His parenting style
Rapper and actor T.I. said in a podcast interview that aired Tuesday that he goes with his 18-year-old daughter to the gynecologist every year to “check her hymen” and make sure it’s “still intact.”
In an interview with Nazanin Mandi and Nadia Moham on Ladies Like Us, T.I. talked about his parenting style, among other topics. When asked about whether he’s had the “sex talk” with his daughters, he pointed to his approach with his eldest daughter, 18-year-old Deyjah Harris, who’s in her first year of college.
“Not only have we had the conversation. We have yearly trips to the gynecologist to check her hymen,” T.I. said. “Yes, I go with her.”
He then mentioned that after her 16th birthday party, he “put a sticky note on the door: ‘Gyno. Tomorrow. 9:30.'”
Gee, how festive.
“So we’ll go and sit down and the doctor comes and talk, and the doctor’s maintaining a high level of professionalism,” T.I. said. “He’s like, ‘You know, sir, I have to, in order to share information’ — I’m like, ‘Deyjah, they want you to sign this so we can share information. Is there anything you would not want me to know? See, Doc? Ain’t no problem.'”
In other words the doctor tries to tell the patriarch that his daughter has rights of her own, and he brushes all that off by intimidating her in front of the doctor and then saying that’s what he’s just done.
Also note that the gynecologist is a man, which probably makes the daughter feel that little bit less able to resist.
But above all, notice the hostility and disgust and aggression embedded in the whole thing. Notice the basic suspicion and contempt for his own daughter expressed in this police-like hauling her to a male doctor who will inspect her for (very dubious) traces of sexual activity. It sounds so Saudi Arabia-like.
T.I. also noted that he was informed the hymen can be broken in ways other than through sexual penetration. “And so then they come and say, ‘Well, I just want you to know that there are other ways besides sex that the hymen can be broken like bike riding, athletics, horseback riding, and just other forms of athletic physical activity,'” he said. “So I say, ‘Look, Doc, she don’t ride no horses, she don’t ride no bike, she don’t play no sports. Just check the hymen, please, and give me back my results expeditiously.'”
“Just inspect the slut and tell me if I have to kill her or not.”
Virginity testing, which often involves a doctor inspecting the hymen for tears or stretching, is widely considered an unnecessarily invasive practice that has no medical benefit. A report from the National Institutes of Health found that these tests can have a deeply negative psychological impact on women and girls.
The World Health Organization has vehemently denounced virginity testing, calling it “a violation of the human rights of girls and women.”
“‘Virginity testing’ has no scientific or clinical basis,” the organization said in a statement. “There is no examination that can prove a girl or woman has had sex – and the appearance of girl’s or woman’s hymen cannot prove whether they have had sexual intercourse, or are sexually active or not.”
Also please note that there is no equivalent policing procedure for males.
God what a horrible story.
Yes, but that’s a feature not a bug for people like this.
I had a friend one time who told me he planned to make sure any daughters he had were locked up in their rooms from the time they hit puberty. They would not be allowed outside until they were married (he didn’t explain how they were supposed to meet the perfect man to marry). I told him this was a recipe for disaster. I didn’t explain that girls are perfectly capable of crawling out windows, and such things will make them want to do so; I was afraid that would alert him to make sure there are no windows in their rooms. I almost cried when I heard his first child was a daughter.
Shame on that doctor.
iknklast, I’ve lost any tolerance for “jokes” about teenage girls’ sexuality. I’ve been unpleasantly surprised by how many ostensibly liberal and feminist people still act like the worst thing a teenage girl could do is have sex, and how it’s the job of all the adults around her to prevent that. Lots of “funny” remarks about buying a shotgun for prominent display to any boyfriends. It even starts at infancy: parents of young boys are told they’re going to be “heartbreakers” when they grow up because they’re so cute, parents of young girls are told they’ll have their hands full keeping the boys away from their pretty girl.
Oh, occasionally there’s a joke about fears that a teenage boy will impregnate someone, but that’s the telling point — boys’ sexuality is a problem if it leads to the specific negative consequences of pregnancy or disease; the mere act itself is deemed sufficient to diminish girls (and reflect poorly upon the parents).
