I don’t know what the etiquette is in these cases, but I shared with my master’s class the reason for my absence last Thursday: my father, 87, died suddenly of a heart attack the day before, Wednesday 23. He had just got off the bus mid-morning, felt dizzy and, the neighbours have told us, collapsed about fifty metres away from his home. My mother, watching impatiently from the window for him to return from his daily walk did not see the incident. She called me later (we live on the same street) complaining that the bus was being delayed by an ambulance, which had been interrupting the traffic already for one hour. I was quicker than her to join the dots and next thing I knew we were both being rushed to the hospital, courtesy of the local police, where my father had passed away alone a few minutes after admission.
As I explained to my MA class, he was far from being an ideal father, and if I am so involved in Masculinities Studies, this is because I saw my brothers study his behaviour and do the exact reverse with his children. Both are very good fathers. This gave me hope that patriarchal behaviour can be positively altered and confirmed for me the idea that the circle of patriarchal abuse in the family can be broken. Hence my intense dedication to this area of Gender Studies.
My father was not a typical abuser, in the sense that he never used physical violence against my mother or us, his children. He was a narcissist and what clinical psychologists call an integrated psychopath, which means that he was not perceived as a man with a pathology. He simply appeared to be a quirky guy who did as he pleased with a total lack of empathy. Yes, we played “My Way” in his funeral. My brothers and I left home at a relatively early age, in our early to mid-twenties, tired of his selfishness and indifference towards our persons and lives, but also of his controlling ways and obsession with money (he was extremely tight-fisted, except for whatever interested him, like his crummy cars).
This means that my mother has been on his own with him for about three and a half decades, seeing her life much restricted by his constant ill-humour, vulgarity, lack of sensitivity and inability to make friends or keep close ties with family members. Nobody attended his funeral for him, but to comfort her. My poor mother has been a victim of a blatant Stockholm system but the uncharacteristic black humour she used after the funeral gives us hope that she will soon be her own woman. She’s 81, luckily in very good health, and we have high hopes that she can enjoy a few good years, perhaps a decade. I must clarify that when we spoke with her openly about the possibility of a divorce (twice!) she adamantly refused to leave my father. Typical of her generation and their economic dependence.
I have thought long and hard about why my father could not be happy and made everyone around him so miserable. I have seen the same behaviour in women in the family and in my work environment, and I should therefore avoid a narrow gender-based reading. I am aware that my father can be seen as a the typically entitled man who craves for the empowerment that patriarchy promises and who lashes out whenever he feels that he is not sufficiently respected. He fitted that description. Yet, at the same time his unpredictable outbursts and his lack of emotional engagement have always suggested to me a possible biochemical imbalance beyond any psychological diagnoses (I have described him before as an integrated psychopath).
My paternal grandmother was a stern woman who did beat up my father as a child when he misbehaved, which was often, and who once threw a knife at him (he was then in his early twenties, his watch deflected the blade aimed at his face). My guess is that she had the same biochemical imbalance, which other members of my paternal family seem to share, too. My paternal grandfather was a far more easy-going person. He learnt to protect himself from his wife’s impossible character by staying away from home as much as he could, usually at the bar with his buddies. My father’s pride and joy, and the reasons why he considered himself a great husband and father, was that he never used violence like his mother and stayed away from all bars unlike his father. My brothers and I see his point, but there is an enormous distance between his self-satisfaction and our disappointment.
These days I have found myself the recipient of many messages of condolence from colleagues and acquaintances who naturally have assumed that our loss must be very painful. Close friends knew of our bad relationship and have been more cautious, respecting our wish to restrict the funeral to just a very small family circle. Just for you to understand the situation, in December 2020 my father caused yet another embarrassing incident in a restaurant during a family meal, followed by a stream of invectives when my husband and I try tried to stop him from bothering other diners. That put an end to his presence in any family gatherings, except the ones in his own home for Christmas. He never asked why, going months without seeing me or his sons. I myself stopped attending any family celebrations at my parents’ after he threatened to punch my mother in the face one New Year’s lunch. I’ve never been so furious in my life. Of course, my mother paid the price, for we basically stopped visiting my parents’ home, though we would see her quite often outside it.
I’m offering so much personal information because as the #MeToo campaign has taught us it is important to share private experiences so that public conversation flows. Mothers can also be guilty of the emotional neglect (and abuse) that my father was guilty of, but when a father fails to be a referent for his children the gap is particularly hurtful. Men who, like my brothers, lack a good father find it very hard to navigate their own masculinity, lacking immediate models, unless they find them in other circles or in fiction. As I have noted, my brothers chose to follow my father as an anti-model, which means that they learnt to be critical of his toxic patriarchal masculinity as young boys. In my case, the first crushing disappointment came when I realized around age 11 that my father could be totally wrong and was awfully sexist: the occasion was his suggesting that I was a slut for going to a male friend’s house to pick him up for a totally innocent walk in the park with other children.
The feeling that you do have a father but that he is not a father to you is just horrible and never heals. Today in this post I’m not actually mourning the father my brothers and I did have, but the one we never had. It’s a wound that never closes. I used to fantasize indeed about finding an alternative father figure that would somehow adopt me but this never happened, of course. I hear that some Japanese old men hire themselves out for that purpose, perhaps I should found a local branch of their service.
My father’s passing comes at a point when I had actually decided to stop working on Masculinities Studies. I have other projects that have nothing to do with this area of research, and I also believe that the younger generations need to refresh the discourse, which is beginning to sound stale. The question is that in the last few days I see more and more evidence of the danger that patriarchy poses at all levels, from Íñigo Errejón’s downfall to the Taliban’s decree to prevent women from talking to each other, as the world watches on doing nothing. Next week might bring the catastrophic return of Donald Trump to the American Presidency, though I remain hopeful that Kamala Harris can win, perhaps even by a wider margin than anyone may imagine right now. Around the world the breach separating men and women grows, from the public to the private. Yesterday, for instance, the Daily Mail, which can be hardly called a feminist newspaper, granted that the UK’s falling childbirth rates are not the fault of selfish women who only think of their careers but of selfish men too immature to think of fatherhood until their late thirties. British women, it turns out, are freezing their eggs as they wait for their male partners to grow up, thus risking their chances of becoming mothers at all.
Masculinities Studies should ideally be addressing and educating men into a new anti-patriarchal world, but one thing I learned from my father is that recalcitrant male chauvinists never change. They simply don’t want to learn. We told our father again and again that he had to be kinder to our mother and in this way we would be kinder to him, but he never even tried. There was no acknowledgement at all that he did anything wrong and, as you may imagine, he never asked for forgiveness. I accept, as noted, that this is behaviour that women may also indulge in, but I am convinced that the patriarchal sense of entitlement is the root of most evil in the world, at all levels.
The sad thing is that I don’t believe my father was happy in any significant way. He was frustrated most of the time but would have been far more at ease if only he had had the ability to listen, change and be content. Without it nobody can be re-educated which makes me fear that patriarchy will last for centuries unless we see a deep revolution I cannot imagine right now. Perhaps, now it’s not the time to quit Masculinities Studies and I should go on, with many others, hoping change will come sooner than we think. And I hope that this post, which has been immensely painful to write, helps other persons in similar situations as writing it has helped me.