One thing that almost nobody talks about but really should is how different Gen X girldads are from their Boomer predecessors.
The one similarity they share is that each archetype lives vicariously through his daughter in a way that prior generations of men mostly only did with their sons, in a manner that lets him preserve the phenomenology of patriarchal headship in spite of increasing material and institutional concessions to feminism.
But the way they do this is very different.
The Boomer girldad’s defining failure mode was catastrophic incoherence—he raised his Millennial daughter to act like Kim Possible and believe she could do anything a man could, often compensating for his natural paternal anxiety in one of two ways:
If right-coded, he’d generally push her into bootstraps personal achievement—sports, business, politics, and so on—while adopting a LARPy fake and gay shotgun attitude toward her boyfriends and giving her patronizing cow-milk platitudes if she took too long to get married, seldom ever interrogating the structural factors behind why it might be taking her so long.
If left-coded, he’d push her into aggressive educational and institutional climb while training her to solipsistically indulge her emotions and Inner Truth at every opportunity and either adopting a laissez-faire attitude toward her relationships or actively encouraging her to pursue the sexual adventurism of a man.
This produced a lot of women who weren’t meaningfully ready for the world but were epistemically overindulged in their twenties, leading to mass burnout and impostor syndrome in their thirties and forties and a lot of timewasting forever-engagements.
That said, Millennial womyn were in a procedural sense fairly competent on average; they were good little Hermionoids who could Do The Thing, and wanted to be both taken seriously by men and propositionally consistent in their feminism. Meanwhile before Tinder went mainstream and the algorithm ratcheted up in the mid-2010s the dating market wasn’t lopsided enough for them to act unapologetically contemptuous toward male peers a la Zoomettes today, and the thick mixed-sex subcultures of that era ensured that overt misandry never really went off the deep end.
Thus the canonical Boomerdad-Millennielle relationships were a) absurdly indulgent MSNBC dad and his hot mess girlboss-princess; and b) retarded Fox News dad and his virtue-signaling bluehaired daughter getting into theatrical flame wars on Facebook because she decided she’s pansexual or is dating a Muslim or something.
In both cases the breakdown happens because of a failure on the dadside to update his priors and address the world as it ackshully is instead of as his Pavlovian legacy media echo chambers tell him it is. In both cases he imagines that his silly retarded daughter is capable of making her own decisions and standing on her own two feet like a man, and in both cases is Surprise Pikachu when she either implodes or turns against him.
The Gen X girldad is different.
Unlike Boomers, Gen X guys are pretty decent usually at updating their priors when confronted with new evidence, and are somewhat more likely to get their information from more than exactly one source, even if it’s often e.g. a conspiracy theory podcast.
But they’re pigheaded in a very different way due to the exceedingly strange constellation of factors surrounding their acculturation.
See, Gen X guys grew up in the last decade of hard premodern patriarchy—a world where your dad might randomly break your arm, alternative modes of masculinity were deeply erotically unviable, and circlejerking over forest porn with the bros was considered the height of male bonding. They also graduated into a world of nineties feminism and political correctness that expected you to act really gay at times.
This contradiction produced the classic Gen X male affect—a form of semiotic arbitrage where aggressive banter and a confrontational persona covers hilariously basic bitch libtard views, e.g. Bill Burr talking about his black wife being smarter than him while putting some edge in his voice when he says “black” so it lands as edgy, or Henry Rollins saying he’ll beat you up if you don’t support Gay Marriage, and so on.
And clearly not all Gen X guys are left wing—indeed, the rightward shift of Gen X men was one of the major stories of the Covid years. They just have a native grammar for leftist views not feeling as faggot-coded as they do for other generations of men, as for them liberalism could mean e.g. Clintonian rakishness vs. Barbara Bush, or Bart bantzing Homer for not accepting the supercoo gayguy who owns the tchotchke store.
