Gloria Steinem believes that women get more radical with age because they become less valuable—their merits as sex objects are diminished, their function as breeders is depleted—as time goes on. She may have a point—Bridget Hall is surely making more money at fifteen, with modeling contracts for Maybelline and Ralph Lauren, than she will ever make as a uneducated fifty-year-old who learned everything she knows during her sixth stay at Hazelden (not that all models are brainless boozers, but by most accounts Hall is). But I can’t imagine Amy Fisher will ever feel more worthless than she did at seventeen.
And traditionally, daughters of all kinds have always been infinitely expendable—just ask the Chinese, who in recent years, under the one-child-per-family policy, have sent so many daughters to state orphanages (and often into the hands of childless American couples) that a generation of boys has grown up to find they have no one to date, no brides to marry. It is the wisdom of Confucius that a woman who cannot read, write or work is a blessing, and ritual foot-binding once assured her delicacy: her trifling, decorative, homebound life as a breeder, her impeded and hobbled access to the world. Even today, the literature of Chinese-American women is rich with unfortunate feelings about being born female. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, a model of the novel as self-help book, should have been called Low Self-Esteem Is Worse Than Mao! Subsequent writers have been both more subtle and blunt: “We were a family of three girls. By Chinese standards that wasn’t lucky,” Fae Myenne Ng writes in the first lines of her novel Bone. “In Chinatown, everyone knew our story. Outsiders jerked their chins, looked at us, shook their heads. We heard things. ‘A failed family … Nothing but daughters.’ ”
And the trouble of getting a nubile daughter into a practical nuptial arrangement is just so much literature. One of the reasons there is no point in reading more than any one Jane Austen novel (Pride and Prejudice would be my pick) is that they all involve the same dilemma: a good, henpecked man is cursed with daughters, and no son, and British entail laws do not allow any of his distaff offspring to inherit the family house. There is a distant male cousin out there somewhere, often brooding and inscrutable at first, and in the absence of a male heir in the immediate family, he will gain title to the home. In the meantime the girls all need suitable mates. In movie versions of Austen, the elaborate cast of extras and wide crinolines create a claustrophobia that makes it feel like daughters here, daughters there, daughters everywhere—girls more suffocating than a plague of locusts—and all of them in want of a husband. Always one daughter is silly, another priggish, another materialistic, and one is good and solid and righteous and noble. The last one, of course, by the end of the book and after a few bouts with hesitation blues, will be betrothed to the cousin who will inherit the house—nearly lost to the family by entail, now saved by incest. The other sisters will also prevail—after a few balls and some afternoon teas and at least one sudden onset of illness that requires convalescence at the future intended’s family home—to make proper matches as well, and as the pages stop or the credits roll, Mr. Bennet—patriarch of Pride and Prejudice—will heave a great sigh of relief, the gaggle of girls at long last out of his hair and lair.
But if daughters are expendable in an eighteenth-century comedy of manners, they are altogether abusable in earlier settings. The Bible, particularly the more narrative and less prescriptive stories of the Old Testament, offers several crude depictions of daughter destruction. Early in the book of Genesis and late in the decline of Sodom—where bestiality began and prison pastimes were invented—a minor character called Lot found his house under siege by all the men of the city, all demanding that he hand over the two guests who were dining with him (apparently the townsmen intended to, as the etymology suggests, sodomize the visitors). Lot tries to negotiate with the terrorists by making this offer: “Behold, I have two virgin daughters who have not known man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.” In this situation, things work out all right because the two sojourners turn out to be angels who blind the madding crowd, and thus a deus ex machina prevents us from seeing a man give over his daughters to gang rape to protect a couple of people he’s only just met. But that’s cold comfort to those of us who realize how unlikely it was for Lot to have a pair of angels at his table; in the absence of miracles, the father opted to ruin his daughters. Later on, after Lot’s wife has turned into a pillar of salt while looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah as they burned down, Lot’s daughters seduce him while he is in a drunken stupor, each of them ending up pregnant. Apparently, the two girls’ intentions were noble: fearing that the twin cities’ destruction meant that the whole world had been demolished, they believed they were the last people on earth, and they wanted to ensure the species’ survival. Obviously this family was uniquely afflicted.
