On the topic of “Shotgun Dads” trying to scare their daughters’ dates or boyfriends, Scott wrote:
Set aside all the stuff you tell yourself and probably your wife about “traditional values and gender roles” or whatever. You cannot, in todays world seriously plan on carrying out any of these threats. You are puffing out your chest to “scare” off the “bad” boys, who know you are full of crap.
He’s right. And if the date in question really is a bad boy this attitude is helpful to him for a couple reasons. First of all, any girl who is entertaining a bad boy is expressing to her father that his approval is meaningless. Attempts to warn off a bad boy heighten the stakes of the game she is playing. The most likely outcome is that she will do more with the bad boy, and sooner. Second, bad boys don’t want permission. They are planning to leave after they’ve had their fun any way. A father who falsely threatens is dancing to the same song as the bad boy.
The best foil to the plans of bad boys and the girls who want them is to trap them in forced commitment. If only someone had thought of that.
16 “If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife. 17 If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride-price for virgins.
That is impossible in the modern world. However, the minds and desires and spirits of humans–including those of girls and bad boys–have not changed since that was written. A protective father could adopt the Lord’s strategy in the OT to our weakened and less manful times by introducing the topic of marriage every time a date/boyfriend’s name is raised, or whenever he is around. Girls perhaps don’t want to marry right now, but they all want to be marriageable right now.
A father could cajole or question a boy to express how he finds the daughter marriageable. This is sure to cause discomfort, but most girls will not be able to resist the temptation to inspect every nook and cranny of the boy’s hems and haws. Any resistance by either the girl or boy to such lines of inquiry ought to be met with the innocent and forthright truth that Christian sexual and romantic relations are always concerned with, and pointed towards, marriage.
Scott also wrote:
It feels good, because all the women around you pat you on the head and nod approvingly. You have earned your cookie.
This is incorrect. If any women pat a man on the head for this it’s because she think he’s a fool; like how a mother “Awwws” over and hugs a child who has done something stupid. It’s not a reward, but consolation.
Dalrock wrote a post commenting on Scott’s post and elaborated in a similar direction as one of my previous essays. While I agree with what both Scott and Dalrock are seeing–the foolishness and the empty posturing–I do wonder what we should expect of most men. I’m much smarter than the average guy, yet my blog isn’t brimming with answers. And it is by far average guys who say things like, “I’ll be cleaning my gun when my daughter’s date gets here.” They’re fantasizing. It’s a really stupid fantasy with contradictions and perversion, but its seed is a honorable desire to protect their daughters. That desire is wholly frustrated because we live in a really shitty culture. Dissolute elites and social science freaks have spent years undermining husbands and outlawing every embodiment of patriarchy. Fathers have been legally emasculated so that no man may truly say it was he who protected his family.
Until there is either an outbreak of sanity, or a breakdown of political entities, we have only one option: Be humble, brave, and truthful; any one of which cannot be done without the others. Many will protest and question what good are such spiritual weapons against the materialist weapons of our enemies. They’ll put forward some scheme or system which pretends to be a psychological machine that produces Good Kids (or controlled women). They’ll say, “Look what I did. I did this and this and this, and I made my kids do that and that and that, and now they’re so awesome because I did it right.” That’s as foolish as saying you’re going to scare away bad boys from the girls who love them.
If anyone did it right, then what he did was recognize the truth, told it to himself, told it to those around him, and then tried to live in obedience to it.
Things that We have Heard and Known 
when a young man comes around, he will not be met with a silly cartoon shotgun dad, but a father who wants to help them both succeed at what they are trying to do.
is the money quote.
He’s raising his daughter to be a proper young woman (they’re on a farm, it makes it 10x easier to deal with the reality of livestock and gardens and crops).
@tz
Anyone who can afford a farm is probably wealthier than over half of fathers.
I like this a lot. I need to think about it.
I appreciate the reasoned critique, friend.
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Man, thanks for being sane. I hear this stuff all the time and it’s just such obvious posturing. I’m not anybody’s idea of a badass but you can always tell who is going to fight and who isn’t, nearly always at least.
I also hate the mechanical view of humanity expressed in “Christian” parenting ideas. Your kid is a human and sees through obvious manipulations and resents them much earlier than you think.
I’m not saying no punishments or admonitions, far from it, but you have got to be wise and human about it.
As you might guess, Cane, I am no fan of posturing either.
Easy solutions are not apt to be found in this day and age. If they were, we would have already heard about them by now.
I suppose it might be a blessing in disguise if I never marry and have kids- won’t ever have to worry about any of this on a personal level.
I am not familiar with your culture entirely, Mr Caldo. But there is a saying among my people that one gains a son when a daughter is married and one loses a son when he is married. It is looking more like it in this less manful day and age.
“Be humble, brave, and truthful; any one of which cannot be done without the others.”
I believe investing in a God-fearing man (or men) — physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually — can be an immensely positive step for the kingdom of God. If he happens to be related to me by blood, it’s an added bonus.
@CoRP
Somewhere in here is a post where I wrote something similar; that when my daughters marry they will be transformed into sons. The Bible says that “a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife.” No mention of her leaving her family. (I’m not laying down a rule here about where and among whom every man and his wife should live. It’s just a note about the pattern.)
I’ve been learning and thinking a lot about the intersection of authority and nationality. I’ve written about authority recently, and the Bible’s treatment of nationalism a few months ago, but I’ll have more on them in the pipe soon, I think.
