Dad Called 'Harsh' For Kicking His Son Out Of The Car & Making Him Walk Home After He Disrespected Women
Many are applauding his zero-tolerance policy on misogyny, especially given the times.
Alexander_Safonov | Shutterstock | Canva Pro You may have noticed that we here in the United States are in a bit of a golden era for virulent and often violent misogyny. The problem is particularly pronounced among young men, including teenagers.
It's set off quite a crisis of conscience among many parents, who wonder how to deal with their kids' constant online exposure to this rhetoric. One dad on Reddit decided to take drastic measures that have people online applauding — and his wife furious.
The dad kicked his son out of the car after he made a shockingly misogynistic comment.
After the election last fall, a truly stomach-turning trend emerged of young men DM'ing women and publicly posting slogans like "your body, my choice." It's a pretty stark picture of what has been going on under people's noses for years now: A steady radicalization of young men into online "manosphere" and "red pill" culture.
Explicit, and often violent, misogynistic rhetoric about male "ownership" over women's bodies and autonomy is everywhere in these cultures, and studies have found that social media algorithms have been amplifying this kind of content directly at teens for years. And in November, we got the Gen Z voting data to prove it.
It's one thing to identify a problem, but another thing entirely to figure out how to fix it, of course. What are parents supposed to do if they can't control what their kids are consuming? For one dad on Reddit, the answer was simple: A zero-tolerance policy for misogyny.
As he shared in his since-deleted Reddit post, when his teen son made a frankly disgusting comment about a girl at school while they were driving home, the dad had none of it. He pulled the car over, kicked his son out on the side of the road, and told him to "learn how to be a real, respectful man" like he'd been raised to be.
The dad said he wouldn't 'associate' with his son unless he changed, and made him walk home.
The drama was sparked by the dad's 15-year-old daughter beginning to date her 18-year-old brother's best friend. The brother wasn't comfortable with this, and they began arguing about it in the backseat of the car on the way home from school.
The son became furious and screamed something despicable at his sister about doing something to one of her friends. The problems with this statement are layered: Aside from being classist, it assumes an entitlement to his sister's friend's body, that there would be no pushback, and he'd have easy access to sleeping with her. It's disgusting on its face, but in these times, it's easy to feel like it has some pretty chilling undertones.
In contrast to simply shrugging it off as "boys will be boys" or just a regular teenage fit of pique like many parents would have done, this dad said that he "immediately intervened" because he "did not raise [his] son to talk about women like that."
He pulled the car over and told him, "he needed to learn how to be a real, respectful man before I allow him to have any association with me." That new rule apparently started right then and there, because he then told him to get out of the car and walk, and that he'd be doing so from then on.
His wife is furious and says what their son said is 'normal,' but people online applauded the dad.
What happened next paints a perfect picture of some of the cultural and political dynamics currently going on in America, namely that it is not just men who've entered a golden age of misogyny. Many women have joined up right along with them, from cultural movements like the "trad wife" trend to voting data showing white women decisively choosing explicitly misogynistic right-wing candidates.
This man's wife seems like a potential case in point. "My wife is adamant that what he said was just normal behavior for a teenage boy," the dad wrote, which kind of smacks of all those "locker room" talk excuses that have helped sail a certain someone to overwhelming electoral victories among white women for three consecutive elections.
Whatever the case, this dad is not having it. "I personally don’t think it’s acceptable for anyone, much less a young man, to talk like that." Given that they only live 10 minutes from the school, he also doesn't think this is an unreasonable punishment for his son's behavior.
Redditors agreed. One summed up the entire thing perfectly. "What he said was way out of line and disrespectful. Walking a few miles is not abuse, it's a lesson. If more parents corrected this kind of talk early, we’d have fewer grown men thinking it’s OK to speak like that."
Exactly. Even one of his son's peers agreed. "As a teenage boy (16) that is not too far to walk," the teen wrote. "That is disgusting language and you are [not wrong] at all." And by framing it as something his father refuses to "associate" with, it sets a tone and models for his son that this kind of misogyny is not only distasteful, but abnormal.
Parenting is about setting boundaries and upholding them. At risk of sounding like a cantankerous boomer, the cliche that "kids today are too soft" hasn't sprung up out of nowhere. It's because there is an entire generation of parents who think young people's virulent bigotry is no big deal and that making a kid walk home from school is cruel and unusual punishment. We are currently boiling alive in the consequences of these attitudes, and we all need to stop tolerating them immediately. Assuming it's not already too late, of course.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
