First, We Kill Off the Parents, Starting With Dad

Anakin Skywalker, bad dad turned good.

Anakin Skywalker, bad dad turned good.

Over at the BBC, Andrew Martin, presenter of the documentary “Disappearing Dad,” looks at the world of fiction and realizes that, when it comes to fathers, there are really only two kinds: bad and dead.

In fact, I have a perfectly good relationship with my dad; it’s just that if a father does play his paternal role correctly, there can be no story. He would, by means of his restraining hand, his wise counsel or financial support, step in to prevent any misadventures occurring. Much better to kill him off in chapter three, as Robert Louis Stevenson does with Jim Hawkins’s father in Treasure Island.

Dad is usually dead in any decent children’s story, whether it be Harry Potter or The Tale of Peter Rabbit, whose father was not only killed but also eaten by Mr McGregor.

He then goes on to trace the current state of fictional fatherhood—i.e., father no longer knows best, probably because he’s dead—to the “youthquake of the 1960s, the rise of feminism, and the culture of ‘cool.'” I don’t know if I entirely buy that, but the whole thing did make me wonder: Is there any good fiction out there—novels or movies—with good fathers?

I’m not talking about the many, many fictions, from Star Wars to Little Children, in which a bad dad turns good in the end. Those follow a pretty typical narrative arc.

What I’m looking for—purely out of curiosity—is a story in which there’s real drama that involves, but doesn’t corrupt, ridicule or treat with kid gloves, a decent father. Anyone got recommendations? Maybe Wall Street? Or is it just better to do away with parents completely?

Why Science Makes Motherhood Impossible

stressed-mother-in-kitchen

From the Times’s Motherlode blog:

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University videotaped 39 mothers while they put their infants and toddlers (ages 1 month to 24 months) to bed, and also gathered questionnaire data about how the mothers were feeling at each bedtime and how the babies slept each night.

Physical actions — holding a baby close or nursing him or her to sleep — are, essentially “going through the motions,” the study concludes, and had far less impact on sleep quality than emotional cues. When the mother did those actions while feeling warm and positive, the baby slept well, on average; when the same types of things were done by a mom who was irritable or brusque or distracted, the children were more likely to sleep poorly.

Holy shit. It’s not enough to care for your child. It’s not enough to get the little demon to go to bed. It’s not even enough to love your child despite it all. You have to be in a fricking good mood. Where are they going to find a mother who is, on some level, not “irritated or brusque or distracted”? Tell me. I’d like to find her.

By the way, the article notes that fathers weren’t included in this study because the amount of time we spend putting our children to bed was “statistically insignificant.” Living on my own with JP, I do put him to bed, and we have our little routine, which is usually fun and pleasant—bath, brush teeth, bathroom, in bed, book, song, see ya later—but if I were held to the non-brusque, non-irritated, or undistracted standard, well, I certainly wouldn’t pass muster. And I’ve yet to encounter the mother who would, either.

Of late, I’ve been trying to determine in my head what are some of the common threads that run through the posts on this blog. One of them, it seems clear to me, is an exploration of a motif in the popular culture in which utterly unattainable parenting standards are set, left unmet, and then guilt over said failure is manufactured. I don’t really know where it comes from. Is it a reaction to a two-working-parent society in which children get less time with their parents? An outcropping of our litigious society in which every action has to be contingency-planned, and if something goes wrong, someone has to be held accountable? Or is it just that we don’t have anything better to do with our time than to pick each other apart?

Women: Is There Anything They Can’t Do Better Than Us?

duffThere are few things more male in this world than beer. Why, just ask men—they’ll tell you. But it turns out, according to the Wall Street Journal, that women are better at tasting beer than men are:

[T]he British company SABMiller PLC decided several years ago to reach deeper into its employee pool to find adept tasters, inviting marketers, secretaries and others to try their hand. The company concluded that women were drinking men under the table.

“We have found that females often are more sensitive about the levels of flavor in beer,” says Barry Axcell, SABMiller’s chief brewer. Women trained as tasters outshine their male counterparts, he says.

So, great. Fucking wonderful. Thousands of years of dominating the alcholic refreshment world, and now it turns out women know our drinks better than we know them ourselves.

But! There is an upside. It turns out that women who taste beer well don’t necessarily enjoy drinking it more, nor do their friends enjoy drinking around them:

“It’s hard to be a social drinker sometimes,” says Laura Dopkins, 28, a MillerCoors panelist, who has a master’s degree in food science and used to taste cereal bars for Kellogg Co. “Other people don’t find it fun to drink around you” when you refer to beer as “metallic.”

What that means is that while women may be better at tasting beer, men are still better at enjoying it—even if that means we’ll put up with metallic, skunky beer.

Although, actually, we may not have to. Since women are supposedly “the superior sex when it comes to detecting such undesirable chemicals as 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, which makes beer ‘skunky,'” we can continue to employ them (at home and unofficially, of course) as quality control, like the dupes who taste Obama’s food for poison. Honey, can you get me another? This one tastes … funny.