The boy is already going to feel intimidated if you’re any kind of a man to begin with. What this is really about is weak men, with weak frame trying to pretend they are a boss
I would have skipped the posturing and taken remedial action if my daughter was stubborn about seeing someone I disapprove of. Which she never was but again weak men, with weak frame are like women and mistake words for deeds
——–
My son in law very much joined Clan Ton, as did my ex wife, but he was/ is fairly estranged from his own family, and her family was also military and scattered. The Girls have joined Clan Ton as well so I am unsure if that is the natural order of things, just the way it played out for us or once again about frame with weak frame meaning your son switches teams and strong frame meaning your daughter in law switches to your team.
I can’t imagine stepping away from my family, our name and history and embracing someone else’s family name, history etc etc
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That is because women were property, in effect if not in reality, at the time. It would make as much sense to says a pet would have to leave its family.
This does not mean that the man must now join the woman’s family. That would not be a good application of what is written overall.
I would still support the wife’s father supporting his new son-in-law as much as possible. Doing that would help build the proper family bonds that build a society, but we should not ignore that a woman has a lot of leaving to do as well.
My soon to be ex-wife would have been much better off if she had ever really left her family. She instead found those relationships to be ultimately more important and her father continued to undermine our marriage whenever he could. That fits with her not leaving her family, but does not fit with the Biblical example (overall), so I must take issue with the assertion.
SFC Ton,
Leaving the other family doesn’t require being completely separate. It requires making a commitment to the spouse first and family only after that. We should have strong extended families to build our society.
These fathers will scare away the kind of “boys” they actually might want for their daughters, while the bad boys simply wont bother to even talk to them as you point out.
To make matters worse, current Churchianity wisdom on when boys and girls should get married mirrors our feminist influenced culture – as Free Northerner has alluded to. Eventually their daughters will fall into sexual sin when they become sick of waiting for a man they are attracted to, but of which their fathers approve. Usually this is the first domino that proceeds to unravel their faith.
Consider what the average man wants for his daughter in a husband, and then consider the very small pool of those men that actually exists – especially in terms of financial capability for young men.
Sincerely, a married charlatan whose father-in-law didn’t want for his daughter, but who his daughter was wooed by regardless, proving your point.
Yes, “marriage.” (Quotes because you have to say it.) It’s really something that that which is so heavily romanticised like dating choices leans so heavily on legal agreements, something which must be enforced impartially. But maybe that isn’t the contradiction it initially appears to be.,,
A.J.P.
The simple, but not easy, answer is that your daughter shouldn’t be dating.
In order to effect this, you need to control education. Which means your daughter should be homeschooled.
If you’re going to homeschool, you will need to install traditional moral values. This limits your choices to (traditional) Catholicism, (traditional) Eastern Orthodoxy and a few tiny Protestant sects (Amish most spectacular and least likely, conservative Reformed Christian more dull but much more likely).
Few modern conservatives like these answers – I’ve had too many of these conversations to not see a distinct pattern. While some men can overcome state or progressive religious control of their daughters (and sons) by Moloch and Mammon for 10+ hours a day, they are few and far between.
@Orthrostrov
I agree; depending on what one means by dating. Some people prefer the term courting. Depending on the activity, courting might look exactly like dating except with a difference in intents. We can and should watch actions and make judgments about those intents, but what I concern myself with is the actions.
Obviously, I’m a big fan of homeschooling.
One can and should try. The final decision is up to the owner of the mind though. I don’t mean that as a rebuttal, but something that I think gets overlooked in the desire to find the “right system”.
The more I experience, the more I appreciate Jesus’ wisdom to remove the planks from my own eye to see clearly. Clear sight is so crucial! I say that it is worse than worthless to blindly adopt even traditional religious practices.
Words matter, and while I don’t want to be like someone who blindly holds to the definition of what a scumbag was from 100 years ago, there is a significant difference – even today – between the general public’s thought process around one who is dating vs. courting.
Put mildly, that biker bad boy is going to choke on his Four Loko if you talk about him ‘courting’ a gal, but likely won’t even flinch at the term ‘dating’.
Certainly one can call it dating while it’s truly courting – and there are some Catholics in particular who have a negative Pavlovian response to ‘courting’, which I write up to some sort of vague worry about it being too Protestant. Go figure.
But the general thought process holds. If teenaged daughters are fraternizing with boys, going out with them without parental oversight and doing Gnon-knows what… well, gentlemen, those fathers have left the field of battle. Good luck to them, because they’re going to need it. If not in this world, then certainly the next.
If, however, fathers choose courting or (sacre bleu!) some form of arranged marriage, then the statistical chances of a much more favorable outcome are dramatically different. And I say this not as a partisan but as one who has seen arranged marriage in action in quite distinctly non-Christian cultures. It just works.
Naturally, we are all free agents (well, those who aren’t Calvinists anyways) and can choose to rebel against our parents’ godly advice, but just like Proverbs doesn’t guarantee that if you train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he won’t depart from it…..the odds are much, much, MUCH better.
Not sure that the ‘blindly adopt’ comment has any meaning in this context beyond warning us against undue pride, which goeth before a fall and so is always good to take a step back to ensure we’re not wandering that way. Certainly anything done blindly (or, I would say, in a God-centered manner) has the potential for poor results. However, precisely because it’s countercultural the odds of courting, much less pursuing arranged marriage, without a deep, abiding commitment to virtue is fairly small.
Just like miracles, I can point to individual examples. But like miracles the exceptions prove the general rule.
“Half-Cocked Varitions”? Should it be “Half-cocked Variations”?
@OKRickety
That’s one variation, yes.
Thanks. Fixed.
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