Or why fathers are underappreciated for the role they play in parenting He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar.
It made him my father. — Jonathan Safran Foer Dads are different now. I’d go as far as saying that men are different now.
As a result of decades or centuries of struggle for gender rights and equality, where women—and the LGBTQ+ community—have been historically the ones struggling, fighting, the men aren’t exactly the oppressors anymore. At least not in my world, at least not within my circle in Manila, where women have always been powerful, such great characters equal to men in terms of intelligence, cunning, potential, and sometimes even physical strength. I’m no father, but I’ve had the privilege of playing a major role in raising two nieces and a nephew and, as they were growing up, I could see a sort of reversal of roles.
The girls, having been brought up in #metoo time, encouraged to be ever braver, more aggressive, less compromising, have turned out to be more independent, less needy whereas the boy, my nephew, is proving to be more affectionate, more expressive, more sensitive, even more clingy, and that’s because the world has been nagging boys like him to be kinder, gentler, more attuned to their “feminine” side, more open to their emotions. Men are being asked to be more like women while women are being asked to be more like men. I do.
