By David Futrelle
On Saturday, former NFL star Jay Feely posted this pic on twitter:
Wishing my beautiful daughter and her date a great time at prom #BadBoys pic.twitter.com/T5JRZQYq9e
— Jay Feely (@jayfeely) April 22, 2018
Feely later clarified that the picture was meant as a joke, so I guess it’s a bit of a relief to know that he wasn’t literally planning to gun down his daughter’s boyfriend if he found out that the two had engaged in some variety of sex-having.
As jokes go, though, this isn’t exactly an original one. A quick search on the Google will turn up countless variants on Feely’s joke, many of them available for purchase in the form of signs and t-shirts.
Not everyone on the internet thought Feely’s variation on this old joke was all that funny.
I keep seeing that photo of the Dad holding a gun while he poses with his daughter and her prom date. Some folks can find that funny, that’s on them, but that’d be the last time my kid was around said family.
— X (@XLNB) April 23, 2018
If I ever ask to see my son’s prom pictures and a motherfucker has a gun raised on him even for jokes we’re fighting js https://t.co/C9UpPDQD6W
— maya (@ThatMayaGirl) April 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/nachdermas/status/988128179821916160
Gonna have a daughter so I can threaten her prom date with a gun and propagate my antiquated toxic masculinity by letting everyone know that I consider her lady parts just another piece of my property and send her a coded message that her sexuality is shameful to own the libs.
— The Internet’s Todd Holloman (@todd_holloman) April 23, 2018
ME: Teach boys not to rape.
THEM: That's ridiculous, rapists are psychos, everyone normal already knows rape is wrong.
ME: Why brandish a gun in your daughter's prom photo?
THEM: Because girls have to be protected from boys' uncontrolled sexual aggression, that's just normal. https://t.co/MTWj8JObcV
— Rebecca Cohen (@GynoStar) April 22, 2018
So much bothers me in this "joke." The gun – yes, obviously. But dad inserting himself into his daughter's prom? No. Stand down, dad. This isn't about you in any way. This is just telegraphing the message she is your property until you say otherwise. Gross.
— babsbeaty (@babsbeaty) April 23, 2018
Nothing screams gun safety like threatening your daughter’s prom date with a handgun. 🤷🏻♀️ https://t.co/AsGCmKo3an
— celia (@_celia_bedelia_) April 22, 2018
Some made their own jokes:
Listen buddy if you want to take my daughter to prom you have to take me to prom too. You've gotta pull up to my house in a limo, attach a corsage to my wrist and awkwardly hover your hands over my ass while we slow dance to I Don't Want To Miss A Thing by Aerosmith.
— miller low life (@itwasthreezero) April 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/gothstepdad/status/988118581572526080
https://twitter.com/LilRevive/status/988156277179256832
And then, of course, there were the cute animals.
https://twitter.com/bkerogers/status/988260730725126150
Wishing my beautiful daughter and her date a great time at prom#BadBoys pic.twitter.com/D7JoGgi41G
— Mαtt Thomαs (@mattthomas) April 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/Slennon_/status/988127131451314176
Ok, maybe cute isn’t the right word for that last tweet.
But my favorite response was the angry email that gun control activist Shannon Watts got from someone insisting that the dad was perfectly correct to pull out his gun to “protect” his daughter’s “chastity” because once a woman has been with too many dicks she loses the ability to love.
Email I received in response to my tweet about Jay Feely holding a gun in a prom pic with his daughter and her date.
Good talk. pic.twitter.com/iJlcGnXKdg
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) April 23, 2018
Huh. Seems like I’ve heard that argument before. Evidently, the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit is leaking again.
He couldn’t just stay behind the camera and let his daughter go on a nice date to the prom. You’re right, this whole venture screams “possessive and chauvinistic.”
I wonder what his marriage is like.
Best part for me was @MechaPrimate going fucking ballistic and calling people ‘male feminists’ and basically insinuating they were perverts or something.
Like gee
This “joke” is insulting to both young women and young men. It implies that the young woman’s sexuality is not her own and that the young man is an uncontrollable sex-fiend. It doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of fathers either; showing them as heavily-armed, barely restrained balls of toxic rage.
Yep, it’s because American women are so promiscuous that marriage rates are so low. It has nothing to do with all those American men who are being promiscuous with them. Or nothing to do with promiscuity at all. And marriages ending in divorce is bad, unlike the good old days when people stayed married no matter how shitty their marriages were.
I noticed this is only a problem if you have “pretty” daughters. Of course, every manly man wants a beautiful daughter, no point in having a woman if you can’t make other men jealous and threaten them! /s
The joke would have been funny if it subverted the trope and the boy was his son, the girl was the date and the dad was protective of his virginity. Only if the gun was fake though. It’s not a very funny joke if it’s just upholding a bullshit status quo.
