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Daddy. Volume 43 | August, 2015. The New Inquiry Magazine is licensed under a creative commons license [cc-by-nc-nd 3.0]. thenewinquiry.com Editor-in-Chief Ayesha Siddiqi Co-Founder and Publisher Rachel Rosenfelt Executive Editor Rob Horning Creative Director Imp Kerr Senior Editor Max Fox Managing Editor Joseph Barkeley Features Editor Willie Osterweil Editors Aaron Bady, Anwar Batte, Hannah Black, Jesse Darling, Malcolm Harris, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Derica Shields Contributing Editors Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Rahel Aima, Alexander Benaim, Adrian Chen, Emily Cooke, Nathan Jurgenson, Sam Lavigne, Sarah Leonard, Francisco Salas Pérez, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Alix Rule, Miranda Trimmier Special Projects Samantha Garcia, Natasha Lennard Editor at Large Tim Barker 7 LETTER TO A YOUNG BABY BY ALANA MASSEY 10 YOU DESERVE IT, SWEETIE BY CASPAR 13 FATHERS AND SONS BY TEJU COLE 16 GREAT DADS BY GIOVANNI TISO 19 BOD OF THE FATHER BY VISHNU STRANGEWAYS 22 MY TWO DADS BY MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI 24 DAUGHTERS HAVE THEIR OWN AGENDAS BY TIANA REID 29 COMING TO AMERICA BY YAHDON ISRAEL 37 DADDY O BY MATTHEW LAWRENCE 42 OCULUS REX BY SAM LAVIGNE ED NOTE THE knowledge of paternity is said to be the learned from their professional family obligations. Alana origin of human society as we know it: that is, born of Massey addresses the young sugar baby as she would a women’s labor but held in men’s name. In the world be- junior trainee, reminding them that a sugar daddy is sim- fore, there could be no such thing as a father, only chil- ply a crude kind of boss, getting away with wage theft and dren, mothers, and sexual partners and childrearers. In unpaid overtime by keeping his babies in the dark about this telling, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life were the work they are actually doing. It’s only a matter of time one and the same, and kept a secret amongst mothers before the veil slips and the sugar baby is revealed to have and daughters. been mommying all along. In another essay, Caspar ex- Fathers are haunted by this prehistory: they are al- plores how getting paid for sex by men who share his ways the last to know. The father invents a whole new background helps him experience his ultimate fantasy: meaning for himself based on the knowledge of paterni- that in a world where love is distributed along race and ty. Their anxiety manifests in many ways, sometimes vi- class lines he could ever deserve what he receives. olent, often tedious, always grasping for control. As that In America, where we are writing this, race is a drama plays out over the course of children’s lives, it’s fantasy about daddies, too. Hannah Black once wrote never clear when Father will be found out. that race is the social form that “mediates between sex In this issue, a duo of sex workers share what they’ve and death, tells us who should be loved and who can be killed.” But of course the same is true of daddies. Yah- the body of the father is no exception. If the appeal of don Israel’s “I Know You Are, but What Am I” addresses fucking a dad is “exhilaration at the potential of taking the way that growing up black in Brooklyn exposed him in the dominating violence of claustrophobic suburban to different kinds of Africanness, routing history, lan- horror as a special blessing,” celebrating the dad bod is guage, and resources through differentially valued lin- nothing special. In Matthew Lawrence’s “Daddy O,” the eages. His mother and father raise him in their version booming genre of sex with stepdads and grandfathers in of Africa, one constructed of kings, queens, and soap, the gay porn industry comes in for examination, seeing while his sister leaves their home for an Ivoirian man, its flirtation with incest as the animating drive and ab- but neither daddy’s patriarchal power remains intact by solute limit of these films, whose point is actually to dis- the end. In “Daughters Have Their Own Agendas,” Tia- place the father from the center of fantasy. na Reid rereads Dick Gregory’s Nigger in the light of her For a few years, the principle of our solidarity at relationship with her dad and the titular word, weighing TNI was No Dads. But unable to escape fathers, we’ve her loyalty to the mother who waits against the hateful decided we prefer making and unmaking daddies in- desire to despise a black father in a world designed to stead. In “Feeling Myself” off her most recent album, kill him. Nicki Minaj sings “Yes daddy I do,” and you can hear her Under