Daddy Issues, Katherine Angel’s third collection of essays, presents the sexual nature of a daddy-daughter dynamic so matter-of-factly that at first I couldn’t help seeing it as a self-help manual: the dummy’s guide that I had long been waiting for...Instead, this is an examination of our often prurient fascination with the dynamic, and that fascination’s inherent misogyny. It’s also something of a reclamation...'You can, at least in principle, leave a husband, but you can’t leave a father,' Angel says...Unless, she suggests, you write about him...Her thought-provoking approach is to argue that our society has overlooked the place of daddies in 'daddy issues'...To prove the point, she dexterously analyzes a variety of literary works, historical figures like Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, and contemporary tabloid examples, like Meghan Markle and Ivanka Trump...But we women do have to look at men, and we must endure our excited terror when they look at us...It is impossible to rid ourselves of our fathers, and they are, inevitably, forever stamped to our insides...The title of Angel’s book gestures not only at our dismissive cultural shorthand, but at its universality...Is an 'issue' inherently bad?...Comparing my own father to Winston Churchill felt good, if only in the moment.
Katherine Angel’s astute observations on the impact of the #MeToo movement, the retrenchment of feminism by younger women, and our current state of gender relations is compelling...Perhaps Angel’s most interesting notations are the way Black women approach feminism versus middle-class baby boomer white women, shining light on the differences in their work and home lives, with Black women less enthused about workplace satisfaction...Patriarchy, the rule of men experienced a resurgence in popularity with the Trump Administration and the heterosexual family, still appear to be held in thrall...As the noose tightens on female necks, with the loss of reproductive autonomy, and lack of societal support for basic childcare, men are on the march...One wishes the book were longer, especially as it lights the dark corners of fear, anxiety, depression, and frustration experienced by mothers who still provide most of the childcare...The black hole of the child’s needs sucking the lifeforce from the mother, leaving father to float outside the atmosphere coming in for occasional touchdowns.
This incisive analysis by Angel contemplates the intersection of fatherhood with toxic masculinity and patriarchy...Noting that 'fathers wield troubling power, whether they like it or not,' Angel draws on literature, film, and current events to explore the nature of patriarchal authority within families...She turns the 'daddy issues' trope on its head, criticizing it for insinuating that women’s romantic troubles with men stem from strained relationships with their fathers...The author also unpacks real-world examples, concluding that Ivanka Trump’s defenses of her father whitewash his misogynistic comments, and that Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court exposed the limits of truth-telling in fighting abuse...Effortlessly moving from the novels of Virginia Woolf to the theories of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Angel demonstrates a sharp intellectual acuity in her elucidation of the cultural mythos surrounding 'daddies'...The result is a valuable contribution to the feminist understanding of fatherhood.