Screechy, I wish I could say my friend was joking. He was not. He was a fundamentalist Christian who was upset when he found out I accepted evolution, and who believed a lot of seriously f***d up things.
The entertainment industry is the worst. They’re politically liberal, but their actual behavior is as regressive as it gets (racist/sexist role expectations, severe ageism, tolerance of extreme misogyny and homophobia in music, sexual harassment, etc.).
I went to a popular lyric site and randomly picked a T.I. song, and it’s pretty much exactly what I would have expected:
https://genius.com/Ti-no-mediocre-lyrics
I suppose it’s good he doesn’t want his daughter treated as he treats women, but going all Saudi-Arabia on her is hardly the answer.
iknklast,
Oh, I know your story involved serious comments. I was just tacking on my own experiences, which have mostly involved people who fancy themselves above such crude gender stereotypes, so it generally takes the form of these jokes. Which are supposed to create some plausible deniability, but when the entire humor of the joke comes from “imagine how mad you’d be if your teenage daughter was having sex!” it’s really not that plausible after all.
It’s a little bit complicated by the fact that shotgun jokes can be about rapey boys as opposed to slutty girls. Some fathers can be worried about their daughters and sex from the angle of not wanting them to be bullied or raped or murdered via “breath play” or all three. T.I. could in principle have been worrying about his daughter’s safety, but the reality of what he said makes it clear he wasn’t.
Ophelia — I’m sure in some instances that’s true. Though even in that sense, jokes/comments like that really aren’t helpful and can be counterproductive. I’m pretty sure I’ve read stories from rape victims who explained that they never told their parents because they were terrified that Dad was going to use that shotgun, and they didn’t want their father going to prison and/or weren’t asking for their rapist to die. (Or substitute boyfriend, husband, or brother.)
Plus the whole subject isn’t funny and isn’t really suitable for “jokes” – in fact they probably contribute to the way boys are encouraged to think they’re supposed to try to bully girls into sex.
If it’s medically unnecessary, how is it ethical for the doctor to do this?
And if you’re a dad trying to protect his daughter, you do what my dad did. You talk about consent, you tell your daughter she can tell you anything and you will protect her and you make sure that she understands how condoms work, why she should insist on their use if she does have sex and that nobody has the right to her body but her.
Good question. I forgot to think about that aspect of it. The gynecologist should be saying that’s not what a pelvic exam is for, sir, and she’s not due for a pelvic exam so Nope.
To be fair, that may very well have been what actually happened. Man lies to make himself sound more in control of people than he really is? Never…
ibbica, that’s possible, but the other is also possible. I learned from years of having a hypochondriac sister that you can find a doctor who will do and say what you want if you pay them. My sister would go to doctor after doctor after doctor, and all of them agreed she didn’t have asthma. Finally, a doctor who told her that initially, realizing the gold mine my sister could be, backed up and said, well, okay, yes, I see a different form of asthma…that different form is probably psychosomatic, something the doctor would never say.
This doctor probably put her kids through college on the money paid by my sister’s insurance, since she was also willing to agree to diagnose my sister’s kids with whatever my sister wanted to get whatever benefit she was angling for that week. This, of course, worked to the detriment of the kids, but…
iknklast @12,
Reminds me of how the number of diagnoses of learning disabilities and other conditions that require medication and/or additional time on the SATs and school examinations are heavily correlated with parental income. Or how many doctors just get tired of telling patients “your cold is caused by a virus, antibiotics will do nothing for it” and just write a prescription for antibiotics. (Hey, how did we end up with so many antibiotic-resistant infections? Who’da thunk it!)
Screechy, I had to deal with that with my son, not because I was wealthy and wanted something for him (I was poor, and I wanted him to be what made him happy, as long as that was not something like mass murder). The teachers at his school wanted it, not because he was ADHD, but because he was energetic, and they had too many students, so they arranged to drug the ones that actually needed some degree of attention to deal with. His father was happy to go along; I was not, but his father had custody at the time because I was battling my own illness. It took me years to get him off the medicines he didn’t need (I had to get well and gain custody first, then waited forever for an appointment). They turned him into a zombie. The school (the teacher, I think) recommended the doctor, and his dad obediently trotted to that doctor, rather than consulting the pediatrician who had treated him for six years.
It is all too easy to find doctors who will do what parents want them to.