For me, father-daughter dances are right up there with "Rules for Dating My Daughter" t-shirts and purity rings as symbols of the patriarchal idea that men have a responsibility to protect or shield their daughter's virtue or control their sexuality. In fact, it's appalling when you think about it that way.

Father-daughter dances are so exclusionary. Families don't always have a dad. Instead, sometimes they have two moms, sometimes they have a single parent, and sometimes they have two parents that don't identify as a dad. Sometimes they don't have any parents at all, but have other caregivers. If they are a blended family like mine, they might have two dads, two moms, a girlfriend, and five kids of both genders in the mix. It's really a shame that schools and communities decide to hold events that overtly exclude kids whose families don't match a certain stereotype.

There's something seriously creepy to me about implying that fathers and daughters should go on dates, dance with each other, or have something that resembles romantic love. They totally creep me out.

I just don't get why we need to have father-daughter dances in the first place. I mean, do we hold them because we've always had them, or is there a more insidious message we hope to reinforce about daddy being a little girl's first love? Ultimately, they don't serve a real purpose and might actually hurt someone. So, can we just stop holding them?

I am so tired of the underlying assumption that everyone is straight and identifies as either male or female. Furthermore, kids, and parents who don't happen to fit a cisgender, heterosexual mold, shouldn't have to miss out just because events are designed without even acknowledging they exist. What kind of messages do we teach our kids about equality, and what relationships are valid and "normal," when we hold events like this?

Honestly, our culture already sexualizes little girls in so many ways that a dance just isn't necessary. Every time a picture of a baby girl in a diaper is removed from Facebook for sexual content, a company makes push-up bras for pre-teens, or a child sex abuse survivor is victim-blamed for what she did or said to her rapist, we send the message that girls are here for men and boys. We don't need a special event to formalize these kind of messages.

From the time they are babies, we treat little girls like property. Father-daughter dances seem to fall right in with onesies that read "Daddy Won't Let Me Date Until I'm 30" and threatening our daughter's prom dates. These seemingly "harmless" messages and jokes teach girls in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that they are under men's control. It's so objectifying to make girls dress up like "ladies," dance with their fathers, and sometimes even promise to not have sex until they are safely in the care of their husbands.

I don't know about you, but I don't long for the "good old days" when things were supposedly more "innocent" and "pure." In fact, the good old days sucked for a lot of people, like women and girls, people of color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. It's time we've made father-daughter dances, along with other misogynistic and problematic values, a practice of the past.

So many things in our culture still bring up the age-old idea that girls belong to their fathers, until those very same fathers decide to give another man permission to marry them and "gives them away" at their wedding. I am not a fan.

My daughters are their own people. No one owns them. They get to control their own sexuality and decide when and if they want to "lose their virginity." It won't make them less than, or damage them in any way. So the underlying messages learned at a father-daughter dance are ones I don't hold dear or think we should continue to perpetuate.