These authors draw on a rich literary tradition of women venting about parenthood and marriage.  This tradition includes such texts as Dana Spiotta’s 2021 novel, Wayward, the autobiographical work of Deborah Levy, and Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, published in 2012, which Gould calls “the go-to literary divorce bible.” 

Few if any of these women claim to be suffering from evil or abusive husbands, or to be burdened by particularly egregious domestic toil. The sick-of-my-family genre is about having the bravery to blow up a normal domestic life in the name of the woman wanting something different for herself: mental independence and space to think, with time to focus on professional goals. 

Why, then, do we hear so little from struggling fathers on this question? Most of the well-known male authors one might cite — Knausgård, Updike — were unfaithful, divorced, or both. What about the fed-up fathers who are still hanging on? Can we express the anxieties and downsides of fatherhood, the ways in which it crowds out our independence and creativity, instead of blowing up our families for novelistic material? 

The answer is no, as I learned to my chagrin this month, when a chorus of disapprobation greeted a reflection I posted on the X app (formerly Twitter) about just this issue.

It began with my 4-year-old son asking me to play catch in the street. I was drinking my coffee, still waking up, but I said sure. I also posted to social media: “Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic, peak experience.” But I wasn’t enjoying it, as I confessed in my post. I wanted to be drinking my coffee in peace. The truth, I said, is that I just don’t like being around my two little kids, alone, for very long. I asked the internet whether I was a monster, or whether my feeling was within a certain range of normality. 

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The post garnered more than 19 million impressions. Men, many of whom granted that my feeling was normal, accused me of being weak and unmanly for complaining in public. Women said I was pathetic: mothers spend so much more time with children, and yet I could barely endure 10 minutes before needing to complain. I hit back that contemporary mothers have no idea what it is like being a father today, and was called a misogynist. Both genders agreed that I was selfish and immature, focused on petty and short-sighted matters like having my coffee in peace or getting back to my work.

The truth is that fatherly pain is exceptionally taboo for a good reason. Contemporary fatherhood is a much darker place than mothers, maidens, and bachelors are ever supposed to know. And one of its proper responsibilities is keeping everyone else in the dark about male suffering. Despite the modern rhetoric about gender equality, women still require men to be strong and silent, as my social-media firebombing shows. Many fathers are so strong and so silent, I suspect, that women are unaware that they’re enjoying the benefits of the man’s protection, or that they require it in the first place. 

How can this be, in a world in which men and women are supposed to be equals? According to a contemporary ideal, men should be able to speak to women frankly, and shouldn’t need to protect them. But what we have in reality is a very unequal equality: men are expected to help out with domestic work and hands-on childcare to the best of their ability, while they are also expected to maintain all of the traditionally male responsibilities — not least, the responsibility to keep those responsibilities secret.

Consider time spent with children. Studies confirm it has increased dramatically: American fathers spent seven hours per week on childcare, up from about two and a half hours in 1965. Another study found that over the same period, fathers’ average daily childcare time rose to nearly an hour, up from about 16 minutes. That won’t sound like much to women. But given that there hasn’t been any corresponding relaxation of the exclusively male responsibilities, it’s nearly a full work day a week — a significant expansion. 

There’s also the question of what this childcare time is for. Biologically, men are not evolved to care for small children, and historically, men were rarely expected to be around for them. The argument that it’s for ethical reasons or child-development reasons seems a bit too conveniently correlated with women’s entry into the workforce. I find the amorphous nature of the rationale behind the demand especially frustrating, because it presents me with no way of knowing how much time is optimal, or even enough. The requirement becomes uncapped, all-consuming, and impossible to fulfill. 

But haven’t other male responsibilities been relaxed in our equal-rights modernity? We tell anxious fathers to worry less about money and focus on quality time with kids. But surveys find that in more than 50% of dual-income households (and in 90% of the wealthiest), husbands are regarded as the family’s “financial expert.” And even when wives earn more, men still carry the moral weight of ultimate financial responsibility. If creeping destitution or spiraling debt were to conquer, for instance, nobody would have any doubt about which of the two parents is most guilty. 