But then in Judges 11, the prophet Jephthah, a Jew in good standing, promises God that he will sacrifice the first thing that walks out the door of his house if he returns from battle against the Ammonites victorious. In a blatant attempt to blame the victim, when Jephthah sees his daughter approach he yells, “You have brought me very low, and you have become the cause of great trouble for me!” Two months later, Jephthah slays his daughter and burns her on an altar, a virgin sacrifice, as promised, never receiving the eleventh-hour reprieve that Abraham gets before slaughtering Isaac. As biblical scholar Ann Tapp points out in “Virgin Daughter Sacrifice,” a study of several episodes of this kind, the moral rectitude of these acts is never questioned or commented on at all in the text. “Nearly as atrocious as the ideological presentation of women in these fabulae is the fact that each fabula is so inconspicuously in a larger narrative that the hideousness of their events reads as a passing detail,” she writes. “The cursory, noncritical allusions to virgin daughter sacrifices in these narratives serve to legitimate the atrocity.” In fact, Tapp cites a mention of Lot’s deeds in the International Critical Commentary, published in 1930, which singles him out for praise: “Lot’s readiness to sacrifice the honor of his daughters … shows him as a courageous champion of the obligations of hospitality in a situation of extreme embarrassment.”
Emily Post, take note.
Still, both Jephthah and Lot are only bit players in the biblical epic, and their impact is limited. But two much-studied celluloid heroes—Jacob and King David—were equally remiss. Jacob, one of three patriarchs, progenitor of twelve sons who eventually named the Twelve Tribes of Israel, counted Dinah as his only daughter. As we have seen, it was Dinah who one day went for a walk “to see among the daughters of the land,” and instead ended up getting raped by Shechem. After the deed was done, after he “took her and lay with her and tortured her,” he fell in love with her, the way Luke fell for Laura after he raped her on General Hospital. Shechem then went to ask Jacob for Dinah’s hand in marriage, but Jacob stayed silent, stony, refusing to get involved. (By Deuteronomic decree, Shechem is actually doing the honorable thing, since the law commands that a raped virgin belongs to her violator—“she will be his because he tortured her”—which at first seems illogical, since a girl ought to be protected from, not entrusted to, those who hurt her, but obviously the tradition of a woman being branded in blood, or being claimed by way of injury, has very respectable origins. Certainly it is demonstrable in modern life that when violence becomes an open wound which the woman is constantly worrying and the man is forever regretting—i.e., the dynamic between a battered wife and her husband—it can become a form of emotional Krazy Glue far stronger than the usual acts of kindness and tenderness that most couples try to bond with.) After Dinah’s brothers massacre Shechem and his people, in a nasty and brutal revenge involving a lot of grown men’s foreskins, as well as plenty of rape and looting—behavior that makes it clear that it is family honor and not Dinah’s feelings that are at stake here—Jacob finally speaks up, but only to say that this pogrom has brought ill repute upon his home and will invite retalia
tion. Jacob never expresses concern for his only daughter.
In the case of King David, the crime is within the palace walls, and rape intermingles with sibling rivalry. The trouble begins when Amnon, David’s firstborn and heir apparent, becomes infatuated to the point of affliction with his half sister Tamar. Lovesick to distraction, the prince takes to his bed, and convinces his father that Tamar must come to his chambers and tend to him and feed him with her own hands. It is on David’s orders that Tamar visits Amnon, so it is under her father’s auspices that she is raped. After this defilement, Amnon finds himself repulsed by his pathetic victim, “hating Tamar more than he loved her before,” and when he tosses the newly deflowered maiden out of his room, insult overwhelms injury. David, who is consumed by the work of nations and already in over his head with Bathsheba and the scandal involved in getting her husband killed so that he could marry her, can’t be concerned with Tamar. Instead, her full brother Absalom takes matters into his own hands and kills Amnon. After that Absalom flees the kingdom in fear of his father’s vengeance, David becomes the poet of Psalms and the seeker of Ecclesiastes, and Tamar is never mentioned again, a ruined girl becomes a fallen woman—a woman fallen out of the pages of history, as good as dead in the public record.
