My dad was a seemingly stand up guy, a military officer with a sense of humor and great smile. But among my earliest memories, alone with him in the car at a red light or crosswalk, he’d catcall women and loudly say very sexist things. As I got a little older, our movie & TV obsessed family would watch R rated movies with bare breasted women, and he’d make the same comments. My siblings and I never said a word, we sat in silence avoiding all eye contact. It was so uncomfortable. Then the touching started: he’d pinch my bottom every time I left a room, and when I’d complain, he said that’s what the guys in Europe do. Or tell me to stop wearing tiny shorts (my pajamas), so I wore pants instead. But the pinching didn’t stop. He ended up slipping his hand down my pants twice before I was in middle school. But he never did it again, so not worth complaining about, right? It all was hurtful, but maybe what hurt the most was as a young teen, he forced me to look at a Plaboy magazine when one of my favorite actresses did a centerfold. None of our relatives called him out on any of this behavior, they just accepted it was just how men are. I didn’t start dating until my late teens, I was very shy and chaste, but he still threw around words like whore. So I stopped caring for a while, and slept with anyone; usually people I didn’t like to keep myself from getting attached. It took me years to start caring about myself and my safety again. As an adult, I never had a relationship with my dad, but oddly, that’s his choice. I feel orphaned, abandoned. I don’t know what’s worse: the shame of how he treated me as a kid, or being fatherless.
— Anonymous
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