Thus, in many crucial ways, the “dual-income household” is a myth and doesn’t solve the economic anxieties of men; indeed, it makes them worse. Many women earn little more than the cost of childcare, which makes the woman’s work mostly for her personal edification or satisfaction. The man enjoys no such luxury. He’s also, whether his wife earns a lot or little, always calculating, behind the scenes, what he is going to do if and when she wants to stop working. Even if she said, before parenthood, that she planned to work until retirement, the husband knows it will fall to him to keep the family fiscally whole if she changes her mind. 

If I don’t prepare for that, I live every day at risk of disgrace. If I’m preparing, however, it might seem I don’t believe in my wife, or I might seem “not present” with my kids. Not to mention, if a man’s wife earns as much as he does, she may become accustomed to a standard of living that may not be sustainable once she taps out — but how can he say any of these things? This makes the burden of fatherhood much more difficult than it used to be, psychologically and  practically.  

Breadwinning, also, has become complicated in ways that have hardly been noticed, let alone understood. 

In terms of bringing in the money, most legacy institutions have declined in standards and vitality. Jobs don’t look the same as they once did, and they’re less secure. Many fathers today must become entrepreneurs, either by necessity because they can’t get stable employment; or to maintain standards or integrity in their vocation; or to protect themselves economically as a side hustle, in case their legacy institution goes sideways next year. We’re working more — much more — but getting less credit for it, and the childcare demands have increased, too. 

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On a deeper level, securing an honorable vocation that does justice to a man’s gifts has always been a major requirement of a successful male life. The structures that made this possible have been so liquidated by modernity that it barely sounds like a reasonable aspiration anymore  — but we still yearn for it and hold ourselves to the standard. 

How much money is enough to have conducted yourself with distinction? We have no idea. Just recently, the writer Michael Green published an article arguing that $100,000 a year should now be considered the real poverty line, or perhaps it was even $140,000, once you update the old methodology for today’s costs. The argument was flawed, but it went viral, suggesting that  people really no longer know the difference between rich and poor. I might read up and form an accurate model of the economy, but if my mother, wife, father-in-law, and peer group aren’t reading the same material, then I can’t know whether I earn or possess enough money to be content. You can say that a father should use his own judgment, but for a good father, the only judgment is: I would kill myself to do right by my family, so if there is no shared standard, then I’ll just kill myself trying, just to make sure.

It was once the case that people from different classes and situations would settle into different occupations. Before capitalism, the options were more or less fixed: the cobbler’s son became a cobbler; the duke’s first son a duke. Today, there are no longer shared standards around meaningful work, vocation, or station (except for whatever money and internet clout measure). If you are a professor, does that mean you are a smart, thoughtful anchor of your community? It’s no longer clear. If you have a million followers on TikTok, does that mean you are successful or impressive? You could very well be a working prostitute, the canonically low-status occupation, and be very high-status indeed, depending on how you manage it. 

Under these conditions, the contemporary father can never “arrive.” No matter how successful he is in terms of money or clout, the father must bear the terror that perhaps he did not do justice to his gifts, or that he did not do justice to his family’s name. Whether his mother tells him that she’s “proud” of him means nothing; he judges himself in the agora. Now add to this bundle of anxieties, both material and psychological, the expectation to be ever more present at playtime. It’s maddening. And crushing.

There is another, deeper burden that is rarely spoken. For the man, having children is not itself a source of immediate joy or meaning in the same way that it can be for women. I chose to have children, and I have no regrets. And yet no man ever thinks to himself, “I would love to have two toddlers in the house because the presence of these two creatures would increase my own happiness.” Whereas for the mother, as the Bible, Nietzsche, and Freud alike taught, children are much more immediately meaningful. A man is more motivated by a larger sense of responsibility: to procreate, to give the world a little bit more life than he took from it, and to give his beloved wife something that is significant and meaningful to her. 

