This post is part of the ongoing Birth of a Feminist series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

As children, we all grow up thinking that what happens in our families and/or households is normal and that everyone pretty much has the same kinds of family relationships and rituals that we do. Over time, exposure to other children, especially when visiting their homes, teaches us that no two families are the same, and even the most mundane of activities may be done a little differently in other households. Your family, for example, might have dinner around 5:30 every night while your friend’s family might eat around 7:00 pm. Or you might have a lot of chores, but another friend might not have any. There are a million variations on how families operate, and it is a function of parental values and experience, and the personalities and dynamics within the family. But despite all the little differences, the average family is more similar than different.

But then, there are families that operate a little differently. Families where the practices and relationships can be downright weird, unethical and even abusive. Now, I think that all families are harmful to girl children – family is not a natural or healthy grouping, but a patriarchal construct designed to give men power through ownership. Patriarchy, by definition is about male domination and female slavery, so all institutions and systems designed by men are harmful to girls, a risky endeavour for adult women if they choose to support and engage with them, and almost universally beneficial to males. But there are degrees of harm to girls in the patriarchal system known as ‘family’. There are families whose practices and relationships are much more abusive and harmful to the female children than those of the average family. But the girl children in those households still grow up thinking that what they are living is normal. Some of these girls may, at some point, come to realize that what they are experiencing is not normal and definitely not healthy, but it can take years for this to happen. Given the nature of some of these family practices and relationships, many of these girls may not actually come to their realization through discussion with others, but completely alone through observation and analysis. After all, what they are living is usually either taboo or extremely embarrassing to even broach with others, and discussion can get them socially tainted, blamed, and even further victimized by their family or patriarchal society.

My own family was a weird one, but I didn’t really understand the extent of the harm they did until I was much older. I was stuck in a household with two strange and damaged parents: an ever-present, NPD housewife-mother who had two modes – antagonistic or stand-by, like a computer in sleep mode waiting for a button to be pressed; and an enabler, narcissistic, psychologist father who was seldom around due to workaholism, but who I later came to realize, probably did more damage in the bursts of time spent around me than my mother did. I’ve written before that women tend to inflict tons of shallow cuts on fellow females, but men inflict stab wounds or else fly in, drop bombs and then leave. For some reason, we tend to pay attention to what other women do to us while conveniently forgiving and forgetting male atrocities enacted on our bodies and psyches. I believe we are well trained from birth to do this. Anyhow, I did eventually come to see my father for what he was – a horrible, entitled, sex-crazed, liberal misogynist. But it took my parents’ divorce and leaving home and developing my own goals separate from wanting to please my hero-worshipped father in order to accomplish this.

There were many forms of harm in my family, but I wanted to get into one daddy dearest was responsible for and that didn’t start to make me question things until I was 19 years old.

My father liked movies. I still remember the first time my family rented a VCR machine in the early 1980’s, invited some family friends over, and watched Star Wars. Not long later, my dad bought a VCR for the family, and began bringing home rented movies for the family to watch together. We were never asked what we wanted to watch. It always seemed to be ‘Dad’s choice’, and that never seemed to consist of anything considered to be kids’ content. And so began my exposure to explicit violence on television (and films). I have a specific pre-adolescent memory burnt into my brain of a scene from one of Dad’s films consisting of a violent beating and rape of a young woman. I also remember standing up shortly after that and going to my bedroom. I can’t remember what happened after that, but I know that I was not spoken to about what I had seen. I am not sure what had gone through my mind other than discomfort. And there were other experiences like this. Other violent films, some weird films. Dad also had taken a lot of pleasure in choosing films randomly – and that is actually something that I have done all my life as well, although I make sure to avoid films advertising explicit violence against women.

I also have a distinct memory of going to the movie theatre with a friend of mine when I was about 14, and for reasons I can’t for the life of me remember, we decided to sneak into another film. I am not sure how we chose the film, but we ended up in Casualties of War, an R-rated film with multiple very graphic and violent scenes of a squad of American soldiers raping and torturing a young Vietnamese girl. It was terrifying, but neither my friend nor I could move – I think we were afraid we would get caught where we weren’t allowed to be. I still remember that horrible film so many years later. It is hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by men, and they refer to what the soldiers did as a ‘moral quagmire’. Yes, men often say that rape during war is an inevitable moral conundrum. What to do, what to do? But it sure makes for super fantastic cinematography, don’t you think? My 14-year-old self did not think so.

It wasn’t until I was 19 that all of this violent film-watching at home and in public caught up to me and led to a significant realization, and it was likely due to my age coupled with other trauma going on in my life at the time. The previous year, my best friend had gone missing while walking home and then had been found dead a few weeks later, the circumstances surrounding it never released by the police and are still a mystery to me today. In the very same horrible month, my parents decided to announce a surprise divorce leading to my mother’s increased insanity and the longest and most convoluted divorce court case my father’s lawyer had ever profited from. As well, at the time, there had been some high profile abduction, rape, torture and murder cases of teenaged girls in a community near where I lived – this ended up being the famous case of the Canadian serial killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Needless to say, I was beginning to be very sensitive to violence at the time.

