I absolutely love this song and video. The only problem that I have with it is where the video plays into the "toxic male" stereotype. These types of fathers absolutely do exist and they belong buried in the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Right next to them, however, should be the toxic mothers who abuse their children while hiding behind the fact that they are a woman who shalt not be fought back against under any circumstance. The mothers who emotionally and verbally abuse their children as a means of manipulation and control. Women absolutely do not deserve a free pass to abuse people in their own manipulative ways. Just because a kid doesn't show up to school looking all black and blue with bruises doesn't mean they aren't absolutely gutted on the inside. Some people's mothers would absolutely be in prison for some of the things they have done to their children if those kids knew any better at the time. Society needs to stop turning a blind eye to the ways in which women abuse people, not all abuse is physical either.
I have a buddy who fell asleep and woke up nearly every single day for a period of 2-3 years hearing his mom and sister going to war with each other. The only nights he didn't hear it were the nights when he slept at someone else's house or the nights when his father didn't work. His mother would charge in to his sister's room grabbing her by the hair and taking her to the floor while hitting her and screaming every terrible thing imaginable at her. Telling both of her children they were going to amount to nothing in life if they came home home with a single blemish on an elementary school report card. Growing up in a household with explosive women who have undiagnosed mental disorders can leave a kid pretty messed up afterwards.
I remember hanging out with this kid in middle school and quite often he never wanted to go home after school. He spent the night at my house a lot, I mean A LOT. Sometimes even on a school nights. He never really talked to us about what was going on at home, he would just say that he doesn't want to go home. Not that we would have been good listeners. We were teenage boys in the 90s. We were assholes, we didn't know how to be anything but assholes to each other. We always assumed his dad was abusive, but his dad always worked at night. So that wouldn't have explained why he wanted to sleepover so often. We were also incredibly judgemental and racist towards him, because whenever he would comment about not wanting to go home, someone in our group of friends would say something along the lines of "I thought your family was all white and Brady Bunch 'n shit." The kid would shoot whoever said that a death stare before mumbling something about Married With Children or Roseanne. When we got in to High School, he used to fall asleep in his first and second period classes all the time. We always assumed he was just staying up late playing video games or something.
Imagine being in a log cabin out in the middle of the woods when a giant grizzly bear attacks. Roaring and howling, doors banging, as you cower in a corner with nothing but a broom to defend yourself with if the bear is able to break through the wooden door. Imagine how shaken up you might feel after experiencing 30 minutes of such an assault. Just experiencing something like that once would leave most people rattled with a story to tell for the rest of their life.
Now imagine the affect on the human nervous system if the bear attacked every. single. night...
Looking back, it was pretty fucked up and outright racist of us to assume that everything in his family life was peechy keen like some 50s "white picket fence" sitcom just because he was white. We had no idea what the kid was actually going through at home. No one ever suspects that it's the mother who is abusive. No one really considers how watching your own mother beating the piss out of your older sister every morning and every night would leave a boy scarred for life. His mother physically abused him too, but not nearly as bad as his sister because as he got older he was better able to defend himself from her attacks. I know that my buddy probably looks back on the situation wishing that he had been able to help defend his sister from his mom, but if he had intervened physically then his mother would have just manipulated her white knight husband in to whipping the kid's God damn ass the next day when he got home from work, and she also would have verbally and psychologically tortured the kid for "hitting a woman." A cardinal sin that went punished without question or context in the "good ol' days."
Not that his sister was completely innocent either. She could be an incredibly confrontational and completely unreasonable litte privelidged brat in her own right at times. The kind of Karen who yells at her brother for not opening the bathroom window after taking a shower which leaves the mirror all fogged up and inconveniences her slightly when she decides she needs to put on her make-up before going to bed or whatever the heck it is that hormonal teenage girls do in the bathroom for 3 hours on a Wednesday night, and then yells at her brother again on Thursday night because the poor kid opened the bathroom window hoping to avoid getting attacked and yelled at by his psychotic sister who is now angry because she says it's too cold in the bathroom. She'd find something to get upset and yell about no matter what he did to avoid her misguided anger.
Boys from our generation were always told to "Walk it off," "Don't be a pussy," or "Boys don't cry." What type of psychological issues were we setting that generation of guys up for? We always called our poor friend privelidged, but I think that if given the chance he would've traded places with any one of us at any given moment. Some of our friends' parents were proud when their kids didn't come home with any Fs or Ds or by being dropped off by the local police. Our buddy had coffee mugs and insults thrown at him by his own mother for having a single "B" on an otherwise spotless grade report. "Healing Femininity" my fucking ass, McBain!
My father once told me that money doesn't stop problems from existing, it just creates another scenario for problems to exist in. I think this is true of anyone's scenario. It's easy for us to assume that just because someone else doesn't have the same problems as we do, or because maybe someone else's parents stayed married while ours divorced, that they are somehow "privelidged" or immune to the bullshit trials and tribulations of life. They aren't. We are just absolute racist, short-sighted, judgemental, and ignorant dickheads for thinking they are.
Happy Mother's Day.