Fathers

Andrew Tate’s hero worship of his own father, Emory Tate, appears to be the main influence on Tate’s publicly proclaimed model of a good dad. While Tate once acknowledged such things as Emory Tate’s alcoholism, philandering, gambling, and possible mental illness (maybe Narcissistic Personality Disorder?), somehow those character and personality issues have now been expunged.

Simultaneously, Andrew Tate has reconfigured Emory Tate’s prolonged absences from the family home, as well as his abandonment of his wife and three young children after only a decade of marriage, as virtues. Tate now holds that fathers do NOT belong in the home. Rather, a father is to be a bold role model living somewhere else with a bunch of guys, doing impressive things.

Emory as role model. Late in Patrick Bet-David’s five-hour post-Internet-banishment podcast, Tate, obviously influenced by many vodkas, announces that he now realizes that Emory “sacrificed his marriage” to Tate’s mother in order to shape Andrew himself and his brother, Tristan, as men. Andrew Tate prides himself on his vocabulary and boasts of reading dictionaries. He should check the meaning of sacrifice. The object sacrificed is supposed to be something valued by the one making the sacrifice. Tate never presents any evidence that Emory valued his wife, Eileen, at all.

As Tate tries to justify his father’s neglect of his mate and offspring, he commits himself to the notion that absentee fatherhood is both normal and desirable. A man will check in on or perhaps correspond with a son as he sees fit. Emory and Andrew, for example, emailed each other and wrote some stories together, which are available on Tate’s Web site. However, an absentee father spends most of his time on what interests him outside his family.

In Andrew Tate’s mind, whatever Emory did or failed to do should become a guiding principle for his own life.

Emory Tate was a fascinating man. He had a high IQ and an abnormal memory that gave him perfect recall of almost anything in his life. But there have been many fascinating men whose lives should not be models for the young, not even their own sons. One can credit Andrew Tate for loving his father. And one can empathize with Emory Tate: it must have been difficult to live a happy life with a brain that housed that particular combination of intellect and recall.

But enough is enough. Empathizing with Emory Tate is one thing. Believing his behavior was even wholesome, much less laudatory, is too much.

The daughter problem. Meanwhile, Tate’s misogyny leads him to suggest that being father to a daughter amounts to leaving all the parenting to the mother, and well, perhaps “giving her away” (a notion Tate loves) at her wedding ceremony. If he can get by with it, Tate feels a “father” should select the daughter’s spouse in lieu of her choosing her own. There is really nothing, in Tate’s mind, that a father could do for daughter other than hope that she is happy and marry her off. He sees no way that being domiciled with female offspring has an any advantages for anyone.

When a father walks his daughter down the aisle in a contemporary American wedding, it is usually a sentimental nod to the fact that the poor sap is paying for the bride’s dress, the ceremony, the rehearsal dinner, and the reception. Even in working-class families, this contribution generally amounts to many thousands of dollars. And money doesn’t talk in the wedding-planning process: the father has likely been ignored throughout that ritual. No one believes “giving away the bride” is what is literally happening. It’s just a matter of including the father in what is frankly a big expensive party designed by and for women.

It’s interesting that Tate, who is generally willing to rip a page from a history book and paste it onto the current calendar, never comments on the practice of the groom carrying his bride across the threshold of their new home or the door to their honeymoon accommodations. Historically, the practice commemorates taking a woman by force, as when the Romans stole a bunch of Sabine broads.

Absentee fatherhood. There is essentially no nuclear family in Tate’s worldview. For Top G, fatherhood means being a sperm donor to as many women as possible, supplying financial support if, and only if, the individual baby mama remains sexually “loyal” and appealing to the male.

Provide and protect? How? Tate’s high-minded “provide and protect” language, always his first refuge when his is challenged on his misogyny, is meaningless as far as the philanderer’s unfortunate biological children and their mother(s) are concerned. Because he is not on the premises where the mother and child live, the biological father offers no protection at all, and his support is conditional on this man’s perceptions of how well a child’s mother caters to his own physical and emotional needs.

Mother’s role. According to Tate, it is the mother’s job to “keep you alive,” a minor task as far as Tate sees it. If you have a mother in Tate’s perfect world, here is a partial list of light tasks your mother will perform until you are old enough to live on your own:

creating you
giving birth to you
ensuring that you have nutritious meals
ensuring that you get enough sleep
bathing you until you are able to bathe yourself
teaching you to bathe yourself
laundering your clothes
teaching you table manners
teaching you how to behave in the company of others
teaching you how to tell time and tie you shoes
teaching you to say “please” and “thank you”
reading to you so that you understand it will become a habit
teaching you about God and listening to your prayers
staying up all night with you when you are sick

In a single-mother home, the mother is the child’s first teacher. And as Andrew is so fond of saying, you become the product of the five people closest to you. The people closest to a child are the people living in the same home.

By the way, Tate has said his own mother taught him to read, a task most often done by a schoolteacher. Yet years of shouldering round-the-clock work and responsibility is minor stuff in the eyes of Andrew Tate, she’s just “keeping you alive” while Distant Dad saves the day by being a stellar jerk of a non-role-model.