There is a meme about how a man, left to his own devices, will default to sleeping on the floor and eating canned beans every day in an unfurnished, one-room apartment. The image is typically invoked to roast the male sex for its barbarous nature, implying how much men need women to organize and beautify their lives. I’ve always thought this to be an outrageous misunderstanding. Instead, consider how much heroic effort the average father expends to provide his wife with things he does not need or desire himself. 

Those who find these observations outrageous, cowardly, selfish, or unrepresentative only display how little  can fathom the darkness of fatherhood today.

If a wife could see or feel her husband’s terror, she would hardly be able to function, let alone be a good wife or mother. We hide it out of love but not purely out of love: for a father to bear his responsibilities every day, he needs his wife to be happy, in part because he needs her to stay calm and be functional. If she falters under her own heavy responsibilities, he could quickly lose control of everything. “Happy wife, happy life” is a laughably sweet euphemism for the infernal fact that if your wife is not happy, there is no reason left to live. 

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This might seem extreme, but when a man builds a family, he voluntarily sets his own happiness to the side, which means the wife’s happiness is the only reliable daily indicator of success and reliable daily reward. So if the wife is unhappy, none of it makes any sense and nothing feels worth doing. As I write this, stoic silence is the only thing keeping millions of families on the right side of the precipice.

Before I got married and had children, I was horrified by the prevalence of fathers who walk out on their families. Today, I am no longer confused by the phenomenon. My own household challenges have thankfully never been so severe, but it is now obvious to me how even the normal challenges of the ordinary husband could lead a man’s life to spiral so far out of control that he breaks and leaves. The gap between my perplexity over this issue as a young man and my current knowledge is a reasonable index of how much darkness fathers hide from the world.

I spend many days and nights churning through these issues in mortal terror. My wife probably has a decent sense of how dark and lonely life sometimes feels for me, but that’s because I’m a little weak and I tell her too much, too often. And then I feel terrible about that, terrified that I might break her happiness and lose everything for the both of us. It is part of my job to protect her from all of this, and I can handle that, most of the time.

Most men do not want sympathy, and I certainly do not. There is no appeal, to my mind, in “rights for men” or any kind of ridiculous “men’s movement.” I only submit for the public record, once again and without fear, that if contemporary fatherhood continues to feel as impossible as it feels to me, it is better for a man to occasionally snap in a small way, rather than snap in the big and silent ways that husbands have too often snapped in the past. And perhaps the weaker, average fathers, such as myself, will take a few hits — or 19 million of them — for the team, so that the really great fathers can carry on, dutifully, in silence.

I would rather be scorned for revealing my weaknesses honestly, while holding myself and my family together, than be applauded for making art out of its destruction. Buzzy celebration simply for snapping is another one of the rewards fathers must be prepared to forgo.

In Episode One of Season One of The White Lotus, the show’s creator, Mike White, doesn’t merely begin a sort of Freudian torment of several of his central characters over the show’s three seasons. He basically invites you to conclude that’s what he’s doing. In an introductory scene, an affluent father at a Maui resort displays his hairy testicles and the wrinkled underside of his penis for his wife — and the viewer at home — to examine up close. The father, Mark (Steve Zahn), is convinced there’s sickness in his reproductive organ. And having just met his children — a sneering dead-eyed daughter and a malfunctioning bug-eyed son — the viewer is inclined to believe him.

This scene shows a big reason why The White Lotus has become such a huge sensation, its tendency to treat a good number of its characters with ruthless and sometimes mocking disapproval. People really love to hate fictional characters, especially when they’re fed ample reasons to engage in this hating, and in Season Three, whose finale just aired, Mike White gives us his most hateable character yet — Saxon, son of embattled finance boss Timothy Ratliff. Then, after creating this hate-object, White visited upon him the most sick-making humiliations. Audiences loved it. I quite enjoy the show myself, but the schematic and predictable and overt way in which Mike White orchestrates his viewers’ responses to characters like Saxon, rouses them to hate as he hates, makes The White Lotus just slightly less than a first-rate creation.