Basically it’s easier for Gen X guys to inhabit liberalism—and even a certain sympathy towards feminism—as the position of masculine and high-status men because their cohort’s masculinity script is based on a kind of theatrical antitheatricality, wherein the most prestigious thing is being conspicuously nonchalant and disinterested and acting like caring too much about shit makes you gay. You can absolutely sneer at women so long as you aren’t too intellectual or systematizing about it or visibly interested in the chick’s reaction, but the moment you cross that bridge it codes to Gen X dudes as too effortful / tryhard and thus proof that you’re a Worthless Faggot. Much like with Zoomer men the basic source of prestige is withdrawal rather than assertion like you see in Boomer and Millennial men.
Also the worst thing you can do as an Xer man is Whine or talk about your feefs—a reaction that makes sense in their ecology as doing so would precipitate aggression both rightwardly from other men calling you a fag and leftwardly from womyn calling you toxic, entitled, etc. Thus as a rule Gen X men learned to shut up about their feels.
For them the fundamental way to hold onto power, especially with women, has always been to remain conspicuously cool and levelheaded while staying basically competent and resourceful and simply waiting for everyone weaker than you to flame out. They have a fundamentally attritional mindset because there just weren’t as many arbitrageurial or interpretive backalley avenues for men to seek power in those days—note this is the main way in which they differ from the Millennial man, who seeks to optimize the metagame of institutional climb, as well as the Zoomer boy, who seeks to minimize needless effort and reputational exposure—and genuinely are just a lot better at suffering and waiting it out than any other cohort in society right now, hence me likening them to Warriors vs. the Millennial Wizard and Zoomer Stealth Archer.
So while the Zoomer boy deals with feminism by opting out of traditional masculine status contests where the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze to him, and the Millennial handles it by creating a localized interpretive frame where he can deal with women on his own terms, the Gen X guy will oftentimes just shrug his shoulders and say women gonna women and wait for them to naturally drift back towards his greater resources and diachronic consistency—a strategy that works quite well on less cunty women of his own cohort, who are ultimately super pragmatic by nature, but often interacts rather peculiarly with the tendencies of his Zoomette daughter.
The reason being that Zoomette feminism isn’t really about competing with men and proving independence like it is with Gen X women (rather understandably given they’re already outearning male peers), nor propositional coherence and girlboss exceptionalism like with Millennielles, so much as simple affective sovereignty—the right to let their Feelings in any particular moment dictate socially understood Truth.
Millennielles were a bit like that too back in the day, of course—but with them it was overtly moralized and propositional; they needed to have Reasons for their caprice, and even when backsolved for those Reasons ackshully did impose a certain restraint on their capacity for overtly Rhaenyramaxxed girlish fickleness. But in an increasingly liquid and frenetic Zoomer Oral Culture dominated by a feed that updates faster than any social coalition can properly congeal and characterized by obligate participation in global algorithmic status markets under an inescapable digital panopticon, the ability of correspondence to discipline charisma has all but collapsed.
And so you get a dynamic wherein Zoomettes are simultaneously a) outperforming their male peers, who are starting to Hirschman-exit from mainstream institutions, such that the very real feminine decline in competence relative to Millennial women is obfuscated; b) compartmentalizing aggressively between separate social realities, often inhabiting a wholly different persona within each one and concealing their ackshual behavior from their parents despite usually being exceptionally close to them; c) engaging in more overtly theatrical displays of attention-seeking than their parents were ever acculturated to handle, often with hilarious levels of indulgence and even encouragement from Millennial teachers and employers, who as a rule show Zoomettes gross levels of favoritism compared to Zoomer boys.
So how does the Gen X Girldad respond to this?
He doesn’t want to feel like he’s indulging the retardation, which radically contradicts his own generational ethos. But he also feels protective of his little girl, and knows he needs to be there for her in SOME capacity—and unlike the Boomer girldad who was radically incapable of comprehending his Millennielle daughter hyperverbally jotting down all her stupid feelings on Tumblr because he’d rather watch Fox News all day, the Xer girldad can’t really be blamed for not getting the Zoomette, who is almost certainly the most compartmentalized and fickle genre of human bean in history.