I find it really funny – but not haha funny, peculiar I guess* – that so many misogynists from the English speaking world fetishize the chastity of Asian women when at the same time there’s a huge sex tourism industry in many Asian countries. It’s almost like their interest in Asian women is not actually about virginity but more about perceived powerlessness and submissiveness. And now I have a use for this Skye gif again
*I’ll reward anyone who knows where that line is from with a cute pic of an animal species of your choosing.
Yeah, wanting a trophy daughter is even grosser than wanting a trophy wife. It also rests on the assumption that no one would have sex with a not “pretty” girl.
I’m also going to go out on a limb and guess that these obsessively overprotective dads are more likely to be sexually abusing their daughters than the general dad population. Purity culture and rape culture are inherently linked.
Obviously, you only obsess about the state of your kid’s vagina if they’re a hottie that you would date.
Bet they are all Trumpsters
Or could be I’m reading this tweet wrong…could it be there’s another reason why Jay wants to shove his hard ready to shoot phallic symbol next to that sweet blonde teenage package?
This sort of thing comes up in non-sexual areas too. When my partner’s daughter finally got her driver’s license, you wouldn’t believe the number of people who made “jokes” indicating that we should keep her in the child’s position of having to beg us for a ride any time she wanted to go anywhere. I would give them the “what planet are you from?” stinkeye and talk about how pleased we were that she’d achieved this major step toward independent adulthood.
For those of us who don’t have a father, what do we do?
Enough of men see us as “easy prey” too. They talk about women with “Daddy Issues”.
But what if you have cleared most of that from your mind? Over and done with and recognize that some people are just assholes.
Deep Thoughts: If my father was an asshole, does that make me an Alpha Female?
Contemplating such things would probably cause them to stop braining.
Dads and daughters. And me and my car issues. A guy approached me today, asking if I want to sell my car, he wants to buy it as a gift for his daughter who’s admired it in my driveway!
Really? And dad wants to buy his daughter a gift for graduating college.
Aw, what a nice dad! I was honest about it’s issues, which I am working on, and then we’ll talk more.
This girl likes the car and wants it? And dad wants to help? Nice dad right here 🙂
And this might work out to be one of those mystical “win win” situations….
Not to mention if Feely had a son, he’d then probably think said male child should be out, spreadin’ his wild oats with as many girls as he can…*barf*
I’m just gonna paste what I wrote on the other thread where this came up:
There is also the flip side that this kind of mentality suggests women without a male figure to protect her is ‘fair game’ for disrespectful behaviour from their partners.
I have heard this expressed more explicitly in a heavily patriarchal country than I imagine people do in the US (or UK) but I can’t help feeling like some of the message filters into society
ETA: I hadn’t considered this as an aspect of the horrid ‘daddy issues’ vileness you hear bandied about
And if son and his friends get someone else’s “beautiful daughter” blind drunk and rape her, then it’s just boys being boys and she was a dirty slut who shouldn’t have been drinking with boys, dontcha know?
Pretty sure that calls for lead shielding at this point.
@WWTH Eels lyric, right? Life is funny but not haha funny?
My favorite tweet follow up to this was something like, “It’s been two months since Parkland, but sure, let’s joke about shooting teenagers.”
I seem to remember my high school prom date and I screwing like minks the entire time we were dating. Ahhh, young lust…. 😀
…apparently neither of us has changed in 30 some years. LOL! (Well, other than we’re with other people now. *snicker*)
On reflection, I’d be more inclined to believe that my mom would have threatened *me* for being an evil sluuuuuuut. 😛 (Fortunately she was against guns.)
Iseult The Idle wins a cute animal pic!
Which species do you like?
PS You Rock My World is one of my favorite albums and now that it’s almost 20 years old, I fear its been largely forgotten.
Confession: my dad wanted to tip especially well a waiter who asked me out. Thanks?!
When I looked at that prom photo all I could see was male insecurity and a cheesy sitcom plot.
8 simple rules for shooting myself in the balls.
Rules for dating my daughter:
1. My daughter is intelligent, self-aware, and has excellent taste. I trust her.
My father used to show my dates MY old targets and wax eloquently about how good I was. It always made me feel like he trusted me to take care of myself.
Re: the final tweet
These guys still have no idea where milk comes from (hint: it isn’t from vaginas).
I have it on good authority that just having a daughter makes you a beta cuck, so… take that, I guess, football dude.
“Giving away free milk” sounds like a reference to that old saw “Why buy a cow if you can get the milk for free?” Which is disgusting on so many levels.
@David
Early reports are tying the man who drove a van through a crowd in Toronto with the incel community. Given the source is a Facebook post it’s hard to say at this point. That he asked police to shoot him (which they declined to do) does suggest that he may have wanted martyrdom, but whether he was inspired by “Saint Elliot” or not is hard to say.