In all these Old Testament instances, basically decent men—and Jacob and David surpassed mere decency to become regarded as tzaddikim, righteous disciples of God—treat their teenage daughters with neglect, abuse or both. These moral lapses on the part of men who were supposed to have walked in God’s footsteps prove that adolescent girls have always been without safety or sanctuary, they are between men, no longer Daddy’s little pumpkin and not yet somebody’s baby, some big man’s little woman. Stuck in the middle—as they were in the age when women did not have careers (when men probably did not even have careers—callings, or sheep to tend, but not careers)—girls of a certain age could ripen and fester as a full-time job. They become a problematic presence around the house, dead weight in the domestic realm because they are just kind of hanging around, expectantly, waiting for something to happen, waiting for life to begin—waiting to get married, basically. In the meantime, their misdirected and undirected and randomly directed sexual energy threatens all the other women in the household—this is assuming a time when harems were a standard feature—because anything that is latent is potentially explosive.
Both the Dinah and Tamar incidents—if we assume their cost to the households they affected and not the emotional toll taken on the girls themselves—caused a lot of trouble and bother for everybody around them, with internecine warfare and fratricide being the worst of the consequences. These girls, silent in the text, but acting as the “McGuffin”—screenplay jargon for a trivial item that the audience will forget about, though it motivates all the action—become the model for every gun moll who causes a rumble when two rival leaders of the pack fight for her honor (though she never asked them to), and the prototype for Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships and then disappeared from view. And you always get the feeling that all this Sturm und Drang could easily have been avoided if their naïve, nubile bodies had not been there, loose, unclaimed, unprotected—basically, just asking to be raped. In biblical times, a teenage girl’s betrothal could create kinship among clans or bring peace between nations—her value as a matrimonial object was real, a bride-price could be attached, she was a commodity for her father to trade. But until she could be appraised on the open market, she was just a body housing hormones in flux, her intrinsic worth not yet assessed. “Virgin daughters are, as understood by men, in a transitory state,” Ann Tapp writes. “Though capable of child-bearing (a necessity in maintaining male lineage), they remain possessed by their fathers and desired by other males, thus placing them in a dangerous position between two male forces vying for ownership.” Back then, it was accepted at the outset that people were functions, a woman was only as valuable as the babies she made, a child was only as good as the crops he tended to or the cows he milked—the notion of unconditional love, Immanuel Kant’s vision of a “kingdom of ends” where everyone is a subject, beloved for his human spirit, did not yet exist. In the Bible almost all purely emotional love—Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba—is an agent of downfall, while practical unions thrive. A teenage girl, on the verge of becoming the producer of another man’s heirs, a sexual being who is forbidden to all the men in her home, cannot be of much use to her father, who may be aroused, disgusted or frightened by her fomenting femininity. He may want to protect her, but he also might prefer to just get rid of her. He might just not know what to do.
It is in this vacuum, the slender ravine between male protectorates, that the Joey Buttafuocos of the world slip in. No father, no husband—open season. There is no story of a teenage girl in trouble where the father is a vigilant, loving presence. Though the Fishers did not divorce until sometime after Amy went to prison, her father looms throughout her memories as distant and terrifying—he was thirty-eight when she was born, her mother was only twenty-one, and in Amy’s recall her dad was old, often sickly, with switchback moods and a trigger-finger temper, the kind of father who would punish Amy for getting raped by the tile man, the kind of father who did not protect her when she was sexually molested by a family friend between the ages of three and six. Elliot Fisher was a true failure in the role of father as John Wayne, the patriarch-protector avenging his wronged daughter’s honor—but he can rest easy knowing he shares this limitation with Jacob and King David. And he can comfort himself further with the fact that at least he was there, even if he was not there.
