Thursday, July 21, 2011

Manly Thor's Day Special

Taking down some low-lying fruit
I probably shouldn't stoop so far but a post at Roissy about "the gamest song ever" was recently pointed out to me. The poster goes by the tag name Heartiste.

Anyway, the gamest song ever is supposedly Hey Mister by Custom. It's on YouTube if you must.

Here is a sample lyric:

Hey Mister I really like your daughter,
I’d like to eat her like ice cream
maybe dip her in chocolate

Hey Mister on your way over
in your Volvo, suit, and tie
We’ll be crawling in your bed soon
messing around, maybe getting high...
I think it says one awful lot about the game guys that they get excited about this tune. I mean, if you are threatened by the girl's father—and that is what this song is really about—you're not a serious man.

As the guy who pointed it out to me said, this is a fantasy projection song. A guy singing about what he wants and can't have. And to have any power at all, he has to imagine someone who is even less able to have her than him: the father. Imagining her boyfriend would be too painful for the sorts of losers who like this song. To do that would erase the fantasy in a brutal way.

It got me thinking though, trying to remember if I had met any fathers who were threatened by their daughter's boyfriends. Because this is a recurring theme in fiction and song. Heck even Loggins and Messina had a hit on this theme.

But I can't think of a single father who was threatened by his daughter's boyfriend. Even in the couple of cases I know of where the girl got pregnant*, the fathers dealt with the boyfriend in a calm and confident fashion. This is probably because fathers know their daughters too well to blame some guy for what are clearly her stupid choices.

If you'll pardon the expression, the whole "cock-blocking father" phenomenon is a male fantasy. To steal one of The Last Psychiatrist's lines: it's what these guys have to believe if they don't want to commit suicide.

* In both cases, the fathers' primary concern was to discourage their daughters from compounding their problems by marrying the guy.

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