Curiously, Andrew’s own brother has a slightly different take on motherhood, at least as manifested in Eileen Tate. She, according to Tristan, was the “backbone of the family” and the major support in making him a professional athlete: she provided “three square meals everyday,” clean clothes, and all that stuff Andrew minimizes.

Second mommy. A father living in the home is just being “a second mommy,” Andrew Tate asserts. You may have believed that he was being facetious the first time he asserted that fathers should live in packs of men rather than in nuclear family units. He was not.

It’s extraordinary that a man as intelligent as Tate cannot see the evidence around him. The problems inherent in alley-cat fatherhood and the disadvantages of single “baby mama” households are well-documented social problems, particularly in African-American households in the United States. But Top G’s need to aggrandize his father and at the same time, to demean his mother, is so importan that he must devise elaborate paradigms for fatherhood, which are, of course, shaped according to the sex of the child.

Male children. In cases where the so-called father has a son, his contact will be infrequent with the offspring until the child reaches an age to permit what schools call “distance learning.” In the early days, a father may drop in, perhaps to criticize the mother in front of the child, as Tate fondly remembers Emory doing to Eileen in several stories. Once the distance learning milestone has been reached, the father begins imparting, from afar, manly virtues, such as self-discipline and control of emotions; skill sets such as chess, the martial arts, and how to put women in their place; and a basic philosophy of masculinity, grounded, of course, in misogyny.

Tate sees no reason to have a male role model in the home. Sons, he tells us, need a father who has achieved things, a father who has seen the world, a father who is a larger-than-life action hero. The father of a son must be aspirational and inspirational. The father must be all that he can be: a war hero, a head of state, a leader of a revolution–or at least be someone who wears tasteless diamond watches, drives expensive racing vehicles, and makes money managing the women who entertain the patsies who expend their money on his soft-core porn site. Andrew Tate’s ego is such that he is certain he is a good role model for his (real or theoretical) son(s).

Fatherless female offspring. Most mature adults know that daughters need regular in-home interaction with their fathers. Without it, they will almost certainly make bad choices about men when they reach maturity. Tate’s solution to the nuisance of female offspring is to marry the girl at an early age to a much older male, preferably one selected by the sperm-donor “father” himself.
I imagine Tate negotiating a “bride price” of several cows, a half-dozen goats, and some Bitcoin.

Cyclonejane’s World War II era father. Fathers in America, where both Andrew Tate and I were born, have changed over the many decades this old woman has been alive. I was fortunate to have a fantastic father. I believe that the anxiety of life in the early 1940s may be the reason so many young American men found fulfillment in establishing their own families in the 1950s.

The U.S. Army arranged for my father to live with other men in the early years of his marriage. He hated it. He was delighted to come home after World Wr II ended and help my mother create me, one of the earliest Baby Boomers.

Harry was a real man, a good athlete, the man a group always chose for their leader, and the guy who could fix anything that got broken and build anything that could be made of concrete, wood, pipes and/or wires. He loved his family more than anything else. Born into a large poor family, he was the one his widowed mother and seven siblings looked to for support, guidance, and practical help. His achievements in the workplace and in his community grew from his sincere desire to provide for and genuinely protect his family. He lived with them–in the house he built with his own hands, every day of every year until his wife’s death. My mother, siblings, and I were not a small part of my father’s life. We were the center of it.

My father was role model and much more. Daddy lavished time on each of his children and marveled at their individual characteristics, abilities, and interests. He was fascinated by my left handedness, deeply proud of my academic achievements, and more than happy to explain sports to me, a girl who would never play football or baseball. I would sit next to him on the living room couch, my head inclined so that I could rest it on his substantial bicep, listening to him explain baseball’s sacrifice fly rule or why the living legend of pro football, Jim Brown, always got off the ground so slowing after a play: “The other team can never tell whether or not they hurt him.”

In my pre-school years, I woke up laughing every morning because Daddy appeared at my bedside with his face covered in shaving cream. “Give me a kiss!” he invariably demanded.

On weekdays, I waited by a front window to see my father, returning from work, walk up our drive. I then raced three steps up the staircase so I would be able to literally leap into his arms when he entered. I knew he would always catch me and hoist me up over his head until he lowered me for a kiss. I never thought once of trying this with my mother, because I knew from that early stage of life that men were stronger than women, and throughout my long life, I have always appreciated this quality in men.

Yet, my father used my imaginary strength to build my self-confidence. When my mother called him to the kitchen to open a jar she couldn’t budge, Daddy would surreptitiously loosen the lid, then announce, “Irene, I can’t do this, but Janie’s really strong. Let’s see if she can open it.” He would lean down and hold out jar so that my tiny hands could remove the lid. “It’s really easy,” I would say. I think it took about twenty jars and two years before I caught on.

Read about Jane’s father here: Harry, My Fabulous Father.

Cyclonejane
December 24, 2022