“Dear card manufacturers, the 1950s want their Fathers Day Card back.” So pines mom Melia Keeton Digby, based on this year’s offerings. She tells us how they can be better.
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Father’s Day in America was a few weeks ago. When you walked into any drugstore in America you found the greeting card aisle exploding with reminders that it is time to show some love to dear ol’ dad (and for the greeting card business to make a ton of money!). It has been years since I’ve perused the greeting card aisle. As a writer with a proclivity to self-expression (and the bank account to prove it), paying four dollars to have someone else tell my loved one how I feel about them has never made much sense to me.
The day before Father’s Day, while waiting for a prescription to be filled, my ten-year-old son and I killed time reading through the Father’s Day greeting cards for sale. After a few moments of reading, I shook my bewildered head and looked up, expecting to see a soda fountain and jukebox. Surely I had been transported to the 1950s!
The card in my hands depicted a confused looking dad and his mirror-image young son, standing in the middle of a living room looking at a vacuum cleaner. The cover read: “Hmm…I’m not sure what the heck it is…and your say you’ve seen Mom pushing it around?” And inside: “Hope your Father’s Day is filled with many amazing and wonderful discoveries.”
The card in my son’s hands described a “SUPERDAD!” as “Faster than a flying golf ball, more powerful than a silent fart, able to cook twenty burgers on a single grill…” What’s missing from this card, of course, is anything actually having to do with fathering.
If Father’s Day is meant to be a celebration honoring fathers and the influence of fathers in society, then the cards produced by companies hoping to appeal to the largest audience offer us a great visual representation of how our culture views men and fatherhood.
It is 2016 and the standard narrative reflected is that fathers are disconnected, bumbling, and incompetent buffoons, with an attachment to recliners, beer, golf, grills, farting, and television remotes. Of course, Mother’s Day cards have their stereotypes as well, but most are complimentary. As a culture, we celebrate moms on Mother’s Day, honoring them for all they do for families, and on Father’s Day, we denigrate dads. Mothers are our heroines, and fathers, the butt of our jokes.
This is not what I know to be true to of today’s men and fathers, and certainly not the message and model my husband and I are offering our three children.
For women and girls, our collective mainstream conscious has begun to shift, and as a society, we are becoming more and more aware of damaging and limiting gender stereotypes as it applies to the female half of the population. But what about our sons? Our daughters will not be fully free to reach their complete potential if their male counterparts are left behind in the 1950s.
Next Father’s Day, let’s offer the wonderful men in our lives honor, respect, and gratitude and leave the outdated gender stereotype “humor” where it belongs — in the past.
Photo: Flickr/Sean Freese
Hi, Melia. As the proud and hard-working father of two boys, I agree with you 100% that more greeting cards can—and should—celebrate and honor dads for the parent they do their very best to be rather than chide them for the gas they occasionally pass or the hogging of the TV remote. Dads today are growing more active, and more outwardly caring and loving by leaps and bounds, and as an active, loving dad, the most special thing I have in life is the love my boys and my wife feel in return. And while some dads (and some Father’s… Read more »
I agree. These sort of cards were funny back in the fifties, but dad’s were honored back then for doing their assigned jobs of supporting the family. We did not make parody of them, so I can’t even say that they were fifties cards, but cards born of a modern society that fails to respect dads. We need to identify them for what they are, and that is tantamount to black jokes or any other racial of sexist assumption. It’s getting better, but not quiet yet. Back around 98′ a father’s group did a study and review of TV commercials.… Read more »
I understand what you’re saying … male stereotypes and all. but in all fairness, you were looking at cards that were supposed to be funny but in a lot of ways aren’t funny at all. Fortunately there are a lot of other cards that better fit who dads really are. The only thing that I was kind of bothered me was the reference of the 50’s. It’s not that the cards depicted dad in a stereotypical way, but instead truly honored them. I looked up 50’s cards and it appears that from what I could see is that dads were… Read more »