Buzzfeed

In his moving testimony on behalf of the Sexual Assault Survivors' Bill of Rights last summer, actor and former NFL player Terry Crews explained to the Senate why acts of sexual violence are never really about sex, but always about power. His voice had by then become a prominent one in the #MeToo movement, the cultural reckoning around sexual violence given a name by civil rights activist Tarana Burke. He chose not only to come forward about his own assault at the hands of a white Hollywood agent, but also to openly reflect on how he himself was taught to associate having control with being a man:

As a child I watched as my father violently abused my mother, using his power and authority to dominate her. As I grew up, this thought transformed the type of man I became. I swore I would never be like my father and yet I believed, to my core, that as a man, I was more valuable in this world. As a protector and symbol of strength, I was more worthy. That women were beneath me.

Two new documentaries contributing to the current cultural conversation about assault and abuse also deal with the themes of masculinity, fatherhood, and power. Surviving R. Kelly and Leaving Neverland spotlight how singers R. Kelly and Michael Jackson allegedly abused and sexually assaulted young girls and boys, respectively, throughout their careers. Based on the accounts of the survivors featured, both men are shown as obsessed with performances of masculinity rooted in control — from the casual demeaning of women to forcing kids to watch pornography.

According to these series, both stars also positioned themselves as “father figures” to the children they have been accused of abusing, as a means of further manipulating them. Wade Robson, one of the survivors at the center of Leaving Neverland, recalls in the film that Jackson called him “Little One” and encouraged in him a distrust of women, while simultaneously isolating him from his actual father, who remained in Australia when the family made the move to the US. (Robson has said that “it was because of Michael, I understand now, that I was pushing my father away.”) Kitti Jones, who says she spent two years trapped in R. Kelly’s home and was also separated from her family, has said that the black girls and women under the singer’s control were “required to call him Daddy.”

As Crews’ Senate testimony suggests, fatherhood is itself often understood as a performance of masculinity: a role traditionally defined by the ability to work and provide, to be ”a protector and symbol of strength.” This role has been historically aligned with what scholar bell hooks, in Feminism Is for Everybody, calls “the two-parent patriarchal family,” reinforced by popular culture that extends far beyond the work of musicians. From the iconic white paternalism of Father Knows Best to the fantasy of “fatherly invulnerability” in Taken, there is a prevalent cultural narrative in the United States that suggests that having authority over others — especially women, children, and people of other genders — is akin to being a “good” dad.

Which is why it surprised many when Crews seemed to come out in defense of traditional views of fatherhood this past weekend. In a series of tweets, Crews responded to a New York Times op-ed by the lawyer Derecka Purnell, which criticizes former president Barack Obama for what she sees as a tendency to “scold” black boys. Purnell writes, “programs like [Obama’s] My Brother’s Keeper insist on making better versions of Trayvon Martin, the black victim, instead of asking how to stop creating people like George Zimmerman, the racist vigilante.”

Crews disagreed, arguing that Obama was more than justified in offering his advice to black boys as “a successful black man.” He also took umbrage with the fact that the piece "was written by a WOMAN [sic] about how how boys should be taught to grow into successful young men" — a topic that, apparently, he felt should be off-limits to women. After being challenged by his followers to elaborate on his disagreement, Crews explained his view that children require a paternal figure in their life, sharing a clip from his 2014 appearance on The View, in which he says, “There are things that you need from your father.” And in a now-deleted tweet, for which he later apologized, Crews wrote that those raised by parents of a single gender — without a father — grow up "severely malnourished.”

What makes this line of argument so troubling is that Crews seemingly doubles down on the very perspective he warned us about in his Senate testimony: The idea that those socialized to be men, particularly straight men, have access to rarified knowledge, one thing that can make them seem “more valuable in this world” than others. In that testimony, Crews spoke out against a fundamental and dangerous aspect of maintaining ideals of traditional masculinity and fatherhood.

Those dangers aren’t only highlighted by the stories of Jackson’s and Kelly’s accusers, but in countless others about accused and convicted predators, from the villain at the heart of Netflix’s Abducted in Plain Sight to the former USA Gymnastics national team doctor and convicted serial child molester Larry Nassar. In all of these stories, it’s clear that the mythic image of fatherhood has itself been used as a shield of protection by men looking to maintain their innocence and preserve their power.

During Jackson’s 2005 trial, one of the singer’s lines of defense was that the boy who had accused him of molestation, Gavin Arvizo, thought of him as a father figure. During the case, in which Jackson would eventually be acquitted of all charges, his lawyers cited video evidence in which Arvizo’s brother says that Jackson “actually seemed more fatherly than like our biological father." The implication is that a father, in a traditional, heteronormative sense, would be less likely to be an abuser (despite research that shows most children who are abused are abused by their parents). In Leaving Neverland, news clips about Jackson’s abuse are contrasted with fawning reports of his subsequent marriages to women, signaling the building of a traditional family, which survivor James Safechuck recalls as an intentional move to avoid public scrutiny.

R. Kelly has also appealed to his status as a family man in attempts to defend himself against charges of abuse. On Wednesday morning, CBS News aired a dramatic interview in which the singer responded to the accusations laid out in Surviving R. Kelly, and the criminal charges that followed it, with extreme anger and an emotional invocation of his role as a patriarch. Through tears he shouted and gesticulated toward interviewer Gayle King and directly at the camera, at one point saying, “This is not about music — I’m trying to have a relationship with my kids!” (Meanwhile, Kelly’s own daughter has described him as a “monster,” and later that same day Kelly was arrested for failing to pay child support.)

There’s ample evidence that men are awarded any number of privileges when presenting themselves as traditional fathers. Researchers have found that cisgender heterosexual men with children tend to be “held to more lenient standards than mothers and childless men,” including in hiring decisions, where “fathers are assumed to be providers [and thus] may be perceived as needing the job more than mothers.” As the existence of movies like 1983’s Mr. Mom or the more recent Daddy’s Home series highlight, there is a fundamental tension between the cultural expectations of manhood versus what we expect of or admire in those who raise children. Depictions of fatherhood in parenting magazines still tend to emphasize men as “breadwinners” more than as parents, reinforcing the notion that caregiving itself is inherently feminine, and therefore — troublingly — at odds with “being a man.” It’s not surprising that studies continue to find that most “men perceive fathering as something they ‘do,’ whereas women experience mothering as something they ‘are.’”

When straight cisgender men fail at an aspect of parenting or domesticity, embodying the “bumbling dad” trope of TV sitcoms like The King of Queens, that’s to be expected; but when these dads make an effort to succeed at even basic parenting tasks, they can defy expectations and reap the rewards — like going viral for baking their daughter a cake or styling a child’s hair. Meanwhile, for women and gender-nonconforming people, “good” parenting is an increasingly impossible standard to meet.