Season One is set on the dry South Shore of Maui, and most of the action takes place within the beachy confines of the titular resort. It isn’t all that much to look at. Season Two is set in Sicily, which its wealthy characters actually explore and, for this reason, the season functions much better as marketing matter for luxury travel. In Season Three, set in Thailand, White has unlocked a powerful feature of his tropical setting — how gorgeous and intoxicating it is when filmed at night. The show totally skirts the cliché of danger lurking in the tropical dark. The Thailand nights of Season Three are fecund and inviting, and they’re filmed with such immersive lushness they sometimes feel more like VR than TV.

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White has said he initially envisioned The White Lotus as political critique, an examination of “the ethics of vacationing in other people’s realities”. Season One rides this idea pretty hard, its ethnic Hawaiian characters functioning mainly as noble natives and totemic victims for guilty liberal viewers. White dropped this ethics-of-vacation conceit for Season Two, it seems. He clearly relishes Sicily’s rocky landscape and ancient cities, and his Sicilian characters, having grown their own agendas, are much more interesting than the sad Hawaiian Others of Season One. Season Three is almost straight vacation porn.

Season Three is also where we meet White’s character archetypes in their most extreme form. The foundational figure is Saxon’s father Timothy (Jason Isaacs), whose hopes for a calm tropical vacation are destroyed when a shady deal from his past comes back to the surface. He’s obviously stressed about his legal jeopardy, but it’s his threatened status as a father that most tortures him, because he’s idolized within his family as a great patriarch, especially by Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the oldest of his three children, and by his dopey and unseeing wife Victoria (Parker Posey).

Timothy Ratliff is the fourth archetypal father in The White Lotus, each a fallen man with dark secrets and dubious judgment — or the fifth if you count the one who doesn’t appear but functions as a plot device. In Season One it was Mark who, along with a pair of unhealthy testicles, carries around the shame of having cheated on his tech executive wife Nicole (Connie Britton). Mark, unmanned by his alpha wife, is also a moron. He betrays Nicole further by confessing his infidelity to their unhappy teenaged son. He does this, he says, because he wants to be open, unlike his father, a closeted gay man who died of AIDS when Mark was a young boy.

Season Two had Hollywood mogul Dominic (Michael Imperioli), who, while feigning atonement for his many sins against his wife, commits even more marital sins on his Sicily vacation. Season Two also had Dominic’s father, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), a lecherous widower who accompanies his son and grandson on their luxurious trip, and who was Dominic’s early model for both infidelity and lying to yourself about infidelity.

It’s hard not to view White’s creation of these characters as expressing a sort of Oedipal reflex, each season a father (or two) being ritually reduced, exposed as a moral fraud. This is where, in a roughly Freudian mode, I have to get reductive. I resist ad hominem criticism as a rule, but declining to note the show’s parallels with White’s own life is beyond my powers of discretion. What I’m saying is, it must have been psychologically formative for this future auteur of prestige television to learn that his father, a well-known figure in the highest levels of evangelical Christianity in America, was secretly gay, and to suffer the undoing of his family in the wake of this revelation. It’s heartening to know that White’s relationship with his father survived this bombshell being dropped on their family, and on the father’s lucrative career as a ghostwriter for famous televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Still, it doesn’t seem mysterious how the idea of the fallen father might have embedded itself deep in Mike White’s mind as a dramatic model to return to again and again, and again.

There’s nothing artistically wrong with White’s repeated destruction of this father figure. Indeed, he keeps getting better at it. Timothy Ratliff, the doomed Southern moneyman of Season Three, is the greatest of these ruined fathers, a subtle and beautiful creation, which is due in part to White’s intimate understanding of him and in part to his astonishing portrayal by Jason Isaacs. Timothy somehow grows more expressive and sympathetic even as he begins to contemplate fatal violence in his desperation, and even as the Lorazepam he steals from his wife sends him ever closer to catatonia. And, beautifully, the most jarring and searching moments in Timothy’s descent happen with the living darkness draped around him. These are powerfully vivid and memorable television scenes.

