On this Father’s Day, I’d like to take a moment to recognise fathers like my own–for example, the patriarch Lot, nephew of Abraham, who offered up his virgin daughters to be gang-raped (Genesis 19.8). Or Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who imprisoned his daughter in a purpose-built secret bunker for 24 years so that he could rape and torture her. And then there’s Clay Fletcher, who (along with his wife, Sheila) left his disabled daughter, Lacey, on a couch in the family “home” to slowly rot alive, starve, and eventually die over the course of twelve years.
Like these men, my father, J. Hal Wilson, can also be described as devoted. Devoted to teaching me that my body was literally up for grabs. Devoted to training me that my body was not my own, that under no circumstances was my body to be protected, defended, or cherished. That, in fact, defending my body against attacks made me bad. That trying to protect myself made me wicked. That if my body were attacked, I was to submit to whatever was being done to it.
Not once did my father flag in his efforts to train me to be the prey of every predator who would ever cross my path, and because of those devoted efforts, I can look back on my lifetime of fear, abuse, assault, and pain, and truthfully say: “Thanks, Dad. It wouldn’t have happened without you.”
J. HAL WILSON 