This is the case I was looking for, though the other one is bad too.
Man, a sixteen year old girl sits on her fathers lap and people are getting ready to call Benson and Stabler. Another glorious legacy of our Puritan heritage.
re prr’s point: sure, all families have their own comfort level. Some are touchy feely and some aren’t. I wish my own very repressed parents had been able to express affection better, but what are you going to do?
And she’s totally aware of this dichotomy. She wasn’t flirting with her father, she was flirting with you all–not in a serious way, but in a “wow, these guys think I’m hot” way. She wasn’t worried that her dad was going to see her sexually because she knows that there isn’t anything sexual there–she knew she was acting in a provacative manner, but the provaction was towards you all–she was showing off her new body and her “feminine wiles” (and if the display looked awkward and amatuer to you, well, it was, but she doens’t know that. Think of it as watching a kid playing T-ball). It was a performance, and her dad was no more than an excuse to come in there.
She may normally be that affectionate with her dad, but what set your alarms off was a a little touch of sexuality that probably usually isn’t there and that he probably didn’t notice. It wasn’t for him–it was for you, and she is so far from thinking of him in a sexual manner that it never occured to her that that part might look oogy.
[QUOTE=Khangol
What creeps me out is how many sick, twisted, perverted people there obviously are in the world who want to make friendly, fatherly, familial, completely non-sexual contact between family members into something bad or wrong. It’s people who think like that who have confused and frightened so many children and parents of today so much that they are unwilling or unable to show love to each other, or comfort or console each other. Talk about a loss of family values![/QUOTE]
Agreed. I’m getting really tired of the “Any Adult Male is Toxic” meme. My family hugs all the time, and we haven’t managed to produce even one child molester.
Thank you! Gosh, my post looks a little overbearing, in retrospect. I started to reply, got called away, and finished about twenty minutes later, not realizing that a whole bunch of people had slipped in and joined the “not creepy” side while I was in limbo. But I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels the way I do.
Sorry, I took a long time to write that short reply and then didn’t check the thread again before posting. Most of those opinions weren’t there when I started composing.
Reminds me of other similar threads where folks discussed the age you should stop showering with your kids of opposite gender, what rules your household has concerning minimal clothing, etc.
As a parent, you realize how differently you view things when your kids are involved. While I consider my daughters beautiful, they are in no way objects of sexual desire to me. Just doesn’t happen. There are countless times I could see them in a towel or underwear - and I just avert my eyes. But I have no problem getting an eyeful of young lovelies on the street, at the beach, etc.
Would be completely different for my daughter to sit on my lap, compared to one of her friends, tho.
While we are not an overly physically intimate family, we do give each other hugs, back rubs, etc. We tend to sort of pile all over each other on the couch and floor, sharing blankets and pillows, when watching movies at home. Or if I am sitting on a chair, it would not be unheard of for one of my kids to sit on my knee. One of the neatest things about family is that you can be that comfortable with each other without any worry about sexual subtext.
From your linked article:
“Some of the children’s accusations were bizarre. Some alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken in one case through secret underground tunnels, which were sought by investigators but never found. Ray Buckey was described as having beaten a giraffe to death with a baseball bat in front of the children. When shown a series of photographs by police, one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.”
Highlighting is mine. This Chuck Norris stuff is really getting out of hand.
Iit’s probably about the same as the thread we had a couple of years bcak about guys with hot sisters and how they deal with sexual feelings concerning her. The general consensus was that while we can indeed see that the female in question is lovely, thoughts of sexuality were never in need of being dealt with. Because they just don’t come up in one’s mind concerning a sibling. (Mostly, some people may, but we were speaking for ourselves in that thread.)
See the difference? It’s not sexual to us because that type of scenario is so foriegn to us that we don’t even have to repress any feelings or urges. The feeling isn’t there to supress. To someone without a good looking sister, or a sister at all, they just can’t (often anyways, ymmv) wrap their minds around the concept because what they see is a female with all the sexuality that usually implies in their minds.
While not a father of a 16 yr old hottie myself, I would wager that what I described is also the case for them.
You see a sexual creature, a female with all the sexuality that that usually implies in your mind. The father sees his daughter.
Of course, all this goes out the window with incest fans, but in my experience, that’s not a very common situation. (I could be totally wrong about that, but that’s why I say “in my experince.”)
There is an incredibly inappropriate joke in here somewhere.