If there’s an artistic problem in White’s vaguely Freudian scheming, it is not with the chaotic unmaking of the fathers but with his orderly painting of the sons. There are two types of sons in The White Lotus, those who admire their father and follow in his path — that is, those who fail to share White’s view of their fathers as quasi-Oedipal targets begging for destruction. And there are those who recoil in their fathers’ presence and reject their influence. These latter spend the luxurious week depicted in a White Lotus season gaining critical distance from their fathers and moving away from their families. The former are monstrous. The latter are exemplary.

In Season One, the exemplary son is Quinn (Fred Hechinger), the awkward younger child of testicle-sick Mark. Banished from the family suite by his cruel sister, Quinn spends his nights on the beach, where, every morning, he wakes to see a crew of muscular Hawaiians putting in their outrigger canoe for a traditional paddle. One morning the Hawaiians invite Quinn to grab an oar and take the empty seat in their canoe. He glides off into the ocean with them and is set free from his ugly life at once. From that moment he knows: he must get away from his idiot father, his poisonous family.

In Season Two there’s pretty much one son, Albie, and he’s exemplary. Albie’s a recent graduate of Stanford, and so he’s both smart enough to know his father cheats on his mother and enlightened enough to know this makes him an irredeemable scumbag, and for much of the week he makes his father sizzle in this knowledge. Like Quinn in Season One, Albie is awkward and insecure, and the grace note he’s given at the end of the season consists of him being — instead of a slick seducer like his father — romantically yearning and tentative and, yes, respectful of women.

In Season Three the exemplary son, Saxon’s younger brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola), has a co-conspirator in his older sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook). The two of them are drawn to the groovy asceticism of Buddhist meditation, which appears as a sane and ethical alternative to the sexual weirdness and stupefying materialism of life in their family. Like Quinn in Season One, they’ve discovered the authentic spiritual essence of the place they are visiting, and, like Quinn, they don’t want to go home. Through this act of staying in Thailand, of not going home, they might redeem themselves from their degraded condition as children of Timothy and Victoria Ratliff.

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The monster sons are as tidy in their similarities as are the exemplary sons. Season One’s monster son is Shane (Jake Lacy), who’s honeymooning in Maui with his new wife Rachel (Alexandra Daddario). Shane’s wacky and grating mother (Molly Shannon) invades his honeymoon — and he exhibits his maternally stunted sexuality in welcoming her — but his wealthy father never appears. Still, it’s clear that Shane, just like Saxon in Season Three, is unambivalent about his daddy. Like Saxon he works for and with his father and, we can assume, reveres him completely. He’s treading his father’s path to an unexamined life of extreme wealth and braying privilege when, if he were any good, he’d be plotting his father’s downfall, or at least eyeing a hygienic escape from his diseased family.

Shane is not as psychologically icky a figure as Saxon is, but he is more comprehensively an asshole, if that’s possible. In certain obvious ways he’s White’s prototype for Saxon, a test version, an early attempt. He is, in other words, an extremely crude piece of characterization. Like Saxon, Shane is made to suffer for the pleasure of his many haters out in TV land, but his suffering is that of hotel slapstick — he’s given the wrong room and thus launched into battle with the hotel’s stealthily vengeful manager Armond (Murray Barlett).

Shane is straightforwardly obnoxious. Saxon is straightforwardly obnoxious too, but he’s also off-putting in dozens of subtler and more visceral ways. His person, in all its dimensions, offends you at the level of appetite — the lifting nasal tones of his voice; the way his lips retract from his teeth and his nostrils flex like he’s smelling crap when he flashes his smile; the smug incomprehension he’s always expressing with this smile; his goading frankness towards his little brother about porn and masturbation; his sexual sizing-up of his little sister; his oily frat-guy methods of flirting; his deafening use of a blender; his toadying careerism. I’m tempted to go on. It’s everything about him, is what I’m saying. Indeed, Saxon has more revolting characteristics than most people have characteristics.

