This. If we didn't live in a society where a May/December romance with a young woman and an older man weren't seen as perfectly normal, and the reverse as freakish, and a significant number adult men didn't use this to prey on young girls, this wouldn't be a problem. But it is, and it reinforces some pretty twisted ideologies.
This I think is also the reason that fathers and father figures in these stories are portrayed so favorably compared to mothers. A mother who guides a child partway and refuses to allow them independence is manipulative and repulsive. A father who does the same thing is in the right. We also have this cultural emphasis more generally on a woman character's father. Ziva's father in NCIS trained her from birth to be an assassan, and when she escapes his grasp, she does it by leaping into the arms of the show's daddy, Gibbs, Tiana from Disney's The Princess and the Frog is following her dead father's dream of owning a restaurant, my beloved Babs is Commissioner Gordan's daughter... It's ridiculously common across multiple mediums. And it's toxic.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2011-07-21 02:18 pm (UTC)This I think is also the reason that fathers and father figures in these stories are portrayed so favorably compared to mothers. A mother who guides a child partway and refuses to allow them independence is manipulative and repulsive. A father who does the same thing is in the right. We also have this cultural emphasis more generally on a woman character's father. Ziva's father in NCIS trained her from birth to be an assassan, and when she escapes his grasp, she does it by leaping into the arms of the show's daddy, Gibbs, Tiana from Disney's The Princess and the Frog is following her dead father's dream of owning a restaurant, my beloved Babs is Commissioner Gordan's daughter... It's ridiculously common across multiple mediums. And it's toxic.