And so he does the Bill Burr thing.
He teases her, calls her a ridiculous brat, rolls his eyes and scoffs at her—and also keeps opening his wallet, keeps bailing her out of retarded situations, and keeps holding the men in her life to ridiculous LARPy shotgun-standards without asking too many questions about how she’s managing all those extravagant Insta vacations.
By occasionally calling her retarded or acting vaguely like the bully in Karate Kid he maintains his own sense of manly honor, and can meanwhile keep seeing her in kind of a hapless vulnerable Dumb Girl light that functionally almost inverts the canonical failure mode of Boomer girldadism—instead of projecting excessive agency onto her, he sees her as sort of an inherently ridiculous drama queen who needs to be protected from shitheel chucklefuck boys and indulged in kind of an exasperated shaking your head way that motivates her to achieve basic procedural competence seeking his approval in those modalities where it’s still culturally acceptable.
But there are also pretty hard limits in negative space to what he can do.
For instance, his ability to shame her for acting like a whore is functionally a lot more limited than even Boomers had with Millennielles, and his ability to govern her social life in a coherent way is radically curtailed by Zoomette social illegibility. She’ll a lot of times be unusually forthcoming with him about all the shit she doesn’t mind him knowing about, but the stuff she doesn’t want him to know about is also a lot easier to hide than it used to be, and a lot of those things are precisely the forces most erosive to his operative economic and cultural leverage over her.
So his optimal strategy with her very genuinely is to do the Gen X nonchalance thing and simply attrition it out as the most stable force in her life, maintaining intimacy through a Bill Burrish teasing thing that theatrically shores up his patriarchal dignity in the face of constant societal and institutional attempts to undercut it and derives authority from the fact that he’s just more competent than anyone else she knows.
And if he’s NOT more competent than anyone else she knows, some Millennial theater kid will inevitably become her new Daddy.
Like most Walt output, no doubt 100% descriptively correct (other than the last sentence, which is only true in a narrow slice of the population, and mostly reflects Walt’s own experiences; Millenial theater kids are considered loser faggots even by low status women with weak fathers in most parts of this country). But normatively, I have the opinion—unpopular around these parts—that girldads of every generation are ackshually fine and good and not an embodiment of serious moral failure, notwithstanding the symbiotic relationship that the girldad affect enjoys with civliizational decay.
The fundamental issue is that you wouldn’t actually want a girl dad (space between “girl” and “dad”) to be able to overcome these dynamics. Such a man would be perverse and repulsive. Much has been said by disgruntled High-IQcels on substack about women lacking agency. But contrariwise true diachronic agency sometimes defeats itself. I haven’t seen anybody make this observation anywhere, and I don’t have the deftness of pen necessary to carry out a serious analysis, but The Condition of the Girldad is a perfect case-in-point. Extremely high agency is almost tautologically concomitant with epistemic inertia. But it’s precisely that inertia that collapses the vector space dimension of reactive latitude in high agency types. In this way diachronic agency and crystallized free will are sometimes in tension. It’s not always a two-faces-or-a-vase situation. This inherent difficulty seems impossible to overcome at scale, which is one of the many reasons why delonghousification is metaphysically impossible.
On the individual level though, I think a Man can sail between Scylla and Charybdis if he is righteous and strong and willing to try. This is the cross to bear for the agentic man. I think many girldads have already unconsciously done this calculus, and thus the girldad disposition of any generation is at once a deterministic reaction to social forces but also a pathetic yet noble attempt to cut the Gordian hymen of the Longhouse Electra. The girldad does what he can without destroying himself or his daughter (at least not immediately). We should all be so lucky to be analogous millenial and zoomerboy girldads. The weakest among us will remain nimble and nonchalant into fatherhood. Those “men” will be wretched and they will do unto their daughters damage far worse than did any other generation of fathers in history.
This just reminds me how hard it will be to raise teenagers and older.