White fashions a punishment for Saxon that’s as appallingly deep and total as his personal grossness, or it should be. In a TV scene for the ages, he and Lochlan take an unnamed hallucinogen with fetching Chloe and Chelsea, two likable gold-diggers — and, in the erotic and psychedelic frenzy that ensues, they end up sexually entangled with each other. The viewer is duly sickened and saddened, and you’d think the combination of incest and accidental gayness would make straight Saxon’s head explode. But when Chloe and Chelsea fill out the incestuous picture for him the next day — he says he doesn’t remember — his disquiet is real enough but also strangely controlled. He’s roughly as appalled as he’d be if his frat-bros told him that he’d hooked up with a fat chick when he was blacked out. He gets over it way, way, way faster than I would.

White seems to be telling the viewer not only that occasional acts of gayness are par for the course for straights like Saxon — which is par for the course from a bisexual TV writer who went to Wesleyan — but that this incest stuff is no big deal either. Families are weird like that. Families are sick like that. Wasn’t a hookup with his cute little brother already on Saxon’s agenda, given the nakedness and wank-talk he assailed him with in Episode One? Didn’t Lochlan seem to smile through these taboo moments as if sheepishly enjoying them?

I sound a little disapproving, and I am, a little, but the moral and sexual extremity and the deadpan lack of judgment from the person who staged it take Saxon to some welcome and unexpected places. In a season with many great scenes, one of the best builds on this prior one, where Chloe and Chelsea tell him he hooked up with his little brother. In the later scene, in the second-last episode, Chloe tries to convince Saxon to participate in an Oedipal sexual fantasy that is at once comically on-the-nose in its Freudian details and surreally mind-bending and involuted in what it means for Saxon. The fantasy comes from Chloe’s rich and jealous older boyfriend Gary and involves a sort of threesome with Chloe, Saxon and then Gary, who wants to replay his formative memories of seeing his parents having sex and secretly desiring to take his father’s place in bed with his mother. (In his habitual jealousy, Gary thinks, he’s always returning to this primal scene of father-son rivalry.)

Saxon is being asked to play the sexual role of Gary’s father, to be the one who starts out with the mother but then is Oedipally replaced by the son. “It would be like he’s winning his mother back from his father,” Chloe says of Gary. But in asking Saxon to play the role of the father in this fantasy, she’s also, perforce, asking him to play the role of his father, with Gary taking his role as the rightful usurper, the son who wants to replace the father. It’s hard to untangle this with any confidence, but when Saxon rejects this proposal it seems like a moment of personal growth. Until now, he’s identified totally and somewhat pathetically with his father Timothy, but here, given a chance to deepen that identification, to be his father in sexual play with a former fashion model, he emphatically declines. You might call it an ambiguous, backhanded act of Oedipal aggression, Saxon’s refusal to play the paternal object of such aggression, his refusal to take the fall for his father.

Timothy really is in for a fall, which Saxon has just begun to realize. He’s facing the prospect of losing his father to prison and losing his job at his father’s firm, which means that he’s also facing the heavier prospect of becoming himself — but he also seems, for the first time, like he’s up to the challenge. Saxon seems to be dealing with his daddy issues.

Unlike his prototype, Shane, from Season One, the much ickier Saxon is actually growing and changing in these later episodes, under the particular influence of childlike Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), the Manchester girl with the uncontainable front teeth and the impossibly big and lovely brown eyes. Her understated scenes with Saxon, in which she seems to be giving him gentle introductory lessons in how to be a person, are genuinely touching.

These changes in Saxon’s character are a strange development so deep into the season. On one hand, they offer a potent sentimental release for the viewer. Watching a despicable person become vaguely human and likable arrives as a welcome note. On the other hand, this change in someone who’s been so central as a focus of loathing, and so heavy with archetypal meaning, is a little disorienting. What, then, could bring The White Lotus to its dramatic conclusion once Saxon punctured the Oedipal tension, once this frat bro got over his daddy issues? Who was going to be the shooter of those bullets that tore through the jungle vegetation at the beginning of Episode One?

Well, it turns out that Mike White had secretly introduced a third type of son in Season Three, and this son had been seething with his own Oedipal hatred for the entire season. But, much like the original Oedipus, this character didn’t know that his murderous inclinations were Oedipal. He didn’t know the guy he had to kill was his dad. And, when he found out, he was as surprised as the rest of us. That would be a strange experience, to discover at this climactic moment that you’re not even the metaphor. You’re the referent of the metaphor. You’re not “Oedipal”. You’re Oedipus.