Reaganite conservatism, the 80s were peak smile. As always, Nicki’s diction is clarifying: the other- dad, inspiring our cover—the spirit of history acting wise off-putting shades of incest in eroticizing childplay simultaneously as the authoritative know-it-all trying aren’t present here. She isn’t casting herself as a daughter. vainly to curb the revolts for freedom of the decade pri- Deputizing a daddy for a night, like extending the per- or, and the midlife crisis selling coke and AKs to despots mission of roleplay, demonstrates that you have some and contras. The violence of the dad was perhaps never power to extend. And a nightly, weekly, or monthly dad- more lurid. Teju Cole, in “Fathers and Sons,” unearths an dy is only one in a series, while a father draws his tenuous old, foundational trope in the West’s mythology—the power from uniqueness. Designating your own daddies son carrying the father on his back, fleeing war—in the short-circuits the dependency inherent to childhood. aftermath of this attempt to maintain the global structure The current popularity of “daddy” as a term of en- of imperialism without its formal name. Out of this peri- dearment ranging in irony levels from 0–100 marks an od of reaction, a liberal wing of patriarchy attempted to era of social and economic precarity that leaves young forge a newer, more palatable dad. The undertaking was people righteously without faith in institutions, but diffuse but global, and Giovanni Tiso argues it may have more fluent in language with points of origin online. reached its peak in the book Being a Great Dad for Dum- Casting faves as moms and dads is a fantasy gesture by mies. Tiso takes the ideology of soft patriarchy without those orphaned by school curriculums we know to be feminism to task in “Great Dads.” biased, news media we know to be propagandizing, and A soft dad may just be a dad with a bad bod, a body job opportunities that aren’t. We can look up to whoever type famously rechristened this spring by a college news- we want: the hot selfie we caption with the filial titles, paper columnist. Vishnu Strangeways takes a deep dive the fandoms we indulge in, the bonds we insist on mak- into the structure of desire illuminated by the dadbod’s ing as rich or devoid of meaning as we please. Fathers social cues. Desire formed in relation to social power are free, disproportionately empowered, and disap- structures in turn upholds them, he writes, and desire for pointing. Daddies are whoever we want them to be. ALANA MASSEY 7 Letter to a Young Baby By ALANA MASSEY Don’t kid yourself, it’s a job I write to you today with congratulations and cau- ther than your search engine. The word of caution is tions. The congratulations are for having the good sense because, despite the informality of even the most pleas- to consider one of few professions where the wage gap ant sugar daddy or the insistence of the most insuffer- actually gapes in your favor, even if you look no fur- able ones, you are thinking about entering a profession. 8 LETTER TO A YOUNG BABY The prospective daddies will resist this notion at every minish nor elevate the particular experiences of sugar turn, incapable of understanding or willfully ignorant babies. I only ask that you always recognize sugar baby of the fact that spending time in their company is not labor as such and value it accordingly. only laborious and worthy of compensation, but that The first thing to know is that billionaires do not tolerating it requires rare and specific skills. find their sugar babies on the Internet. Securing a sugar daddy with truly exorbitant wealth is more likely to hap- pen via mercenary personal assistants at a TechCrunch Disrupt gala or Fashion Week after-party. Anna Nicole Smith was the last and only exception. This does not mean that sugar daddies are not by and large wealthy. They are. But social and professional exposure to lev- els of wealth that seem merely hypothetical to most of the world has disfigured their sense of what constitutes “rich.” The resulting chip on their shoulder means they seek out sugar babies whose relative poverty will make The sugar daddy, him feel better about his own place in the world. This should not discourage prospective sugar babies, but it like any employer, should help manage your expectations. When you embark on a search for a sugar daddy, would rather you the specification you’ll read most often in ads will be “No pros.” It is a vain hope that no professional sex not know what workers will contact him because they frequent the same sites he browses. It is frankly foolish on his part.

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