Why fathers should be feminists

When my older daughter was very little she came back from nursery and reported: “Max has got a willy, but Bella has only got a bum.”

Ever vigilant against such sexist self-deprecation through the internalisation of the patriarchy, I reacted with speed: “Bella hasn’t only got a bum darling – she’s got a fanny! And it’s not ‘only’ a fanny, it’s a fantastic fanny!”

My child looked attentive and I was pleased that at a vital moment I had taught her respect for the female body – and taught her that I respected it also. I was a good fellow – possibly a very good fellow. But as I twirled my Smith and Wesson of Feminism and plunged it adroitly into my Holster of Self-Satisfaction, I realised that in my zeal I might have shot myself in the foot.

So I hobbled into the kitchen to have a little chat with her mother: “If you should ever, either by the nursery staff or one of the other parents, be confronted with my having made the statement, ‘Bella has a fantastic fanny’, then this is the context in which I uttered these words. I am logging this with you now in case there is trouble down the line.”

I have two daughters and they live with me half the time. It would never have occurred to me or their mother to set things up any other way, following the Great Rearrangement. But even now, in 2019, people occasionally ask if I have them at weekends and are surprised to learn that I do half their rearing. I am always surprised at their surprise. Who isn’t doing it? Fatherhood is key to my sense of manhood. It’s something I do well, I think about it strategically and I do it with my own spin.

That said, I am aware that in basic ways the burden of role-modelling falls less squarely on my shoulders. As they advance into their teenage years, I will have less to say about my kids’ experience, though as poacher-turned-gamekeeper it will be good to have me on side as a consultant. With the coming terrain in mind they do kung fu and boxing. Kid Two hit me playfully in the stomach the other day and I still felt it two hours later. Good.

I don’t know their male schoolmates so well any more, or to what extent they will be able to outthink their own sexuality. I hope they don’t fall prey to one of these internet-age male power wimps who are literally too stupid to reapply classical principles of masculinity – strength, stoicism, meaning through service – to new rules of engagement. There is manly power in sexual self-control for example. My daughters and I riffed our way to a vision of tomorrow where men are as embarrassed at a loss of sexual self-control as they would be at a loss of bladder control.

For the 93 per cent of people who identify as heterosexual and live accordingly, the politics of DNA still express themselves through our courtship dynamics. DNA uses the sexes for its own reproduction and survival: giving men the biological mission to find many partners and make many babies; and giving women the contrapuntal mission to select mates likely to stick around, protect the family and hunt for food – women are typically more cautious in their selection of a sexual partner. When women outnumber men in a population – a university campus say, sexual mores adapt predictably to the market conditions. All things being equal though, for example in a 1:1 hetero relationship, it is women who tend to control the supply of sex, though it is men who control the supply of pickles.

With my adult-male strength, I can lock the pickle jar from my wife and children with a firm twist. I don’t do it, because I believe that pickles belong to all of us. But sometimes when we negotiate other matters I imagine their peripheral awareness that on a whim I could cut off the supply of brined cucumber – and I subtly gain the upper hand. Fear of bland sandwiches props up my dictatorship.

But I am a nice dictator. The way I behave in my relationships with my children must model the way my daughters might in future expect a fellow, if fellow they be, to behave – not romantically but over the long arcs of cohabitation. And I take very solemnly my duty to prepare my girls for a sustainable life in the world of men.

I sidle next to them. Their perfect faces are innocent, serious, absorbed in activity – and I am filled with joy. For a seated child’s head, as if by celestial design, tends to occupy the same altitude as my bottom. And how sweet it is to discreetly blow off and back slowly away, counting silently until their nostrils flare and the penny drops.

“Da-a-ad! Why-y-y-y?” they yowl, grimacing and flapping their palms in a doomed attempt to disperse the foul miasma.

“Why, it is a metaphor for my generation’s environmental legacy!” I respond in my best Noel Coward voice, pirouetting out of the room.