DADDY ISSUES                         _2016/2019

Typing ‘father and daughter bond’ in Google search truly was an exciting moment in my research and the results I found forced me to dedicated a chapter to the topic. I will volountarily not dwell in depth here but will rather share the higlights and the most recurrent elements of my online investigation.  

. Extremely romantic scenes of father and daughter holding hands in front of sunsets.

. Articles on incest

. An anonymous quote:
The reason why daughters love their father the most is that there is at least one man in the world that will never hurt them

. Kinky lingerie printed with the following: ‘daddy’, ‘yes daddy?’, ‘daddy’s little slut’, ‘daddy’s girl’, ‘are you my daddy?’, ‘property of daddy’, and more

. Electra’s complex

. Father/daughter dance

I find extremely interesting the social habit that tends to think that women cannot function properly without a solid male figure in their life.
Still nowadays people would argue that a male role model is essential for a girl and that without it, they would be depraved and lost.

Can we love men if our dad doesn’t love us?Are we necessarily easy, promiscuous or destined to work in sex industries because we didn’t have a strong man around keeping us on track? Is everything we do and will do, defined by men?

Here I will try to deconstruct this stigma and tackle the stereotype according to which women’s behavior is dictated by men, in this case their father.
Through a panel of conversations, and in a journalistic approach I aim at gathering a wide range of testimonies to put against or in the favor of it.

Eager to discuss about sexuality and patriarchy, I have reached out to the women who are the most victims of stigmatization: sex workers.

I sent 413 messages, via two escorting platforms.
From the first platform 7 women replied.
From the second platform, 49 women replied.
Out of these 56 answers, 12 ended up sending me their participation.

I sent an interview to guide them and offered the choice to either answer it or write a personal text with no restrictions besides remaining in the topic, and asked for a picture of their father, that I would blur, for obvious reasons.
I reveived 4 photographs.

The participations are anonymous and introduced by the first letter of each participant’s first name.
Below is an exemple of the interview’s template picked at random amongst the 12.