Amongst the many myths that weave the fabric of patriarchy; the ancient and the trending, the pseudo-scientific and the esoteric; there is this thread that I suspect is holding it all together. It might just be one of those foundational myths, it certainly lives at the heart of it; etymologically, historically, and empirically.
Like most people I learned from early on that my father was the head of the family, marking the beginning of my experiential knowledge of patriarchy. It’s a domestic-level inauguration to the gendered hierarchies that try to govern us, easing us in like frogs in a pot coasting into boiling temperatures, unbeknownst we’ll be cooked into a meal. As a kid, I didn’t need to know much about society, nothing about wage gaps and discrimination and vitriolic woman-hating and Judith Butler, to know who was in charge. But the myth is more than the fact that “Dad’s the boss”, that is just the reality it creates. The myth makes it feel justified and absolute, it is the seam that holds the fabric intact, and it tells of the grandeur of fathers and the desolation of the fatherless. It would like us to believe that without that strong male paternal figure, a person falls apart like old cloth.
Recently fatherlessness has become the subject of a popular copy-and-paste insult on social media. Usually directed at women, sex workers or queer people, anybody deemed too feminine, too cringe and too promiscuous might be reprimanded for their “fatherless behaviour”. Post a racy pic on your insta? Fatherless hoe. Show off your manicure as a guy? No father figure and possibly traumatised in early childhood. Promote your Onlyfans? Exhibit A of “fatherless behaviour”. The message is clear: the fatherless person is of low morals, a social deviant really. I can’t see this idea, that supposedly the father makes or breaks the person, as much else than an overstatement of male significance, if not an expression of yet another macho power fantasy. But more importantly, it's a tired narrative, as old as patriarchy itself, a base principle of agnation. In the New Testament Jesus is born to a virgin mother, as it was believed then that a child is created of only the paternal seed. There was no knowledge of the ovum which partially forms the fetus, so the mother and her womb were seen as mere incubators. In this exaggerated perception of the father’s importance, the divine child could not be stained with the original sin that has befallen all of humanity since the Garden of Eden, as only the male mortal could bequeath it to his child.
Seeing that the antiquated myth is resurging in the form of cyber-harassment crusades in the name of the father (amen!) someone has to vindicate the fatherless, if not write them a love letter, and I feel right in my authority to do so. I have long learned to shut my ears to myths and online misogynists and to view blood as inconsequential. Because whatever good I ever achieved in life, or managed to become, any happiness that has ever come my way, none of it materialized due to my father but in spite of him. So when a few months ago my mother called to inform me of his passing, alone in his apartment, I felt happy to be finally and indisputably fatherless.
It was an easy transition really, I had toyed with the label of fatherlessness long before he took on those layers of dirt and graveyard scrub. I was elated with the idea that I was my mother's child only. If life were anything like ancient lores, I might as well have appeared in her womb out of nowhere, a clump of growing cells belonging to her alone, conceived of nothing. When I first tried it on to see how it fit me, I found this word, "fatherless" to be like armour, shielding me by denying him the privilege of being my parent. But it became more than that, a word loaded with hidden meanings only I knew. I live by the grace of my fatherlessness. I survived his cruelty and then I survived him.
But since all is relative, the father’s gain in power is the mother’s loss. Where he is strong she yields, where he has wits she is shallow, where he meaningfully shapes his offspring, she is trivial. It’s not just Mary’s virgin birth, many mythologies of the Christian and Greco-Roman canons are informed by women’s supposed subordinate role in conception. Where the father is substantial, she, to be the vessel to hold his child, has to be hollow. Don’t be shocked but this line of thinking opens the gateway for patrilineage as a way of societal organisation, which is portrayed most poignantly in the Oresteia, a Greek tragedy about a bloody family feud.
As the story goes, King Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War, a war at the outset of which he sacrificed his eldest daughter, to raise the winds. In his ten-year sojourn in Troy, his wife Clytemnestra has not forgiven him and by the time he returns, she has long planned his murder. Clytemnestra lures him in with the promise of a hot bath and upon his descent into the tub, stabs him until the bathwater is coloured red. She would pay for this, as this is a story of vendettas and wherever blood is spilt, more shall follow. Her time comes a few years later, as her remaining children Orestes and Electra plot to avenge their father. Her son, Orestes, becomes her executioner and subsequently finds himself haunted by the Furies, underworldly goddesses of vengeance, who don't take lightly to matricide.
The crux of the story rests in its final part. To end the streak of gory vendettas, Athena sets up a legal trial for Orestes, who is accused by the Furies, of murdering his mother. The defence, spoken by Apollo, decrees that "Not the true parent is the woman's womb that bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed new-sown: the male is parent". In agreement with Apollo, the verdict bids that Orestes be pardoned. He killed his mother, sure, but to avenge his father, who is now seen as a more legitimate parent. Simone de Beauvoir comments on Apollo's speech, noting how the mother is demoted in rank and how “the father’s sovereignty is exalted; he is the one who holds rights and transmits them”. The Oresteia is more than a simple tale, it is thought to reflect the actual shift from matriarchal to patriarchal lineage that took place in ancient Greece. So at least in part, patriarchy really is built on mysticism.
