents, and certainly not my dad, ever expressed. Matter of fact, I have the word of some of her former suitors that they were rather more concerned about exciting my disapproval than my parents. Does this mean that I thought I owned my sister’s vagina? Certainly not, and I rather suspect that any concern about me from the boys was because we all went to school together, and thus I was a bit more of an immediate concern than my parents.
I interpret this whole thing as an expression of the “hurt her and I hurt you” thing, rather than any kind of expression of ownership or of protecting property. Attempting to save a loved one heartache and pain, yes. Ownership, no.
Matter of fact, should a guy try anything inappropriate with me these days, I’m fairly certain my guy friends would be metaphorically reaching for the shotguns before my dad, and the thought that they would do this out of any sense of “ownership” of me quite frankly makes me laugh until my sides hurt.
In the end, I rather suspect that all the “I’ll have my axe sitting out, and gun magazines on the coffee table” is half-joking posturing. While I don’t doubt that the protective feelings that would make them consider it is real, I would be almost certain that in at least 90% of these cases, when their “baby girl” first brings home a guy, the father will be sitting there acting like a normal human being, no gun magazines in sight.
As a guy who was in high school once upon a while ago, there were two ways this whole situation tended to manifest. Type A was the kind of absolute idiots who literally did stuff talked about in this thread, and to whom even relative wimps like me were disrespectful in return–as an example, a girl I dated had a father whose opening line upon meeting me was “Son, I don’t care who you are, you can’t outrun a .357 and you’d best keep that in mind when dating my daughter.” My immediate response, without even thinking, was “Maybe not, but I can hit you from farther away with my .303 anyway.” Needless to say, perhaps, said daughter had no respect for her father’s bullshit and introduced me to a few delights, most notably third base.
On the other hand, I’ve had guys who carried off the attitude that, say, Shodan’s later posts seems to represent, namely, they could make “Hi, Z, nice to meet you. My daughter tells me you started dating at band camp?” sound an awful lot like “I have her back if she needs me to. If you don’t have her best interests at heart, you might wish to think about that.” I can respect that as long as it’s carried out with respect to the choices and well-being of said daughter.
Now, on the other hand, when I met my dear wife’s grandmother, who’s in her '80s, she took me down to their basement ostensibly to show me some woodworking project the grandfather was working on but instead showed me the splintered hinges of the inner basement door. “See this, son? I shouldered that down last week when I locked myself out with the stove on. If you aren’t good to her, well, I hope you’re tougher than a solid-oak exterior door.” and then she flexed. Nae, I shit ye not.
Nana’s pretty damn cool.
Anyway.
The biggest problem I think parents face, and I say this as someone planning on being a father in the near future, is this. Removing gender from the equation, there’s a transition point where your children go from needing your decisions all the time in order to be safe and healthy to needing you to not even offer advice unless offered because independence is the end goal. The particulars of that transition are in a large part where the difficulty lies–I can’t imagine catsix suggesting that any guys in this thread are scum if they make decisions about bedtime or friends played with or hell, what food is eaten and what clothes are worn for their 3-5 year old kids. I can’t imagine her objecting to basics like curfew-setting and homework completion. The problem is twofold–the transition between total control and little/no control, and the urge of many men and some women (in my experience) to really want to go absolutely apeshit in defense of their offspring.
When my wife and I joke about this, it’s either in the context of HER giving the “You hurt my baby and I will hurt you.” speech or me riffing on “Yeah, we want to teach self-reliance, I figure we start her on karate at 4 and move to knives at 6…‘Hey, little girl, your daddy said it was okay if I gave you a ride home from scaaaaaaaaugh.’ ‘Daddy said anyone who says that doesn’t need their eye anymore. sweet kindergardener smile’.”
As another addenda, that firmer-than-necessary handshake stuff is in fact crap. The only guy I know who seriously does that is my uncle, and he’s a broken-down alcoholic who did it to me for a decade until I was fifteen and just about broke every bone from his wrist up (by squeezing back until he knocked it off) because I was sick of his shit.
The above was in response to some steaming pile of childish posturing from Shodan.
But Orual, you are missing the funniest part: that the vast majority of pimply-faced adolescent boys would undoubtedly kick Shodan’s ass twice before he even got a message from his dinosaur brain, through his primitive, molasses-like nervous system and down to his dragging knuckles.
I’ve encountered males like this before–so very fucking sure they are some TV Show badass with cartoon biceps that they never stop to think about just how simple it is to outwit them; to leave them whimpering on their own living room floor, eyes pooling tears and staring unfocused up at their humiliated daughter and her vagina.
Not that I would ever be the one to put them in such a sad state, mind you, I’m simply musing over how many pathetic and terrified males (can’t really call them ‘men’) there are like that who are somehow so shocked (even though absolutely no one else is) when someone half their size leaves them in a mangled heap… pretty much every time.
All mouth, but no balls, no tactics, no nerve and certainly no respect from their daughters.
So what if Suzie-Q starts dating little Donnie Darko and she comes home crying one day and tells daddy that she caught him making out with another girl (and they don’t call her “head” cheerleader for nothing!), and he shows up begging forgiveness and Suzie-Q heads for the door to discuss the issue? Do you say anything? Do you intervene? Do you cast the Glare of Death at him?
Very long thread, didn’t read all of it, but I’d like to share an anecdote.
Yesterday, a good friend rang me in tears to tell me about his horrible weekend. His seventeen year old daughter announced on Saturday night at 8.30 that she was going to a party and that she wasn’t going to be coming home, because she was going to stay at <some boys>'s place. She then walked out and climbed into some boy’s car and left. True to her word, she returned the next day round noon. We infer that adult situations transpired.
His daughter is ordinarily really together and mature about such things. My friend had actively met and engaged all his daughter’s boyfriends, and liked every one…except THIS particular Lothario. He believes he has spent a life providing his kids with the right tools to make the right choices, and he believes her choice to be nothing short of a betrayal. Knowing this girl since she was a newborn, I’d have to say I agree with him.
If you’re reading this and you’re in your teens or your twenties, you may say something along the lines of “What a square!”, or something of similar meaning in the modern vernacular. If you’re a parent, you may concur. We may divide along these lines.
The cruel irony is that whatever transpired to set this turn of events in motion is exactly the sort of thing my friend would have gleefully engineered when he was this boy’s age.
And that’s why dads hate boys.
I have a daughter (15) and a son (9). I’m definitely telling her she needs to think, and not be pressured into doing something she may not really want to do. I’m definitely going to tell my son to treat girls with respect, because his sister and mother are girls. Beyond that, I don’t have any assault weapons to threaten suitors with, so I guess I’ll have to trust my kids to make the right choices.
From personal experience Mrs Cider’s dad was frosty to me for about the first decade, presumably because I stole his little girl or some such nonsense. Will I be frosty to the mates my daughter chooses? I hope not.
But I probably will.
Should I be happy to see him after he has done something to hurt my daughter emotionally? As has been addressed in the cheating thread, I agree that anybody may at some point cheat. It is up to my daughter, at that stage, whether she wants to forgive him and continue the relationship. How she’s handling things in her relationship is her business.
Where I would get involved, and in a way the boy would not like, is if he decides to try his hand at a spot of physical or emotional abuse. Don’t say it doesn’t happpen, because it does. Just last week, I “escorted” a young man to the office for slapping his girlfriend. It works the other way, too, we have young women here who are emotionally and physically abusive.
So let’s say my little girl comes home from a date with a bruised face or a black eye. Little Donnie is going to have some serious explaining to do. He’s going to be doing it in front of his parent(s) too.