THROAT: Father Figure

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.

The first time the woman said Daddy it was over text. She matched with Kiran, a 34-year-old non-profit worker, on Feeld in January 2023, a month after a big breakup. Over several weeks of texting before they met, Kiran guided her carefully yet enthusiastically into Daddy territory.

“I’m imagining walking into your apartment and finding you on your knees,” he texted her in the days leading up to their first date.

“Mm. I love that image. I’d be kneeling in front of you, looking up at you with my mouth open,” she texted back.

“It would be hard for me to resist calling you a ‘good girl’ in this moment. Would you be into that?”

She thought for a second. “Absolutely.”

“Good girl.” 

The woman dropped her chin and looked up from her phone with doe eyes. Good girl evoked the image of a pliant and protected schoolgirl that never existed in her youth. One who followed the rules and broke them with equal pleasure. She thought of Eve’s casual cruelty in Sweet Days of Discipline, the destructive innocence of Plath’s Esther Greenwood, and the beginning of My Brilliant Friend, when the beautiful Lila pitched Elena’s beloved doll into the cellar. These were the types of girls for whom, now, even as a grown woman, she felt disdain and envy. The woman’s childhood was far less coordinated; she was not neglected so much as simply left alone. At times (and this was one of those times), she resented her self-reliance and daydreamed of having expectations to meet that were anyone’s but her own. And so, good girl was a release valve. She felt herself get lower, heavier, more liquid. Being on her knees (even in her imagination) was a relief; she might stay there forever. Why had no one told her being needy felt so powerful? 

As she melted down into good girl, she also felt the instinctive need the maintain a kind of erotic asymmetry. She needed Kiran to rise up and guide their way.

“How do you feel about being called ‘Daddy?’” she texted back.

“At first, I thought it would weird me out. But recently I’ve learned that I really like it.”

“Good. I want you in my mouth, Daddy.” 

Once she started saying it, she couldn’t stop.

Daddy unlocked in the woman a luxurious kind of freedom. A type of thoughtlessness and extreme vulnerability usually reserved for hospitals or luxury hotel service. As she tipped her head back and looked up at the Daddy in question everything inside her — her plans, her wit, her strategies — dripped down into the low end of her body. (She could almost feel her hips filling up with the pent-up emotion that would later be fucked out of her.) What remained was a slick and viscous emptiness, open to receive whatever she was given. Andrea Long Chu wrote critically that “to be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you,” but, honestly, that sounded pretty hot. 

In the months after discovering Daddy, the woman basked in the revelation that letting people take care of her felt good. Over that spring and the following summer, 30 years of middle child, gifted program, #MeToo, hyper independence shed swiftly off her back. She let her neighbor carry her bike up the three sets of stairs to her apartment. She let the boys on her touch rugby team give her the best ball to practice with. And, in a moment of acute distress after an intense exchange with her mother, she texted her best friend, “Hey, I don’t want to be alone today. Can you come be with me?” And he did.

She did not know — until now — that letting people help her made her easier to love, not harder. That accepting an offer of service allowed her friends and lovers to express their care for her. And denying it was not saving them from hardship, but shunting away their attempts at affection. Months into sleeping with Kiran, he came over to her house after she had a frustrating day at work. She explained how she had yelled at a colleague and slammed her laptop shut in the middle of a Zoom call that afternoon, and that she wasn’t feeling very cuddly or sexy because of it. “That’s okay,” he said. “You are always so even-keeled and composed, it’s actually nice to see you flip out at something. It reminds me that you’re human.” They cuddled on the couch for another hour, then had glorious, spit-filled sex.

But Daddy also had its limitations. So far, Daddy could not be smaller than her. Younger than her. Make less money than her. Daddy could not have small hands, or an egregiously small dick. Daddy also needed to be direct and a little demanding, outside of the bedroom, but especially inside of it. While it did seem like an increasingly popular (and fairly benign) roleplay, the woman realized that not all men could be Daddy, not even all dads could be. Through her final semester of grad school, she dated Adel, a 42-year-old Park Slope dad of two in an open marriage. Adel was tall and sinewy with soft brown skin, dark brown sympathetic eyes, and large basketball-palming hands that he had know idea what to do with. 

After consummating their relationship on the second date, sex with Adel became a regularly scheduled element of their time together. In text conversations, he would diligently allot 45 to 90 minutes before or after their plans so they could have sex. But he never said it like this. Instead, he used euphemisms like “Can we start the date in your apartment?” (they never went to his) or “If we go to the 6:30 movie, that gives us enough time for bed after.” On its face, this language seemed to convey his gentler sensibilities. But to the woman, it seemed evasive or sort of childish. At the very least, it was a turn-off. Just be a man, she thought. Say you want to fuck me. 

