Is a bad Dad better than no Dad? The myth of the male role model

That's not the story that comes across in the popular press. "Who was going to show my son how to walk [like a man]?" a woman agonized in one article. "Fathers protect, they provide, they initiate into adulthood, they bring the standards of the outside world to bear on their children," says the author of another (ignoring the fact that it is men who commit most of the crimes in the world, as well as in their own homes). Psychiatrist Frank Pittman, who scolds the "politically correct" for believing "that a mother [is] able to show a male child how to be a man," tells us categorically that "in families where the father is absent, the mother faces an impossible task: she cannot raise a boy into a man. He must bond with a man as he grows up." "In other words," I translate for her, "someone male who has those female qualities you don't value in yourself? Why go to a therapist?" I ask. "Why can't you be the role model your son needs? Why can't you be the one to show him that one parent, man or woman, can own all the qualities that it takes to be a human being in the world we live in?" Today our culture has a near-obsessive interest in reclaiming and rehabilitating the reputation of that missing person "the father." Even if he is, as [Robert Bly] has written about his own father, alcoholic, unsupportive, and emotionally remote, he is to be embraced and forgiven (while Mother is left in the cold). Indeed, Jungian analyst James Hillman, one of the leading thinkers of the any-dad-is-better-than-none men's movement, has gone Bly one better. In A Blue Fire Hillman pays something resembling tribute to the "destructive father," because such a father "smashes the son's idolatry" by virtue of his negative traits, "teaches [the son] that failing belongs to fathering," and "awaken[s] moral resolve...by provoking moral outrage at [his] bad example." Imagine a comparable tribute to mothers!