A lot has been said over the first week of March 2015 about the Saturday Night Live skit that divided the Internet over the controversial Dakota Johnson short involving ISIS taking her away from her father. When I first saw it, I laughed hard, not because of the ISIS reference which seemed to soak up all the attention, but for another reason. In the skit Dakota Johnson speaks to her father played by Taran Killam as if she were being dropped off at college. It was a touching kind of thing that we have seen before in so many romantic comedies. But just as the young daughter leaves her teary eyed father for what looks like the last time she says, “Dad, it’s only ISIS.” That’s when the audience realizes that the father’s little girl is not going off to college, or moving out on her own, she’s joining the high-profile terrorist organization which is actually happening to some families.
I have raised two daughters and had to marry both of them into families of their own. I know what it feels like to let a daughter leave your care. For me, it was much harder because I was excessively close with my daughters. I was not a “hands off” dad, we always did a lot as a family together so we were unusually close. The biggest rage of my life was in watching young boys come to my house to take my kids on a date. I tried really hard to understand that the process was a natural part of children growing up, so I internalized a lot of it for the sake of everyone. One time though I nearly killed a whole car load of those little scum bags when they picked up one of my kids at 11 PM for a date, one of the boys with their shirt off. It was not the kind of courtship I had spent many hours of my life preparing my daughter for. It wasn’t necessarily her fault; it was the culture at large. The young boys she had to pick from were just so terrible that if she spent her whole life looking for just the right guy that her daddy would approve of, she’d be an old spinster to this day. But from my perspective nothing good happens to a girl past 12 AM especially in a car load of guys on the prowl. So I have had my experiences and they were miserable at best. My kids were good, so there wasn’t much of that. If they had been bad kids its highly likely I’d be in prison over some anger management issue now.
I know it’s unfair so I try to be sympathetic to the young boys who weren’t raised by me. They didn’t know why I was so mad, or what I expected because they were raised with far different backgrounds—so I kept my self from being overly intrusive—largely because that dating phase is the last step in raising children—and at that point you better be ready to trust your children. For insecure parents not confident in the tools of intellectual aptitude they have given their children they must worry about their kids doing something stupid. I never felt that way; my issue was always that the boys tended to have a biological interest in my daughters as opposed to a genuine respect for their cerebral matter. Those boys wanted to satisfy themselves at the expense of my many years of hard work, so I took it as a personal insult that they’d show up at my house treating my girls like a piece of meat to be conquered. One little slug actually had the gall to argue with me in my living room about Chick-fil-A and its position on gay rights. Well, Chick-fil-A in my house is sacred, so I didn’t need some little progressive snot-ball ignorant to the ways of the world telling me anything. To this day the Xbox he was playing when we had this discussion is something I still hold a grudge against. We still have the old unit because it has a lot of treasured games on it, but I no longer like it, because it reminds me of that kid.
Daughters never really get over their relationships with their dads. They may go for great periods of time without talking, but if they have strong fathers who spent time teaching them things, there is a bond there that lasts entire lifetimes. I know very hard-core women in their declining years who still love their dads who have long since died. I know even more women who had bad relationships with their fathers who turned out to be screwed up messes. A father is a very important job to a daughter and it is one that I always took very serious. Never too intrusive, but protective to their very souls—not in the type of neurotic fashion so prevalent in modern comedies, but in ways that only literature has managed to even remotely deal with.
So watching Dakota Johnson step into the back of an ISIS truck is exactly the way I felt every time my daughters left the house with a pack of boys destined for trouble. And the nonchalant manner that the skit ended, “Don’t worry dad, we’ll take it from here,” is precisely the way modern males see such daughters—as objects of possession and conquest destined for their penises—and it angers every cell in my body. Every young man felt just as the Saturday Night Live skit showed as my daughters dated. They were all terrorists to the hopes and dreams I had for my kids and were dangerous.
The SNL skit would have had to go to some common extreme such as ISIS to paint the feelings that most dads who really care about their daughters feel when their children leave home. For boys, it’s different. You smack the young tike in the back of the head and congratulate him for having a woman or two on his arm throwing themselves aimlessly at his whims. Boys get congratulated for winning races, and throwing touchdown passes in games of conquest which girls are just one part of. So raising boys is easier.
Girls are the most precious creatures on earth and the world needs many more of them who are good, and it takes good dads to help make good girls—and it’s a hard job. So I laughed at the skit not for the controversy, but for the potent exposure it had of such a raw truth. For me, every young boy who wanted to date my daughters might as well have been a member of ISIS—an aimless terrorist hell-bent on ideological destruction laughing at me and damning death to America. That is exactly how it feels. But the story doesn’t end there. There is much more that comes after and for that, dads are still needed—probably more so than less. And it takes a lot of personal understanding and confidence to embrace that role when there isn’t any glamour or glitz to the job of being a good dad.
That brought up another question I had for which there is no answer. I grew up loving Don Johnson, Dakota’s real dad in the television show Miami Vice. I always liked him as an actor. So I was curious how he could attend the Saturday Night Live broadcast and actually make fun of the fact that his little girl had just made Fifty Shades of Grey showing herself completely nude to the world. She was so naked in the movie that they had to have a makeup person insert public hair on Dakota Johnson to be true to the spirit of the best-selling novel. How could Don Johnson perform that skit and even make fun of it? Even in jest? I suppose some people play good dads, and some people just aren’t. And that’s also why I’m not an actor. I couldn’t do that for all the gold in the world. You can’t grow up loving and caring for a young daughter all your life then revel in her public exposure and dissemination all the while casting jokes. There was a lot wrong about the SNL evening staring Dakota Johnson, but it wasn’t the ISIS skit itself. It was the theme of dads and how they are a dying breed in our culture disrespected and ridiculed by a progressive society. And I’m not OK with that.
Rich Hoffman
CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
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