Many of us don’t consider that creepiness unnecessary and find something rather disturbing about a grown man describing anything he would do with his daughter by the same terms he presumably used when finding his wife.
Actually, I’d personally feel a little creepy about using the word that way myself, for just that reason. But people do legitimately use the word “date” to refer to non-sexual, non-romantic get-togethers. See #4 and 5 on Wikipedia’s list of meanings for the word “date”:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Date, a social activity which may be associated with:
- Dating, a form of courtship, which may include any social activity undertaken by, typically, two persons with the aim of assessing each other’s suitability as a partner
- Double date, a social date in which two couples participate
- Group date, a modern pattern for dating wherein a group of single or currently dating men and a group of single or currently dating women organise a night out, with the hope of forming romantic partnerships
- Meeting over a meal (e.g., “breakfast date”, “brunch date”, “coffee date”, “dinner date”, “drinks date”, “lunch date”) or for a planned activity (e.g, “bowling date”, “golf date”, “ski date”, “tennis date”), for social and/or business reasons
- Play date, an arranged appointment for children to get together for a few hours or even a few day to enjoy each others company
[/QUOTE]
There can definitely be an emotional component to incest. It may be part of the grooming process to gain the victim’s trust. My adopted father routinely took me out for movies and dinner, said and did ‘‘romantic’’ things to convince me how much I meant to him, and I was routinely mistaken for his girlfriend or wife. He said things like, I was the only one who understood him, and he wished he married me instead of my mother. I was a young teen who looked much older than my age so the general public reaction was, ‘‘Oh, you’re his daughter? I thought he just liked younger women.’’
Both were true.
It’s just an awareness raising billboard. Would you be equally creeped out by something that said, ''Don’t hit your girlfriend?" or whatever? I think people just don’t want to think about how routinely this stuff happens to children. It should disturb you. You should be more disturbed by the reason the billboard exists than the billboard itself. Destroy the culture that allows the exploitation of children to happen and you’ll never have to look at another goddamn billboard again.
This is how I feel, too.
That’s what I thought this thread would be about, based on the title – that someone was angrily protesting the fucked-uppedness (one p? ;)) of purity balls and the like.
One of the downsides is definitely to expand vocabulary policing into making it ‘creepy’ for someone to talk about eg. father daughter date, which is not creepy at all if your mind isn’t in the gutter. That alone isn’t a huge deal. I wouldn’t use that term myself because I know a lot people are actively looking to be ‘disturbed’, especially by male behavior.
The whole thing, including the core issue of how to help victims of abuse, is a balance. I know a lot of people have trouble with that concept. ‘If only one case were prevented… what’s the possible downside?’ The downside is what I’ve seen that I believe, based on my own experience I doubt there is any real way to ‘cite facts’ in such a case, a tendency to exaggerate various problems which can have negative effects if the exaggeration is big enough and the problem small enough. To take a perhaps extreme but real example, there’s no actual evidence that ritualized sexual abuse of children at pre-schools ever happened anywhere. But there was a wave of celebrated cases, people wrongly convicted, etc. Incest and child sexual abuse in general definitely happen, but the same potential exists.
Sowing comprehensive distrust in society, even if against men, is not cost free. For people who can acknowledge that point rather than completely blow it off, there’s a useful conversation to be had about what the balance is. Those who act as if there isn’t any downside are misguided IMO.
I don’t take the bill board as a personal accusation against me. But IMO the approach of that billboard is very non-optimal. If the proposed measure was part of age appropriate awareness raising of kids as part of education, then maybe, depends on what exactly.
Okay, that’s a fair point.
Sure the potential for exaggeration always exists, but we’re talking about a pervasive cultural problem comparable to, say, domestic violence in its commonality, not weird paranoid delusions about Satanic ritual abuse. In my experience rape and sexual abuse is an issue for which people dramatically underestimate the prevalence. The state of Michigan where I live is the 3rd biggest state for sex trafficking nationwide and I live near one of the highest trafficked corridors in the world (U. S. to Canada.) When victims manage to escape here, they are rarely even pursued by their captors because they are easy commodities to replace. The most recent FBI report published for Michigan estimates 60% of Michigan women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime, from unwanted touching to forcible rape, and 20% are raped, the majority before the age of 22. Research by the sort of people studying these things indicates time and again that merely being a teen girl is a dangerous situation in the U.S. (being a young boy isn’t wonderful either but we have all sorts of issues affecting our ability to get accurate data on the sexual abuse of boys and men, including the profound stigma and limited resources for male survivors.)
