When I was younger, my dad had a talk with me about boys. He told me that boys are “only after one thing” and that if anyone ever tried to rape me I should “kick him in the balls and run”. 100% boys will be boys, girls are the gatekeepers, victim blaming mentality. No actual protection. I’ll bet he thought that having that talk with me at all was progressive and that he was a good dad for talking to me about that stuff. When I was in my mid-teens, I was raped. When I finally had the nerve to talk to my dad about it, a couple years later after going through therapy for it, all I could manage to tell him was that I said no and the guy went ahead anyway. He actually identified with and sympathized with my rapist. He told me to get over it, everyone makes mistakes. Then he told me a little story about how he was in a “similar situation” once. Apparently when he was a young man stationed overseas, he had a relationship with a woman and one night she said no and he “went ahead anyway” - he used the same phrasing I had. I don’t know how much that “situation” resembled what happened to me, but my rapist held me down and forced himself on me, the gory details of which I had chosen to spare when I was talking to my dad. The whole thing still makes me sick to think about. Not the rape, I’m over that. Thinking about that conversation with my dad makes me sick. He also turned a blind eye to some other (milder) sexual abuse I endured for years, and he was complicit in covering it up. I still don’t know if he thought that rape is ok or not a big deal, or maybe he thought what happened to me was something a lot more benign than what actually happened, and I’ll never know what he really meant by all of those weird backwards things he said to me because we’re estranged (my choice) and I’ll never speak to him again. Every once in a while I check online for obits in his town to see if he’s still alive.

Some men go through some elaborate mental gymnastics in regards to the nature of men and their fatherly duty to protect their daughters. Some men are all too willing to throw their own daughters under the bus or to throw them to the wolves.