You can of course add other hypotheses, like Engels’ who located the dawn of patriarchy at the establishment of private property, starting as a system of property transmission from father to son. And while the father claimed his property he claimed his woman and children just the same. Thereby the hetero-family unit was established, and the hetero-family unit brought us the unpaid domestic labour of women and American sitcoms about happy families with three kids. But no matter which explanation you favour, what matters is the mother's demise vis-a-vis the father. It might seem contradictory to dismiss her in the one domain she is designated to: child-rearing and the family. Most men want to take on a minimal amount of responsibility in this, some would rather raise the winds than their children. Yet nothing this substantial could be hers alone. If God created man in his image, then how shall the destiny of literally just any guy, be less than that? The mother merely grows the child, "the father alone was the creator", writes de Beauvoir. Of course, the father makes the person.
But it’s not just those ancient texts. In the 1940s and 50s waves of psychologists started to believe that the most crucial and defining factor in any girl’s healthy development was her father. Said psychologists were influenced by the psychoanalyst who shall not be named (it’s Freud), who developed his most famous theory (Oedipus complex) based on his complete refusal to believe the accounts of paternal abuse his hysteria-diagnosed patients entrusted him with. Does this mean that his become-cartoonish therapy couch was stricken with archaic myths? Well, Freud did name the female counterpart to Oedipus the Electra complex, after non-other than the Oresteia’s murderous daughter.
Maybe his unhinged father theories stemmed from deep-seated womb envy (the feminist response to one of his more wildly misogynistic concepts: penis envy). But no matter what motivated him, he laid the foundation for a convenient double standard: Any mental or behavioural issue is caused by a deficient father relationship because he is that important. A deficient father relationship is usually caused by the mother - or the child even - because he is never at fault. Absent as he often is, he is nonetheless indispensable. The father reigns over the mental and emotional health of his children and he is infallible. It is at his will they get to be stable, functional and valuable, and it is in his absence that they’re not. If he wants, the father breaks the person.
Or so they say. Are we actually gonna place a single all-powerful man at the nexus of the psyche and accept that we could so easily be destroyed at his will? In Athena’s trial, Orestes’ killing of his mother and Clytemnestra’s killing of her husband were scrutinised, yet no one questioned King Agememnon’s right to kill his daughter. It is never the father who destroys, not the negligent father nor the father of the hysteria-patient who gets shunned or pathologised as broken. Instead, fatherlessness is used as an insult to punish women for the men that have failed them, in the same way, single moms are mocked but never useless, selfish or abusive fathers. Of course, they aren’t criticised cause they’re part of the design, the archetypical father, the patriarch, is a despot ruling over his family like they’re his property and he believes he has the right to impose his narrative reality on them.
To behave fatherlessly is to behave out of bounds of this system of domination. That’s why fatherlessness, when accepted, embraced or chosen is so dangerous to patriarchy, and that is why it has to be used as the ultimate insult. It doesn’t matter if you actually have a father or not, just like slut, cunt or hoe, it is above all else a marker of deviancy, reserved for the most unruly and disruptive to patriarchal equilibrium. While affronts implying promiscuity used to be the worst thing you could call a woman, it’s just not enough anymore. We can’t just be hoes, we have to be fatherless hoes now. It is the perfect insult to put you back in your place, cause “wasn’t there a man around to teach you to behave, make you conform, make you complete?”.
The guy who calls women online fatherless might just be a 20-something-year-old who has never touched a woman, but nonetheless, he dreams of rearing a girl to his liking, to be docile and good. Most importantly he’ll teach her to never love another man like himself. At the same time his mouth waters at the thought of a woman with daddy issues. He can't wait to possess her, she who is dying for his attention and validation. Cause he doesn't understand the woman who calls herself fatherless self-affirmingly.
The self-proclaimed fatherless hoe has skipped the inaugural patriarchal teachings of her father, no one taught her how to be, and she never wishes to resume her education. Like the furies, she defies Apollo; she knows she isn’t born from an empty vessel and therefore cannot become one herself. She alone rules over her mind and body as she constitutes herself of nothing but her own will and imagination. She pities those who label her as broken, knowing completeness to be a silly social construct. You know how when a woman goes missing, people lament that she was someone's wife, sister and daughter because they have to place her in relation to a man to understand her personhood? But not the fatherless hoe, her value is innate and eternal, she doesn’t receive it on account of being the daughter of a man. Cause she’s not, she’s freed herself from that burden.
When my father died it was unexpectantly. Yet, in his last months, I had this recurring dream, that under heavy tears and sobbing he would beg me to forgive him as if the part of me that was yearning for amends flared up in precognition. This dream was completely unrealistic of course, an apology was as likely then as it would be coming from his literal corpse. It must have been my tears on his face, my sleeping mind gave them to him, probably because I secretly wished that I could make my pain his. Because I wondered what it would be like to tip over that power imbalance between us when I’d tell him that no, I won’t forgive him. Now all that is left for me to do is to send him off with a few spiteful words, and a feminist analysis because I know he would hate that. So I made his obituary my manifesto. An ode to myself and all the other fatherless hoes.