The billboard’s phrasing hit me particularly hard given my own background and how fervently I would have liked someone to club my father over the head with exactly that phrase, but I doubt it would have changed anything in my own behavior or my adopted father’s because he was a complete sociopath and I was limited in exit strategies at the time. I’m not saying the billboard is a stroke of genius or anything. But look at the world you live in and the heinous things happening in your own neighborhood and try to gain a little perspective. It’s like complaining about homeless people bringing down the trendy areas when poverty is a deeply problematic social issue robbing people of safety and dignity.
As a grant writer for sexual assault & DV Prevention Education programs I am particularly interested in what programming models are effective at preventing abuse. I do know that a current evidence based model for preventing domestic violence and sexual assault is bystander intervention. It’s an approach that acknowledges you can’t talk rapists or abusers out of abuse, nor can you place the onus of prevention on the victim, but rather you can appeal to the decent majority of folks who both find such behavior abhorrent and are in a position of power to intervene. Research on this model is most promising.
Mere awareness raising in, say, schools, is generally not effective at preventing abuse, but it has been indicated to mitigate the damage to the victim when abuse does occur and enhance the likelihood of reporting the incident, finding resources and recovering with less shame and self blame. IOW, the daughter being dated might potentially see that billboard and reserve a little more dignity for herself in the aftermath, or acknowledge the problem sooner, or something to that effect.
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It has been nagging at me what this slogan kept reminding me of, and I just realized… with Jack Nicholson’s help, we can figure out the truth before Escobar gets here.
“She’s my daughter! [slap] She’s my date! [slap] She’s my daughter and my date!”
[quote=“Riemann, post:69, topic:760648”]
It has been nagging at me what this slogan kept reminding me of, and I just realized… with Jack Nicholson’s help, we can figure out the truth before Escobar gets here.
“She’s my daughter! [slap] She’s my date! [slap] She’s my daughter and my date!”
[/QUOTE] Um, post [33](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19500368&postcount=33). Didn't have the Youtube link, though.That’s a good point, so how about billboards addressed to the kids, the victims. Tell them something like “It not okay to make love to your parents”, or something more graphic, and encourage them to contact the authorities?
Don’t blame him.
He’s spent too much time on Sequential Threads.
oops! missed it, sorry
I think it would be highly damaging to place the onus of responsibility on the victim that way, which is probably why the billboard is phrased the way it is. It tells kids what’s happening is not okay without implying the child should be doing something to stop it.
I realize that seems counterintuitive - ‘‘kids should tell’’ being the default common sense response - but the situation is usually quite a lot more complex than that. These children are emotional hostages in the very least, and usually have good reasons for not telling, maybe they need to protect themselves from a worse fate. And trauma is very complex. In the aftermath of abuse, it’s common for the victim to blame him or herself for not doing more to stop the abuse, and it’s common for loved ones of the victim to blame the victim for not doing more. A billboard like the one you describe would only reinforce that self-blame and would likely compound the trauma.
Yes, this. I know a lot of great fathers who have taken their daughters to dances, taken them out to ice cream. Basically non-sexual dates.
The guys that this billboard is directed at are not ‘dating’ their daughters.
Bringing awareness to incest is a good idea. However I don’t know if this is the way to do it.
*It’s not like our style to put the burden on the victim,
but if your dad grabs your privates, we think you should kick him
(Just saying, is all)
Burma-Shave
If your dad, when he’s drunk, likes to “play” in your bed
No jury will convict you if you shoot him in the head
(He had it coming)
Burma-Shave*
You’re going to send us all straight to hell. 
She’s your date, not your daughter,
so you don’t get to do her,
until dinner you have bought her!
(nice tip too!)
Burma-Shave
The more I think about this the more I really don’t understand what the phrasing of the billboard is driving at. It made perfect sense to me at first, but trying to think outside of that experience, it seems like it would be really easy to interpret the phrasing as an attack on people who innocently go on dates with their daughters. I think my discomfort with the idea of daddy-daughter ‘‘dates’’ is more based on my own experience and maybe it should be an innocent thing.
I now understand why people might take it more personally.
I’m also trying to work out what sort of billboard would be effective at preventing incest or helping incest victims. I got nothin’. Maybe something pointing to red flags for others to look for, or something like that.
Oh. Relevant bit of info we all seem to be missing here. I looked up the actual billboard. ‘‘She’s your daughter, not your date’’ is not the full text of the billboard.
It says, ‘‘Getting drunk is never an excuse. She’s your daughter, not your date.’’
That’s quite a different message, I think.