The Strength of the ‘Soft Daddy’
Originally published in The Atlantic
The latest season of Netflix’s animated comedy Big Mouth explores the mysterious world of father figures, and emerges with a revelation. The middle schooler Nick’s dad, Elliot Birch, has been harboring a secret: He used to be a fearsome competitor in the macho martial art of “Scottish nipple twisting.” Elliot is a sweetie pie, a family man who takes the concept of being a lover-not-a-fighter to the extreme. He’s a vocal feminist who kisses his male friends on the mouth and moisturizes as liberally as he praises his wife. So what gives? Elliot explains to Nick that he only ever engaged in the martial art to earn his own hypermasculine father’s approval. Eventually, Elliot left that life behind. “I vowed to myself that I’d be the exact opposite kind of father,” he explains to Nick. “You mean like a soft daddy?” Nick asks. “The softest, and the daddiest,” Elliot says.
Elliot made good on his vow: He’s likely the softest daddy around. And not only on Big Mouth, but probably in the contemporary animation canon—which is saying something, because today’s cartoon married men aren’t the patriarchs of the past. For decades, animated sitcoms frequently relied on cynical depictions of bad dads to make their audiences laugh: Think of the boorishness of Fred Flintstone or Family Guy’s Peter Griffin. Today’s “soft daddy” is a different—and welcome—archetype of domestic masculinity.
Soft daddies are the cartoon world’s new men: gentle, communicative, thoughtful. They’re Central Park’s Owen Tillerman taking his daughter bra shopping, Tatsu from the anime The Way of the Househusband leaving the yakuza to cook croquettes for his wife, Greg Universe co-parenting Steven with three space aliens. Soft daddies aren’t caricatures of beer-soused loutishness, anger-management issues, and laziness, unable to relate to their children and wife. They’re not South Park’s Randy Marsh drunkenly brawling at his kid’s Little League games, Homer Simpson strangling Bart, American Dad’s Stan Smith posing as a school bully to torment his own son. Sure, soft daddies make mistakes and have moments of frustration and buffoonery—they aren’t bastions of unimpeachable good, just as their predecessors aren’t uniformly deficient. But they can generally be relied on to make their world feel safer and more united.
This story originally appeared in The Atlantic, November 2022. To read the full story, click here.