One reason I remain fascinated by the Heene “balloon boy” spectacle is that you don’t often see such a blatant case of father-blaming in the media. I can easily name famous mothers who murdered – Susan Smith, Andrea Yates – but I can’t think of a father who killed his kids and drew similar media attention. We all know that the mother of Britney and Jamie Lee Spears is a lousy mom. I can recall the name of JonBenet Ramsey’s mother (Patsy). Who are their fathers? No clue. [Update 10/22/09, 12:30 a.m.: I'm not suggesting Patsy Ramsey murdered her daughter, and in comments Mandolin notes that she was exonerated. My intended point was the media and much of the viewing public - myself included - forged a broad consensus that sexualizing one's child prematurely and letting them be judged on appearance is not healthy. The media blamed Patsy for this almost exclusively.]
And even if you’ve forgotten who Nadya Suleman is, you likely remember “Octomom.”
I’m not defending the actions or judgment of any of these women, just observing that it’s unusual for media attention to focus on fathers’ misdeeds. To be sure, not every last commentator is pouncing on Richard Heene. At the HuffPost, Norman Lear expresses empathy for Heene, saying he just wanted to grab his 15 minutes. Lear conveniently ignores the fact that most fame-hungry adults neither break the law nor drag their kids along for the ride.
It’s telling, though, that Lear doesn’t see any need to defend the kids’ mother, Mayumi Heene. Why, exactly, is the media focusing on the “bad dad” this time, and practically giving the mother a pass?
Well, for one thing, in their TV interviews Richard has done almost all the talking. Mayumi has hovered at the edge of the spotlight. That makes him appear more culpable, even if they both agreed to the hoax.
For another, his overbearing attitude makes it easy to believe that he hatched the balloon scheme and bullied the rest of the family into going along with it.
Racism just might play a role, too. Tracy Clark-Flory of Broadsheet reports that when the Heenes were on Wife Swap, Richard yelled to his ersatz wife:
“You’re a man’s nightmare. I’m so glad my wife was born in Japan” — presumably because Japanese women like his wife, Mayumi, know how to be appropriately obedient to their husbands.
It’s possible that the media are cutting her more slack because she’s assumed to be stereotypically subservient. If so, that’s the kind of “understanding” that mothers really don’t need.
More optimistically, it’s even possible that our culture is starting to turn allergic against the sort of toxic hypermasculinity that Richard Heene exudes. (Jeff Fecke of Alas just beautifully dissected this brand of masculinity.) We can hope, right?
And then there’s the fact that Richard Heene is an obvious whackaloon. He calls himself a research scientist though his last paid job was laying tile. He believes the world is due to end in 2012. His motive for doing reality TV is evidently to raise enough money to opt-out of world destruction, possibly by building a bunker.
Am I missing anything? And can you think of other “bad dads” who’ve captivated the media? Surely there must be some that I’m forgetting.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
In my newspaper it was reported that the police were called to the Heene home once in the past and that, though no charges were laid, the officer was reasonably certain that Ms Heene had been assaulted. Apparently she was fearful but would not acknowledge that she had been assaulted. If people in general read that, they might be thinking that indeed, this mother isn’t in charge of much.
For me, the most fascinating thing is that we never take any of the blame ourselves for feeding the reality frenzy.
Yes – I was well aware in this – and in my prior post – that even discussing the “balloon boy” incident is stooping. I’ve never watched reality TV in the U.S., except for one episode of “The Bachelor” to figure out WTF my students saw in it. (I failed.) When the whole trend was brand new, I watched the German version of “Big Brother” for a couple of months in a row, while trying to bounce my first baby to sleep on a gymnastics ball. So I’ve been getting my info off the web, and not actually tuning in to the TV itself, but I agree that any tactic other than pointedly ignoring it will only feed the feast.
I’ve seen rumors about assault – and while I don’t want to hasten to judge, I’ll say Richard Heene definitely strikes me as a bully. So it’s not much of a stretch of the imagination to picture him getting physical.
(You might want to defend the actions of Patsy Ramsey — I think she was exonerated recently, but died while many people still believed she murdered her daughter. I think the blame aimed at her is probably pretty heavily anti-feminist.)
Hi Mandolin. Yes, I know she died a couple of years ago, and I believe she *was* exonerated. I can’t imagine putting my child in a position where they’d be judged on their looks or forced to grow up too soon. That’s where I think Patsy Ramsey really did transgress, and that’s where I believe Richard Heene is equally culpable.
Should I be ashamed to admit that I thought the father was named John Benet Ramsey?
Not at all! JonBenet was in fact an amalgam of her father’s middle names, John and Bennett. And no, I wouldn’t have known that except I googled her name to find her father’s name.
You are forgetting how Mr. Yates was blamed for pretty much everything under the sun – keeping her in a constant pregnant state, not giving her the proper medical attention, forcing religion, not helping her cope etc etc etc
At times, it almost came across as him being the one who instigated the murder of those children.
When women go ballistic – a lot of people start looking about for a man that must have casued her to go ballistic.
I hadn’t forgotten Mr. Yates entirely. At the time, I wondered about all the questions you raise. I think they were legitimate questions, too. By no means do I think a man is always at fault when a woman goes off the rails. But in this case Russell Yates – as the one ostensibly sane adult in the household – had a lot of opportunities to intervene, or at least stop doing things that exacerbated the situation. I don’t know if he could have prevented the murders.
By the way, I welcome dissenting comments but I don’t generally allow anonymous ones. If you’d like to comment in the future, please use a consistent pseudonym. Otherwise, your comment won’t get past the moderation filter for new comments. Thanks!