In the beginning, the woman did try to improve their sex life. She asked Adel what fantasies he had, and when he came up mute, she suggested he call her a “good girl” and tried to show him how to choke her. The closest he got was repeating “good, good, good,” and hesitantly placing his palm on her chest like he was doing a one-handed pushup. She knew then that asking to call him Daddy would be a bridge too far, but maybe she could still get him to fuck like one. 

One night, after she made him cum, she rolled over and started touching herself.

“Do you daydream about fucking me?” She asked with her eyes closed as she ran her middle finger up and down her labia. 

There was silence for a moment. 

“Yes. I think about fucking you often.”

“What do you think about?”

“I think about your mind, and about your passion, and your... strong sexual energy.”

She paused.

“Do you think about my tits?”

She moved her finger deeper between her lips, sliding the slick wetness down to the opening of her vagina, circling it, then back up to her clit again. 

“Yes, I love your breasts. They’re so big and soft. I love holding them in my hands.”

She let out a sigh and gently arched her neck as she tilted her mouth up to the ceiling, her hand still moving up and down. 

“What about my ass?”

“I love your ass, I love watching it bounce when I fuck you from behind. It’s perfect.”

Her body tightened as she swiped her finger back and forth across her clit.

“Do you think about fucking my ass?” Her ribs flared up as her hips tilted forward and her legs opened, bracing for the final push over the edge.

“No.” 

“What—” She dropped her hand on the bed next to her. Her whole body deflated. “What the fuck.”

“What!?” Adel replied, alarmed. “I always want to be honest with you! Even during dirty talk!” She crawled over him out of the bed as he kept talking. His Massachusetts accent heightened in his anxiety. “My partners in the past haven’t liked anal so it’s not something I think about doing!” 

She whined and rolled her eyes as she walked out of the room. “Just say you do!” 

—

There was also the problem that Daddy in the bedroom was not Daddy in real life. After breaking up with Jonas, a 31-year-old musician with addictive tendencies, she had to live with the excruciating knowledge that she had the greatest orgasm of her life after he told her, “I will always give you whatever you need.” Only to find, later, that he quaked when she asked him to make a single plan for their afternoon date. 

The woman had trouble reconciling the veracity of this roleplay. Inherently, it was playing; it was a game. But the release she felt in the arms of this Daddy or that one was connected to something real and fragile within her. When was the last time someone had told her, “I’ve got you,” or “You’re safe with me,” as so many Daddies had? Conversely, in what circumstances outside of the bedroom would those sentences even feel appropriate? The heightened intensity of sex with these men allowed them both to speak in ways that were rarely applicable in day-to-day life. That was part of the fun. And yet, the woman was concerned about the slippage between the two realms. Sure, she didn’t want these men to boss her around on her knees 24/7, but she had been disappointed by their lack of initiative and confidence in their upright lives together more times than she could count. To what degree could she reasonably expect the role Daddy played in the bedroom to inform the man he was outside of it? 

That was the other part of it, this “man” thing. A man had never said no when she asked to call them Daddy, but after saying it she could tell immediately which ones wore the badge with pride and which said yes cause it was better than saying no. Was the ubiquity of Daddy forcing men into something? Where many women moved fluidly (and publicly) between calling themselves “princess,” “slut,” “brat,” or “muscle mommy” (or calling men Daddy, “babygirl,” or their “little gay boyfriend”), men seemed left behind. Unable to play with the power of analogous archetypes because they were still stuck in a manospheric rut. The existing labels that offered any deviant potential — soy boy, chad, cuck, manchild? — were rarely reclaimed as a positive. While many men enjoyed donning the label, the woman wondered how, for others, Daddy might just be reinforcing tradition.

And yet, the woman believed the true desire to have a Daddy or be one was inherent, approaching on holy. Like preferring the ocean to the mountains, or the summer heat to the winter chill. The exigent need to lose control or wield it to find release spoke to something intrinsic to one’s disposition, perhaps even one’s spirit.

—

One afternoon in the fall of 2023, the woman took the train uptown to the Guggenheim. An hour into her visit, she found herself standing at the edge of the rotunda watching as a large white man knelt in front of the prints advertising the services of Black femme mistresses. The five prints, made by the artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden, hung in an arc in their own red-carpeted section of the museum with three low, shallow, black benches in front of them. The placement of the benches was strategic. The prints were rendered in black ink on black leather and, therefore, were only visible when the light bounced off the ink at an angle and revealed the image. The note card to the right of the artwork suggested that, “If you are comfortable kneeling, you may choose to do so.” The woman was unsure if the man saw that line on the note card (tourists seemed to rarely read those things) or simply chose to kneel because it felt natural. She liked to imagine it was the latter.

The man’s wife stood to the side of him, looking slightly impatient, embarrassed, and out of place. The man, for his part, had looked out of place too — with his suburban bootcut jeans, New Balance sneakers, and Apple Watch — that was, until he knelt down. Then he looked perfectly at ease. The woman leaned against the curved half-wall and watched him with a small smile. She understood this innate desire to supplicate.

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.