It’s quite normal, at this point, to grow up without a dad. Fathers often feel like a family absence, like heroes of Bolshevism airbrushed out of photographs under Stalin’s rule—they are missing figures that nag and tease us with the sense that they must be there somewhere, like an amputated limb. The fact that the institution of fatherhood is in complete crisis in this country is not something that anyone of functional sanity can possibly deny any longer. The Million Man March, the Promise Keepers’ rallies—these happenings could never have been elevated to media events unless a return to responsible paternity was on their agendas. According to a Washington, D.C.-based organization called the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60 percent of rapists, 72 percent of adolescent murderers and 70 percent of teenagers in state reform institutions are products of single-parent households; in 1993, 84 percent of the children of divorce were in their mothers’ custody, and according to a study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, 35 percent of children who live without their fathers never see them, and 24 percent see them less than once a month. It has gotten to the point where there are now public-service advertisements on television that show a lion teaching one of his cubs how to roar properly, which is apparently basic to the survival of the brood and the species, presenting a parable for the importance of fathers to human beings also. The overdetermined images like the Kodak commercial that shows a hunky, shirtless man holding a baby or the overextended dads of popular movies like Mr. Mom and Mrs. Doubtfire both belie the absentee fatherhood that is a fact of growing up American, and also pay homage to the struggle that many younger men are in fact undertaking to make their paternal presence known, to be involved parents, nothing like their own distant dads. Though the future of fatherhood is probably a brighter one, all the troubled teenage girls who have made headlines are the products of a lifetime of wondering, Where’s Poppa?
Lolita is fatherless, her widowed mother’s marriage to Humbert Humbert the intermediary that allows the pedophile to enter her prepubescent life. Most of the child-star sex kittens are fatherless, and many were in some sense replacing their missing fathers: Tuesday Weld, Sue Lyon, Carol Lynley, Linda Blair, Jodie Foster and Drew Barrymore all acted as sole breadwinners, supporting single mothers, siblings, stepfathers, whoever. In the Tamar and Dinah stories, both David and Jacob have ceded all paternal duties to the brothers. Nicole Brown’s father did not hesitat
e to hand his eighteen-year-old daughter over to O.J., and continued over the years to mortgage Nicole’s life to his son-in-law’s generosity, becoming the recipient of a Hertz dealership in Orange County, allowing O.J. to pay for his various daughters’ intermittent schooling. It seems clear that girls gone wrong are always either bargaining chips between fathers and husbands—currency, wampum, barter—made into sex objects by the men who should be protecting them and allowing them to cling to their girlhood just a little bit longer; or they are simply without fathers at all.
It is, in fact, a telling detail in this saga that when Mr. Fisher first brought Amy to Complete Auto Body to have her sideswiped mirror repaired after her first car accident, he overheard Joey say, “I’d like to fuck that,” in reference to his daughter. “Somehow that remark hadn’t bothered my father,” Amy says. “He dismissed it as a compliment.”
Hey little girl is your daddy home?
Everyone, it seems, protects the boys when they are bad, but no one protects the girls when they are victims. It’s true that the Fishers provided Amy with excellent legal counsel, and risked all that they owned as collateral for her $2 million bail, but their support for her always came across as anemic, ashamed—as if they too could understand the objections to a teenage hooker with a married lover, as if they could never summon the strength that Mary Jo Buttafuoco had to just insist that her husband was perfect and that was that. Just as abortion rights activists for so long fought on behalf of womankind with the apologetic “Abortion is a terrible thing, but …”—minced words that paled beside the righteous indignation of those championing the cause of the unborn—we seem only to defend our girls gone wrong with “She is a monster, but …” We never quite give them the insane and often inexplicable support that boys seem to get no matter what. In his 1997 book Our Guys, journalist Bernard Lefkowitz chronicles the overweening kid gloves’ treatment that thirteen teenage boys—all local heroes and varsity letter types—were accorded in affluent all-American Glen Ridge, New Jersey, when, in the spring of 1989, they sexually abused a seventeen-year-old mentally retarded girl (she had an IQ of 64), luring her into a basement and treating her to an afternoon of oral sodomy followed by rape with a baseball bat and a broom handle. The next day, the boys tried to entice an encore performance out of their victim. Despite the grisly nature of this crime—and the coldblooded cruelty that could cause these boys to ask for more on the morrow—only three were finally convicted, and not until 1993; they were not sentenced until 1997—to jail terms that could be paroled in as little as ten months’ time—and in the intervening eight years, these rapists roamed free. According to Lefkowitz, one of the convicted offenders simply explained, by way of excusing himself, “I used poor judgment.”
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