Given Richard Heene’s outbursts, I guess I give the wife more of a pass because it seems highly possible that she is emotionally if not physically abused.
The only other dad I can think of who is universally vilified is Jon Gosslein, who really made himself repugnant with the way he’s been handling his split with Kate these days, which is interesting, because for a long time, he was the more sympathetic Gosslein.
Good point about Jon Gosslin. I’ve tried to avoid both Gosslins, but you’re right, the media coverage I’ve seen has been pretty unsympathetic to him. In fairness, I have a beef with *any* parents who’d put their kids on a reality show. Shouldn’t the TV contract should pay for unlimited future therapy for the poor kids?
Umm, Woody Allen?
Sorry, couldn’t resist. He gets my bad dad award.
Definitely! It’s been … umm … interesting to see him leap to Roman Polanski’s defense.
Steve Irwin got in trouble for holding a child while teasing a crocodile.
And Michael Jackson got in trouble for holding a baby over a balcony.
I hadn’t heard about the Steve Irwin incident, but I remember the Michael Jackson incident all too vividly. I spent most of the ’90s living in Berlin, not far from the balcony in question, so it was too easy to picture the landing his baby would have had if he’d been dropped. When people now think of his alleged transgressions, it’s probably the child molestation accusations that first come to mind, but yeah, he was pilloried for a few days after the balcony incident.
I sure agree that Woody is and was a bad dad but he didn’t get the “Dad blaming” routine. Lots of people think he’s just fine – no doubt many of the same people who think Roman Polanski slipped up a bit when he was a youngster of 44. I think it was the same with Irwin and Jackson – some outcry, yes, but a lot of minimising and rationalising went with it that you don’t see with “Mom blaming”.
Yes, I think the media glom onto “mom blaming” more persistently than when it’s a father who screwed up. The flip side is that the media also present images of “perfect” celebrity mothers such Madonna and Angelina Jolie, plus all of the famous women who look like they’ve never had a baby four weeks postpartum. This creates a big gulf between mothers who are somehow monstrous and those who supposedly do everything right. I don’t see the same sort of idealization of celebrity fathers.
This is a very thought-provoking post, Sungold. I wonder if you are just talking about “normal” bad dads, and excluding the most pathological extreme: namely the dads who do a murder/suicide of their kids, spouses and selves. Of course women do this too, but I have the (very unscientific) impression that men do it a lot more. Perhaps an academic like you could verify this either way?
Of course, looking at pathologies provides only limited insight into society as a whole.
Slightly more “normal” bad dads, I suspect, get less of a hard time in the public eye because of the inherent sexism of our society. If kids are raised badly, then we are likely to assume that the mom was the main caregiver and it was her fault. Or, if it clearly was the dad’s fault, then we are still less likely to be as hard as him because, hey, he’s just a man.
If we conceptualize women as nurturing caregivers and men as relatively socially clueless breadwinners, then it is no surprise if they get it wrong — even badly wrong — in the parenting stakes. It does not shake our notion of reality.
But if a woman parents badly? It calls the very paradigm of motherhood into question. How can “motherhood” and “bad mother” coexist? Talk about cognitive dissonance! And thus a conversation point; a headline; something to tsk-tsk over.
Maybe it’s the same kind of cognitive dissonance that makes us feel less upset when we hear that 100 human beings who are soldiers die than when we hear that 100 human beings who are civilians die. We feel more upset again when those 100 civilians are women and children. Why is a civilian male’s death felt less keenly than a civilian female’s?
Perhaps it’s this (almost genetic?) paradigm we have: women and children = Yin (with all that implies). Men = Yang (with all that implies).
Perhaps it’s the same sexism that has seen women excluded from the military for so long.
So maybe it’s not that there are fewer bad dads, or even that we are less aware of bad dads, but merely that we have lower expectations of dads as parents.
On some visceral level, I fear that we may all believe that there is nothing surprising or unusual about a bad dad in the way that there may be about a bad mom.
If my theory is right, it might also explain why dads so often feel short changed in the family court. And perhaps, conversely, why women still so often feel short changed in their careers.
The question in my post wasn’t so much whether there’s more bad parenting among fathers or among mothers (which is very hard to determine because there are no objective standards, and motherhood and fatherhood are heavily socially constructed). Rather, I was asking about our cultural expectations of mothers and fathers as expressed in the media. And that’s where I think your observation is correct:
“So maybe it’s not that there are fewer bad dads, or even that we are less aware of bad dads, but merely that we have lower expectations of dads as parents.”
I do think our expectations of men have increased pretty dramatically over the past two generations, but there’s still not the same shock when a father kills his family than when a mother does the same. Similarly, on the non-pathological level I think as a culture we’re more apt to raise our eyebrows when a mother works 70-hour works than when a father does so. Personally I don’t think such long work weeks are good for any individuals – parents or not – and they’re not so great for society as a whole, either. But the father in that scenario can still be seen as a good father because he’s providing for his family, whereas the mother will be more quickly viewed as abandoning her family.
One California man whose car was stolen falsely reported his niece was in the back seat at the time. The resulting Amber Alerts put his car’s license number all over the place and his car was soon discovered.
His impulse to involve a minor was unfortunate. The Colorado incident clearly shows greater premeditation and should receive enhanced punishment.
I hadn’t heard about the California incident. I agree that it’s only right for intent and premeditation make a difference in sentencing.
Either way, though, the damage extends beyond the kids involved. The next time a child is reported missing, the parents might not be taken so seriously; there’s a danger in crying wolf.
Did y’all see this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/opinion/25rich.html?em
Try taking the end off that bad link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/opinion/25rich.html
Seem to be having trouble with my typing tonight. Sleep.
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