For the viewer, this climax is both surprising and kind of reassuring. Season Three of The White Lotus ended with a startling plot twist, but this plot twist reinforced the dominant theme of all three White Lotus seasons so emphatically it was as if it wasn’t even a twist. We didn’t foresee it, and yet once it happened it felt necessary. You might say it felt like fate.

But this feeling of necessity also points to the show’s persistent weakness. When a season ends, you’re left with the sense that Mike White thinks he’s just given you a lesson. He’s just told you a few really important things. You look back and realize he’s just led all those characters through their sufferings so that you’ll come away from his latest eight episodes with the proper thoughts in your head. These thoughts are of course his thoughts — thoughts about families and, especially, about fathers and sons.

And, for all the moral chaos that The White Lotus puts before us, these thoughts are extremely conventional. Described as “post-woke”, this latest season is refreshingly light on progressive messaging, at least compared with previous ones. (With its oppressed Hawaiians and righteous university girls, and a final resolution taken straight from the Department of Whiteness Studies, Season One sometimes felt like a sideshow act at a George Floyd die-in.) Season Three even breaks an iron taboo of trans discourse in a riotous scene featuring the great Sam Rockwell. But the show’s supposedly transgressive critique of families and fathers is as familiar as a Grimms’ Fairy Tale at this point. For many generations already, artists and writers have been leading the upper-class struggle against these buzz-killing symbols of stability and authority, of the intolerable notion that people from even the recent past might be useful guides through the present. According to these creators of culture, we dumb parents need to take our bearings from the younger generation. We need to stop and ask ourselves: What would our children have us do? How would a teenage girl improve the words we use?

These ideas are not very profound or original. Indeed, they’re literally childish. On their own, they’re barely worthy of discussing anymore. Still, it might be worthwhile to ask Mike White, perhaps in the manner of a psychoanalyst, how he came to find them so convincing.

Men are barely part of the picture. Ask Google what a “dadager” is, and the first result is the definition of “momager”. Ask it about “tiger dads”, and it wonders whether you might mean golfer Tiger Woods’s actual dad. “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington,” Noel Coward advised: Mr Worthington apparently did not need to be told. Maybe the assumption is that a father would never inflict such pressure on a child. After all, raising children is the woman’s job, and she’s supposed to crack on with it quietly. We make so much more fuss about Mother’s Day than Father’s Day — which is this coming Sunday, not that anyone will notice — perhaps because dads are still seen as supporting acts to mothers, the primary carers (who are always to blame when things go wrong).

But men do, obviously, get involved in their children’s careers. Tiger Woods’s actual dad is one example: he was coaching his son from practically the moment he could toddle. A high-level golfer himself, he knew what making it as a pro would mean for his son, whereas other fathers only get deeply involved when the glory begins. That’s the version of Mitch Winehouse that’s presented in the 2015 documentary Amy: a father who left the family home when the star was a child, reappearing as her career took off to become her effective second manager — and take control of her finances.

It’s a version that Mitch himself has rejected, complaining to an interviewer that the film was “trying to portray me in the worst possible light”. The fact that Amy died in 2011 as a result of alcohol poisoning raises the stakes for his reputation. Was he a caring father doing his best in an impossible situation, or one of the many who profited from Amy while neglecting her wellbeing?

His own book about her is really a long-form testimony for his own defence. All the same, Mitch did OK from his status as “Amy’s dad”. He got to travel the world in her entourage and manage her bank accounts — and writes in his book that “she and I knew that I needed to stop her frittering her money away”. He also got his own portion of fame with a TV series and a record deal. But all this success derived from his daughter.