Following my parents’ divorce, my siblings and I would visit with my father on Sundays, stay for dinner, and sometimes watch a film – like old times. I remember one particular night, it was just my father, brother and me, and Dad put on some video. And it wasn’t long before I was presented with a scene of a woman at night in her home preparing for bed. A man was watching her from outside the house and then decided to break in, and start beating the shit out of her and raping her. I started crying. It hit me that most to all television and film entertainment was not for women and girls. It was for men. It is rapetainment. We women and girls sit there watching representations of ourselves being dehumanized, violated and destroyed on a continuous basis and we are expected to accept it and laugh along. How is this entertainment??? For women and girls, that is? I can understand that men might like it and get turned on by it or feel powerful because of it or possibly feel nothing at all. If I decided to write a television or book series centred on the terrorism, torture, mutilation and killing of men and boys, I guarantee you I’d be censored, or I wouldn’t sell anything, movie studios might reject me, and likely a horde of women would descend on me and call me every name in the book. I’d be a ‘misandrist’. And to question the escalating misogyny, slurs and violence against women in entertainment is met with derision, gaslighting, ad feminem attacks and excuses of “it’s art”, “it’s free speech”, “it’s just fantasy”, and “don’t be so sensitive, sweetie.” Would this argument work if the tables were turned???

Anyhow, back to my 19-year-old self. The accumulation of years of vulnerability and experience and fear and confusion resulted in my tears, and finally my father noticed. He stopped the film, whisked me upstairs and left me in the bedroom. Then he went back downstairs to rejoin my 15-year-old brother and to enjoy the rest of the rape movie. It was never talked about again. I felt alone and raw and so utterly hurt and disappointed and confused and angry. Remember that my father was a psychologist. He had trained as a child psychologist, but then went on to specialize in sex therapy. I almost want to say, “Ha, classic!” But that isn’t quite the right way to put it. It is so much worse than that.

There is a profound sense of hurt and betrayal that you feel when you realize a parent has harmed you in a deeply disrespectful way. It is natural for children, as they grow up, to begin to see their parents as regular humans with all the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that all humans have, but it is another thing altogether to realize a parent doesn’t respect you or see you as human worthy of consideration or care. This is even more significant if you are female child as we are all in a process of realizing that we aren’t respected as full humans by society at large. To have it come from your parents as well hits you really hard. I think this was the beginning of a long end for me with regard to my father. I began to see him as a misogynist, and there were countless examples after that to support my suspicions. And I became more vocal over time. He definitely didn’t like me pushing back against what he believed was his right to enjoy women’s degradation and subordination in entertainment form. But still it was confusing. He did respect my superiority to him in math and science, and he was the only one to tell me that it was perfectly fine for a woman NOT to have children. But where so many women would see this as a sign of a ‘great man’ or a ‘good dad’, his harm to me outweighs anything good he said or did. I think any person can have something in common with the worst people on earth, but it doesn’t mean you have to see them as good people or that they have redeeming qualities. Honestly, I don’t know how one can have a daughter and still find rape and violence against women to be entertaining. I just can’t get past this, but I will say that when women say “every child needs a father”, I couldn’t disagree more. Men know what men are, but they have no ability to feel empathy for women and girls. And empathy is the bare minimum you need in order to be a parent.

A last note on rapetainment.

Without getting into what will be a separate post on entertainment as patriarchal propaganda, I’ll just say here that even children’s media is designed to instill a docility and acceptance in females where it concerns how girls and women are seen and treated in the world. As a child moves into the consumption of adult material, the level of graphic and linguistic hostility and outright violence towards female people escalates – and with absolutely no added value, I might add – and thanks to what we consumed as children, we are well prepared to view it as entertainment, sitting happily with the males in our lives and pretending that the material is designed with us as a co-audience alongside men. In fact, the material is designed for males primarily as entertainment and ego-boosting, and then secondarily for females both as a threat, instilling justified fear, and as a confusing reminder that we are supposed to want and need males to protect us from their fellow males. The violence and slurs are normalized through repetition, and entertainment can be seen as a form of education as it works in the same way, burning it into your brain so that it becomes part of how you think and act. As a result, most females, by the time they reach adulthood, don’t even notice what is going on. They sit there with family members, husbands and boyfriends, laughing along to the rape and dead hooker jokes, feeling afraid and then safe when the alpha male slips an arm around them to let them know that they’ll protect them in exchange for docility and other services. And then women go back to their lives where they can pretend that this so-called art that they’ve consumed isn’t actually a reflection of what goes on in the world or that it has larger implications for and effects on women’s lived realities.

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