Frustrated by Fathers and Feminism

But here's how we come to today: I also believe that our society holds Mother's Day to be a day of thanking women for their role in childbearing and rearing, and Father's day as a time to celebrate... golf. For every wonderful, good Father out there, there's probably two selfish men who think rape is the best kind of self-gratification, or that children are a woman's responsibility because she shouldn't have gotten herself knocked up.

I am mildly jealous of those who hold functional marriages and dating situations. I explained to a friend last week why I use the word functional rather than happy - happy is, as Switchfoot suggests, a yuppie word. A truly functional relationship will mean that when a couple has an argument, they resolve it. Functionality means that their sex life is healthy and balanced between individuals, that their agreed upon roles are being fulfilled to the extent that they can be. Where both individuals have a realistic view of the kind of partnership that married life entails, and they realize that communication is the life and death of any relationship.

I cannot avoid the happiness of friends who are functionally married and have children or are looking forward to having them sometime soon. I don't envy them in a way that wishes their loss, and I am not jealous because I want what they have. I am merely filled with sadness over the reasons for my all-female family - the loss of what could have been my life. That all the men connected to my family were assholes. And that women were naive and only escaped from one hell to another. That in their whole lives, very few people ever tried to help them....

So let me take this Father's day to rejoice in the fact that I have met good Fathers, people who inspired me as much as they made my gut ache. And I have met some guys my age who will make good Fathers one day - boys who will become real men with feelings and a capacity for love and protection. And let me be thankful that despite my unfortunate history, I have seen relationships between men and women that make the militant members of today's feminism look foolish for asking for something so low as mere equality.

[via You saved my life from a colorless one]