Daddy Issues
The right really loves fantasizing about political retribution via metaphors about spanking children. I hope this has nothing to do with the conservative family model!!
At a campaign rally for Donald Trump last week, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson foretold vengeance against the left via an extended metaphor about a father spanking a teenage girl.
“If you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it,” Carlson told the crowd.
“There has to be a point at which dad comes home. Dad comes home and he’s pissed. He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they’re his children, they live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in them and he’s gonna let them know … And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.’”
When Trump took the stage afterward, the crowd chanted “daddy’s home” and “daddy Don.”
When Democrats call the right “weird,” this is the kind of thing they’re talking about. While Republican candidates like Trump campaign on the pretext of protecting children from sexualization by forces outside the family (and by “sexualization,” they usually mean encountering anything to do with LGBTQ+ life), a sizable percentage regard the family as a sexualized project of male domination. Trump and Carlson, both of whom have made sexual remarks about underage girls and their own daughters, typify this trend.
It’s a little tired at this point to note that Trump is gross about girls. During the 2016 election, reporters surfaced clips of Trump speaking to a young girl and remarking that “I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”
Of his own daughter, Trump has claimed that “I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” That’s in addition to Trump’s mountain of substantiated sexual misconduct allegations by adult women with whom he has no relation.
But it’s only tired because those allegations and on-record offenses have been public for decades, with little effect on Trump’s career. Carlson, too, kept his Fox News gig in 2019 when Media Matters rediscovered old radio programs in which Carlson downplayed statutory rape within religious marriages, and made lewd comments about underage girls experimenting sexually at his daughter’s boarding.
“If it weren't my daughter I would love that scenario,” Carlson said.
Conservative men can often weather these indiscretions because patriarchal politics allow (even require) a certain degradation of women and girls. Within the wealthy circles that Trump frequented as a real estate developer, the ability to degrade women can even serve as a marker of status between men. Just last week, a former model came forward to disclose that Donald Trump had groped her in front of influential pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in 1993, in what she described as a “twisted game” between two men who “were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together.”
The right’s vision of “family values” doesn’t undercut this abuse. It formalizes it through insistence on male headship over women and children who are regarded, to varying degrees, as property. Just look at how Carlson describes the varying acceptability of sexual abuse within and without families.
In a 2006 talk radio appearance, Carlson condemned felony rape charges against cult leader Warren Jeffs, who had forced children into marriage with Jeffs’ adult male followers.
“I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her. That's bullshit,” Carlson said.
At the time of Carlson’s remarks, Jeffs had already been sued by his nephew, who said he was five or six years old when Jeffs raped him. The criminal charges that Carlson called “bullshit” stemmed from the case of a 14-year-old girl, whom Jeffs had forced into marriage with an adult cousin. The girl testified that her husband frequently raped her, and that she survived multiple miscarriages.
Jeffs was later found to have raped a pre-teen girl he forced into marriage. Even after this revelation, however, Carlson continued to defend Jeffs on the grounds that violence within the home was different than at the hands of strangers.
“I am not defending underage marriage at all. I just don't think it's the same thing exactly as pulling a child from a bus stop and sexually assaulting that child,” Carlson said on a 2009 talk radio program, adding that “the rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different. I mean, let's be honest about it.”
He also deployed similar language about supposed differences between the rape of a sex worker and the rape of a housewife. “It's a little more complicated than if some, you know, housewife claims she was pulled off the street and raped. It's just not the same thing,” he said in 2006.
Carlson’s comments offer a neat encapsulation of the right-wing program as it seeks to categorize family as the property of men. Carlson describes a dangerous public sphere in which women and children can be spirited off the streets by strangers, and in which women who live outside the traditional family order are low-key asking for assault. To complement this supposedly dangerous public realm, the right valorizes the male-led household as a site of protection against the corrupting influence of the outside world.
Within this matrix, sexual assault is reframed as an offense to father figures, and described in terms of theft; of property crime. And if there’s any doubt that Carlson regards wives as akin to property, here’s what he said in 2008 about a Republican political candidate who described his “trophy wife” as his favorite possession:
“Anybody who answers ‘my trophy wife is my favorite possession’ is my hero,” Carlson said. “I don't give a shit. I'm voting for the guy.”
This system allows for all manner of abuse against women and children within the home, from “duty sex” and marital rape of wives, to corporal punishment of children. As Carlson’s creepy spanking comments suggest, the latter often straddles the line between physical and sexual abuse.
In her new book Wild Faith (excerpted this month in New York Magazine), journalist Talia Lavin interviews adults who experienced childhood spankings as sexual abuse. Multiple women, many of them raised in Evangelical cultures with a strong emphasis on modesty, recalled being made to strip in front of their fathers for spankings. Some said the experiences led to sexual trauma that has endured into their adulthoods.
“Afterwards, once he’d calmed down, he had me lay on my tummy on my bed and exposed my bare ass and spread ointment on the bruised and bloody skin,” one woman said of a beating by her father. “I couldn’t sit in a chair for some time, but the revulsion of him touching my bare ass when I was 11 or 12 years old stayed with me far longer.”
Even if parents claim spankings are unrelated to sexual domination, the adult children interviewed in Wild Faith and Harvard researchers who studied the neurological effects of spanking agreed that spanking children elicits responses similar to those produced by sexual assault.
“You see the same reactions in the brain,” a Harvard researcher said of the findings of a 2021 study on spanking. “Those consequences potentially affect the brain in areas often engaged in emotional regulation and threat detection, so that children can respond quickly to threats in the environment.”
Again, Carlson’s past remarks are clarifying, because he repeatedly invokes spanking as a sexualized punishment for adults. When describing Martha Stewart’s daughter as “cunty” (derogatory) Carlson commented in 2006 that “I just wanted to give her the spanking she so desperately needs.” And when describing a debate victory against an adult man, Carlson declared in 2006 that “I spanked Michael Moore like a bad little girl.”
A significant number of adult men want to assault and humiliate women and girls. It’s not a secret. It’s not a phenomenon that takes place underground, in shadowy cabals, as right-wing sex panics like QAnon falsely allege. It’s a fantasy that they feel comfortable describing at a televised rally. It’s an entire ordering theory of politics for these men. And when they want to threaten violent repression of their political enemies, they point to this scene of acceptable violence: they envision a father spanking a teenage girl.