are fathers ecessary?
沒有父親又如何？

a paternal contribution may not be as essential as we think.
——父輩的奉獻也許并非像我們想的那樣必不可少

by pamela paul

帕梅拉·保羅（pamela paul） 撰文 海瑞兩千 譯

even the most recession-walloped and otherwise diminished man can take pride in his essential role as father. fathers, barack obama intoned in a 2008 father’s day speech, are “critical” to the foundation of each family. “they are teachers and coaches. they are mentors and role models. they are examples of success and the men who constantly push us toward it.”

即便是在經濟衰退中遭創最重，因而其他方面亦顏面盡失的男人，也會因其身為人父這個不可或缺的角色而自感岸然。巴拉克·奧巴馬在2008年父親節演講中慷慨陳詞：父親，對每個家庭的基礎來說，是“至關重要的”。“他們既是教師又是輔導員。他們既是賢明的顧問，又是楷模。他們是成功的樣板，又是不斷鞭策我們朝著成功邁進的人。”

none of this would seem particularly controversial. nor would the ominous statistics obama reeled off about kids who grow up without dad: five times as likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times as likely to drop out of school, and 20 times as likely to wind up in prison. obama was citing a commonly accepted and constantly updated body of research. the effectively fatherless obama is clearly a freakish outlier. as for the rest of the fatherless: insufficiently breast-fed, apt to develop attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, unable to form secure bonds, lacking self-esteem, accident prone, asthmatic, and fat.

這些似乎都沒什么特別值得爭議的。同樣，對于奧巴馬朗朗讀出的那些一連串不良統計數字也是如此：與有爸爸的小孩子相比，沒有爸爸而成年的小孩子在貧困與犯罪中度過的可能性是5倍、更容易輟學的是9倍、更容易坐牢的是20倍。當時奧巴馬引證的是一份人們通常可接受的且會被不斷更新的研究數據。這位實際上沒有父親的奧巴馬，無疑是無父者中的一個特例。至于無父者其它方面的表現則是：母乳喂養不足、易于出現注意力不足多動癥、不能形成穩固可靠的親和力、缺乏自尊、易出事故、哮喘、以及肥胖。

liberal feminist moms—eager for the participation of our emotionally evolved, enthusiastically diaper-bag-toting mates in the grueling round of dual-career child rearing—are keen to back the data. dads, we tell our husbands, are essential influences on children, the source of unique benefits.

自由派女性主義的媽媽們不遺余力地支持上述數據，也迫切要求我們那些感情投入、滿心熱忱地手提尿布、菜籃子在撫養雙職工子女的怪圈中精疲力竭的伙伴兒們的參與。我們告訴我們的丈夫說：爸爸，對子女有著本質上的影響，是唯一的收益來源。

there’s only one problem: none of this is proven. in the february issue of the journal of marriage and family, judith stacey, a professor of sociology at new york university, and timothy biblarz, a demographer from the university of southern california, consolidated the available data on the role of gender in child rearing. as stacey and biblarz point out, our ideas of what dads do and provide are based primarily on contrasts between married-couple parents and single-female parents: an apples-to-oranges exercise that conflates gender, sexual orientation, marital status, and biogenetic relationships in ways that a true comparison of parent gender—one that compared married gay-male couples or married lesbian couples to married heterosexuals, or single fathers to single mothers—would not. most of the data fail to distinguish between a father and the income a father provides, or between the presence of a father and the presence of a second parent, regardless of gender.

這里只有一個問題 ：以下所述沒有一個被證明。在二月號的《婚姻與家庭》雜志上，紐約大學的社會學教授朱迪思·史黛絲（judith stacey)和來自南加利福尼亞大學的人口統計學家蒂莫西·比布拉茲（timothy biblarz），匯總了現有的有關子女撫養中性別角色的數據。史黛絲和比布拉茲做了這樣的說明：我們關于“爸爸”的所作所為及所付撫養的概念，主要是建立在已婚雙親家長和單親女性家長相比對的基礎上的：一次蘋果-柑橘式比較的演習，它把性別、性傾向、婚姻狀況、生物遺傳關系放在一起以多種方法進行比較，而不是一種真正“家長性別背景”——已婚男性同性戀力偶或已婚女性同性戀儷偶與已婚異性伉儷相比、或者單身父親與單身母親相比——意義上的比較。多數研究數據，往往把父親與父親所供給的收益作等量觀，也不分別在世的“父親”和在世的 “父母中的第二家長”（second parent），即對后者不做性別上的區分。