I can’t read 50 Shades of Grey or watch the films. I don’t want to identify with a female main character whose first sexual experience is being dominated, manipulated, and controlled by a male partner. Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage, has many of the same themes as 50 Shades of Grey, but the main plot contains a relationship between gay men who I can find empathy for without liking them too much, forgetting they are damaged people, or taking psychological damage. So this book is perhaps the only sex thriller I will ever read because I can stay at a safe distance and not get it on me.
Conversely, I wonder if this book is a wakeup call about abuse for young men who are told they have to be strong and shown that women are disposable like the abuse only happens to women. As a result of such toxically masculine thinking, sexual abuse of men is under reported and this book may be serving an important social purpose beyond being scary and provocative entertainment. Anyone who has experienced sexual trauma would likely be triggered by the graphic descriptions of angry, dominating sex and should steer clear of this one. As a demisexual woman who has boundaries precluding angry or drunk sex, I found the novel a safe space to meditate on how violence, alcoholism and sex become mixed without having to navigate a real relationship with my personal safety at stake. The hook was bearable, and I stayed through the BDSM violent sex and normalized sexual harassment of gay men at work for the more important messages about gay men and their fathers, faith and sexuality, and the effects of fame and cancel culture in popular culture on my generation.
Sex sells, but until recently gay relationships were terribly underrepresented in entertainment media. I’ll admit to being underexperienced in LGBTQIA literature, but on film I’ve seen two narratives of either hidden sexuality with surprising reveals or normalised sweetness and longing for gay relationships to be seen as equally healthy in comparison to straight relationships. I used to feel like the gay community didn’t need the equivalent to the mass infantilisation of actresses and disposal of female victims that play out in detective stories too frequently. But men don’t report sexual violence nearly as often as women, and I worry some of them are hiding survivor status due to toxically masculine rules about having to want sex and also be tougher than anything that happens to them. The first half of Yes, Daddy is full of domination, alcohol, and drugs. The book throws out lots of sex, but the sex isn’t fun. It’s dangerous, and readers are supposed to want the alcohol removed from dating. Any hint of possible healthy relationships are ignored by Jonah due to the lack of impressing achievement in people his own age. It’s also upsetting how easy the men around him find pinching Jonah or grabbing him at work well before he meets playwright Richard Shriver and his drunken friends who likewise find it easy to force sexual touch in semi-public spaces like kitchens and private parties. Jonah is able to get attention from the powerful famous playwright by flirting with his youthful body, and he also has some body image attachment to maintaining his physique throughout the subsequent abuse and control issues he endures as his #MeToo story escalates from fantasy dating into a scandal with drunken parties and a private sex dungeon where he is treated like a discardable toy. Anything you ever heard tossed out as a casual party joke is played out to show you that verbally creating awfulness just to destroy ideas wouldn’t be funny anymore if it were all real. Jonah is a victim of toxic masculinity but also of his own lack of empathy for other humans with an inability to seek out healthier relationships.
Neither the main character nor his famous romantic target approach life the way I do. Jonah Keller is self absorbed and finds it easy to lie even to the point of ruining his evangelical pastor father’s life. There are several points wherein Jonah lacks self awareness and I feel like I myself could easily have avoided this whole mess, but like a moth to a flame he decides he can endure abuse for public attention and access to an expensive lifestyle. He and Richard Shriver both are more power hungry and have worse relationships with their families. Richard has a stereotypically toxic relationship with his mother which feeds his writing with her rejection that made him an antisocial narcissist who wants to dominate and control younger partners. Jonah should have had a better childhood by comparison with very involved helicopter parents, but their strict evangelical church destroyed their family union by rejecting homosexuality as a less common norm and leading Jonah’s father to force conversion therapy on him. Retaliation in both cases led to public scandal and retreat by their children to spaces where they could be as defiantly different from their parents as possible.
I want to believe there already is more acceptance for homosexuality than either Jonah or Richard got from their parents. I want to believe that both wealthy families and evangelical families are outliers for either too little attention or too many rules respectively. Lightly mentioned but unresolved are faith communities that are accepting of gay members who are celibate. Maybe it is too prying to reach a conclusion for everyone who was on an independent spiritual journey between the rise of the Westboro Baptist Church in the late 90s and the federal recognition of same sex marriages in the United States in 2015. It just seems like a false solution that denies a key part of personal identity and biological and intimacy needs that are not socially conditioned away. To people who live in faith focused communities, Jonah’s arc may make more sense but fall short of a completely satisfactory resolution.
What I identify with the most in this novel is Jonah’s desire to impress a successful person into a productive mentorship or even creative collaboration. Living in a fame obsessed culture in a capitalist country surrounded by advertising and people’s successes posted on social media, we are absorbing psychological damage to our self worth. It’s easy to fall into a dream state of thinking you must be happy to be able to be creative. I still wonder about the balance between pain and joy for people who are actually productive in their creativity. It’s probably impossible to ever have an equal relationship with someone who intimidates you by always being more professionally accomplished, and if all you know about someone is what they choose to release to reporters, it’s impossible to gauge the true state of their mental health or whether you would be safe in their private company. Pop culture writing sometimes has a catty and cynical tone, and it wore me down to hear Jonah repeatedly internalising it unto having hollower relationships with the people around him. I was also saddened by a sidebar mention of child star problems of having early success and early access to alcohol and drugs with better understanding of how to work than how to maintain healthy relationships. We may be sick of cancel culture already, but it seems important to have documented here the currency of attention and the toxic way entertaining lies or hidden true crime stir public outrage and lead the general public to impulsive actions and the cheapening of their relationships with people who are not famous or powerful.
Harder to endure is the flat othering perspective that it seems gay men have of women in general, though I know I’m not the target audience here. Other than mothers with control complexes or enabling mothers to take money from, this book has a couple of female enablers who probably know that abuse is happening but don’t want to jeopardise their professional reputation or cut off money from a repeat customer by having Richard investigated. The healthy relationship Jonah is ignoring with his coworker is connected to an aspiring songwriter who doesn’t have any dialogue but quietly achieves more success in the background than any of the men who are mixing sex and career goals. It continues to bother me that Jonah casts his mother as equally awful to Richard’s, she shows very little emotional growth when I would have thought she would have been more likely to change than his father, and in the end she is abandoned to the same sort of fulfilment of faith community participation that divided her family. If she was so willing to finance Jonah’s journey away from her to New York, you would think her final reaction to him and his dad would be more reconciling at the point that Jonah’s father shows growth as a person.
The main lesson in this book, of course, is that recognition comes from your efforts to develop a creative portfolio and business skills to market the work produced. The substance you bring to a portfolio will outlast any attention seeking stunts or slander of other creators. I wish, however, that gay men wouldn’t abandon female friends they’re not attracted to as soon as they find a great romantic relationship. It would be nice to keep a dating free zone for building professional or emotional resilience together in friendship, and I wish it didn’t have to end with college and marriage to romantic partners. I think whether it’s female friends, church service, or even therapy, cancelling all further contact with an entire group or concept doesn’t build your self worth or resilience. After the nightmares, the end of Yes, Daddy left me thinking that boundaries can be rebuilt and resilience after bad experiences may be found. But I’m not sure how many things Jonah cancelled forever.
Who’s it for? Young gay impulsive people who like sex too much maybe. People who need to spend more time looking at the reality of their party jokes. Maybe people who thought they had to discard faith entirely to live while gay. Or people who want to read different perspectives on attention seeking behavior and don’t mind graphic sexual descriptions and toxic relationship examples. I found a lot to think about, but it was never really for me.
