Edition 02: Here to steal your daddy
Daddy kinks & the collective longing for being fathered
I don’t have a daddy kink.
But, my kink is pretending that my biological daddy isn’t actually my real daddy.
I have this perverse fantasy that upon sending my spit off to ancestry.com, which I silently fear will end up being sold to the highest bidder on the dark web and/or Facebook; I’ll realise it was all a big mistake. That my one-boyfriend-having mother, had an immaculate conception in the same ovulation cycle and my dad isn’t my dad at all.
I dream about getting the results back and ripping open the paper with the kind of glee that I presume one has when they win a scratchcard; fingernails embedded with silver foil and eyes threatening to erupt from sockets. I want to win. I want to win a new daddy, damn it. The one I didn’t win in the biological lottery.
There’ll be emails sent back and forth to my real dad. He’ll write back detailing that he just knew there was a piece of his hopefully very wealthy and intelligent heart beating outside of his body. He’ll tell me how his life has been filled with a longing so visceral that he often found it hard to breathe. I’ll weep into my keyboard as he describes the pain of a love not yet realised but profoundly felt.
We’ll reunite, preferably at an airport, because obviously he’s a US citizen and can rescue me from the Britishness that I’ve grown ever so tired of. We’ll sit in coffee shops and catch each other up on thirty-four years of life. He’ll ask me about what inspires me, what makes me angry, who has broken my heart and who has helped heal it. I’ll feel safe with him, he’ll promise to stay. To be a place I can always return to.
He’ll promise. I’ll believe him. He’ll commit to it.
That will be our story.
As unhinged as all of this sounds. As much as I want to caveat that I have inner worked extensively on the impact of a life lived in estrangement from my dad. I want to laugh it off and tell you that I really am unbothered, I’m over it, I don’t think about it much. As desperate as I am to call this a joke. In the deepest nooks of my subconscious, I know that it isn’t. There’s a part of me that really does wish that my dad wasn’t my dad. A part of me that no amount of therapy can cure from the soft ache I feel at the thought of leaving this planet without the love of someone who I wouldn’t exist without.
There’s no other dad for me. There’ll be no airport reunion. I won’t get to walk into the Terminal 3 bathrooms and look at the space under my eyes where my concealer once was and the dampness of tears now reside. I have what I have and what I have was not enough.
The comfort and heartbreak of all of this, is that this is no club of one, there’s a too-large population of the fatherless. By choice, circumstance, death or just outright bad behaviour. Which makes every bolus of sense as to why our culture is obsessed with daddies. And not fathers, but daddies. We know the difference. Our obsession has peaked to the point that when a grown woman healthily and normally refers to her father as, “Daddy” it sounds unfamiliar and met with double glances; as if the word can only be used in its newfound sexual context.
The actual re-emergence of the daddy kink for our generation is by no means a new one. I’m not that interested in its history or how it came to be, my fascination lies in the fact that it hasn’t gone away. That along with the normalisation of choking during sex, thanks to pornography, daddy (said in jest or not), remains a staple in the sexual pantry.