Why do you avert your eyes?
I didn’t spot that quote you and ShibbOleth noticed. It’s pretty funny, but I caution that Wiki is open-source, Chuck Norris is a popular internet meme, and there are a lot of jokers out there.
OK, I am sorry, but I don’t find Father-Daughter affection to be “inappropriate”. What I do find to be “inappropriate” is dirty minded Mrs Grundies who watch a nice gesture of affection and see something nasty in it.
Preach it brother!
This is an issue that really hits home for me. I am a single father with sole custody of a beautiful little girl. Almost from the time she was born, I have been somewhat paranoid about how others would perceive my interactions with her. I have no idea what brought it on, but I used to really and truly stress out over any situation where I felt in the slightest danger of being perceived as a child molester. This became especially difficult when my daughter developed repeated urinary tract infections, requiring me to apply medication to her nether regions on a regular basis. I harbored some secret dread that someone would jump out of a closet with a video camera, going “Aha! We caught you fondling a child! You’ll go to prison (where you’ll be beaten and murdered by the other inmates) and she’ll be raised in abusive foster homes!” I’ve gotten over that particular insecurity, but I still bristle when anything reminds me of this.
And the way American society (or at least the corners of it I’ve been exposed to) now reacts towards situations once considered perfectly innocent – it boggles my mind. For example, the daycare where my daughter stayed when she was a pre-schooler, little girls had to wear shorts under their skirts to prevent their undies from showing. In itself this is not an especially big deal (though it did contribute to my daughter’s UTI problems!), but the logic behind REQUIRING it is pretty disturbing. Just who are we protecting with this policy? Are the exposed knickers of a four year-old girl scientifically proven to be an irresistible siren song for any nearby pervert? Or a corrupting influence on four year-old boys?
Some parts of the country are obviously more prone to such obsessions than others. The aforementioned daycare was back in El Paso, where I spent many useless years of my life. My mother was a schoolteacher there, and told me that there were now rules in place making it a punishable offense for a teacher to hug a student. Sick. Truly sick. So far, my experiences in Austin have been much more favorable. Parents in my apartment complex don’t seem worried that their grade school age daughters will be abused by that weird single dad when they come over to visit Kizarvexilla (who is a bouncy, precocious 7 year-old). I still keep my guard up, though, and try never to put myself in a situation that would invite suspicion.
But reading some of the opinions expressed on this thread brings it all back again. I can certainly grant that there will be instances when a sixteen year-old girl sitting on her father’s lap would (and should) be considered inappropriate. But blanket statements about such an action trouble me deeply. Are we so far gone in our puritanical paranoia that any instance of physical closeness between a father and his teenage daughter must be seen in a sexual light? Disgusting.
Seems strange to me. But my family wasn’t the type that snuggled and petted one another. Er, I guess that means we weren’t healthy and loving. I’m just curious, for all the people who think it is a wonderful thing for daughter to sit in daddy’s lap: Is it equally awesome for mom to sit in 16-year old son’s lap?
If you can teach me how to ignore that BIG WHITE ELEPHANT, I’d greatly appreciate it.
I was a little weirded out recently at an extended family get-together at my in-laws’; my wife’s uncle (45 y.o. man) and his daughter (15 y.o. girl in full-on, err, womanhood) played “grabass” (constantly tickling, grabbing, pinching, wrestling, etc.) the entire time, with her sitting on his lap for the majority of it. We were completely creeped out although there was obviously nothing illicit going on.
It’s creepy, and so is when a grown child still calls her father, “daddy.”
Do you mind when Sampiro refers to his “mama,” or is this strictly a girl thing?
I agree, in fact I think the mindset that finds it objectionable is way weirder than the lap-sitting.
I do find this oogy, but for a slightly different reason. It seems like the girl has developed a behavior, possibly a pattern, of being charming and flirtatious with men to get something from them. Taken to its extreme, this is analagous to trading sex for money. Without getting all Great Debates about it, let me just say this isn’t consistent with my values. When I have known young women with this type of behavior, they’ve usually learned it from their mothers. In one particularly oogy case, the girl and her mom were always all dolled up to get money from ex-husband/daddy. The case described in the OP doesn’t particularly set off my molestation-ooginess sense, though. It’s not the girl’s cuteness or flirtatious behavior that leads to molestation, when that happens, it’s a serious boundary and power issue that the molester would be perfectly willing to act on with a plain, shy girl.