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By Sarah Ditum

Tyler James, Amy’s best friend, is at pains in his new memoir My Amy to give Mitch all possible credit and stress how much Amy loved him (remember, she had “Daddy’s girl” tattooed on her bicep). But he also describes Mitch hoping to film Amy for his own documentary, regardless of her reluctance to be involved. Mitch pressing Amy to sign autographs for fans and be in photos, even though she doesn’t want to. Mitch lavishly announcing “we’ll get that” when James is booking his flights. (“I’d think, No, you won’t be getting it Mitch — Amy’s getting it,” writes James. “It wasn’t his money and it did my head in for years.”) Mitch, enjoying every moment of the celebrity that was manifestly tearing his daughter apart.

The most generous thing James can say about Mitch at these moments is this: “He was so caught up in her success I felt like he didn’t see his daughter for who she was anymore, and maybe not even himself.” Within the Winehouse machine, it seems like Mitch lost sight of Amy as an individual. She was just the raw material that supplied the mini-industry around her. Still, no record industry pro came any closer to saving Amy than cab-driver Mitch did. None of the seasoned experts in dealing with substance abuse were any more effective in their interventions.

It is unfortunate that Mitch is fixed forever in that line from “Rehab” where Amy explains she won’t be going because “My daddy says I’m fine.” Mitch accepts that he said this, but “as we carried on talking, though, I saw the other side” — that is, the side he ended up contracted to make a documentary about. His TV series was on families affected by addiction, and he writes that he “wanted the public to know about the heartaches and dilemmas that such people live with.”

Which presumably seemed a good reason to try to get footage of his alcoholic daughter relapsing. God knows life with an addict is impossible, but it’s hard to reconcile Mitch’s apparently simultaneous beliefs that Amy was well enough to tour while also being sick enough to anchor a whole series on the topic of substance abuse. The one thing that unites both positions, though, is the fact that they made money, which has a marvellous power to dissolve scruples.

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How daughters turn fathers into feminists

By Tom Chivers

If Mitch seems at best naive in retrospect, the most extreme charge against Jamie Spears is the opposite: that he has wilfully run his daughter’s life to his own benefit. Britney is still fighting a legal battle to have her father permanently removed from the conservatorship that has controlled her personal, professional and financial life since her 2008 breakdown. How Jamie came to hold this central role in his daughter’s life is an interesting question in itself, given that (according to the documentary Framing Britney Spears) he was largely absent from her childhood, with her mother doing most of the career running.

But after 2008, it was Jamie who scooped Britney up off the floor and got her back in money-making shape. He set her up with a Vegas residency that made her (and by extension, him) wildly well-off — and which continued until she abruptly announced her “indefinite hiatus” in 2019. Among the #freebritney contingent of her fans, who believe she is being controlled by her father, her withdrawal from work is read as an act of resistance after a lifetime of being treated as a puppet. Her attorney has told the court that she’s “afraid” of her father, and won’t return to work until he’s no longer in control of her career.

Jamie’s not the only dadager who’s ended up putting an axe through his golden goose. If Thora Birch’s career trajectory had continued from where it was 20 years ago, she’d be one of the most famous actresses in the world: American Beauty, Ghost World. But in 2010, her ex-porn-star father got her fired from an off-Broadway play by allegedly interfering in the production, threatening other actors for touching her per direction, and poking his head through windows on the set. She didn’t have another significant role till The Walking Dead in 2020.

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Why I had a baby at university

By Sarah Ditum

And no one can outdo Thomas Markle when it comes to grifting from your own child: here’s a man who has faked paparazzi photos and sold private correspondence to get a slice from his daughter Meghan’s success in marrying into the royal family. It didn’t matter that she firmly held him at arm’s length. His logic seemed to be that she was his, and he felt entitled to his portion from her. Any boundary she set, he saw as a betrayal. Any infraction he committed was only what a loving father would do. No wonder she didn’t want him walking her down the aisle. He gave her away a long time ago.

It’s a question of possession. Some fathers still treat their children as an extension of themselves, regardless of how post-feudal the rest of the world becomes. When a woman takes the tiger role, she’s being ambitious through her children, and ambition in a woman is always suspect. When it’s a man involving himself in his child’s career, though, he’s merely exercising his patriarchal rights — something he’s apparently entitled to do even if, as in most of the examples, he wasn’t around for much of the actual childhood bit.