being emotionally abused has made me incredibly defensive towards being told what to do, but at the same time has made it hard for me to do things without someone telling me that it’s ok to do out if fear of doing something wrong and getting in trouble
Apparently when Burr was a very young teen (we’re talking 13-15) he was being mentored by a man named Paterson, who was a grown adult man (24-26). Paterson had been in the same college club as Burr and, upon graduating, had decided to stick around and remain part of this club, while the other members grew younger and younger. Burr, at this point was the clubs, and (possibly?) the college’s youngest student. Paterson was very friendly with Burr and very free with advice. He was also very free with sexually suggestive talk, commenting extensively on Burr’s feminine traits (he’s literally 13) and using extremely thin metaphors to talk about masturbation, specifically likening it to writing to the (13-year old) Burr. In her biography, Isenberg uses this as an example of the young Burr’s precociousness and the spirit of platonic camaraderie at Princeton.
Personally, I don’t know how anyone can look at a 24 year old man engaging in this sort of dialogue with a 13 year old boy and draw such a sunny conclusion. Boys typically had not reached puberty until around 15 or 16 in the eighteenth century, so it is highly unlikely that Burr would have been even physically matured enough to make this sort of relationship acceptable, much less mental/emotional maturity. The fact that Isenberg completely ignores the possibility that this could have been an abuse situation strikes me as irresponsible. It’s especially irresponsible considering that, later in life, Burr assumed the role of the older mentor figure binding much younger men to him with both warm friendship and, it seems, sexually suggestive gestures and conversations.
It really is a shame that Isenberg is so determined to prove that her darling did nothing wrong that she can’t even look deeply at episodes in his life which may have been harmful, toxic, or traumatic to him. Another example of this is that she takes his frequent running away from home as a sign that he was eager to impress his family and, again, operating above his age (I don’t understand why this is so important to her), whereas it is much more likely that for a child in his situation, frequent attempts to run away from home, always ending in his uncle forcing him to unwillingly return, that this was a sign of poorly coping with a series of traumatic events, a failure to adjust well to a new environment, an attempt to extricate himself from a toxic environment, or some combination thereof.
Instead of humanizing him, she misses real opportunities to do so and decides instead against the evidence to pain him as a (frankly obnoxious) special snowflake.
Literally everyone deserves better here.
Yeah. Ignoring the age difference (or rather, Burr’s young age and the power imbalance) here bothers me a lot. The masturbation reference / feminine qualities letter was written to Burr when he was sixteen, but that’s still ridiculously young, and we need to remember that Paterson had already known Burr for years.
that thing about Burr’s childhood is weird – Isenberg’s not the only author who has some really dismissive opinions about it. Lomask for example offers some half-baked insight why Burr could have been ‘an unruly child’, but at the same time hints that Burr may have wanted to simply present himself as such (’lmao i was such a horrible brat’). Lomask also rejects the idea that Timothy Edwards could have been too harsh on Burr / Burr could have hated him, based on the evidence that they got along when Burr was adult. Because that proves everything, apparently.
I hate how unwilling historians are to discuss possibilities of same-gender-attraction, mental illness, disability, or abuse. They act like these are slanders they need to defend their subject from.
Burr’s running away could have indicated any number of things. He was, essentially, a foster child, and very young children who wind up in that situation often develop a whole slew of difficulties, including attachment issues. It could be indicative of the mental/emotional scar-tissue that was left behind when he lost his parents and grandparents and was uprooted at such a young age to go live with a different family in what sounds like a very overstimulating environment that would have been very difficult on a child in that situation. Instead she takes it as a sign of independence which just makes no sense? I don’t know, the way she dealt with his childhood was frankly just terrible.
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Lesbian mothers raising children in lesbian-headed households also had to worry about ex-husbands using their lesbianism to take custody of the children. In 1958, Vera Martin met and fell in love with Kay, a Japanese American woman who had come to the United States at the end of the Second World War after marrying an African American serviceman. Kay had two children, and Martin had a son and daughter. The families got along well and would spend time together on the weekends. R., Vera Martin’s teenage daughter, babysat for the other children when Kay and Martin wanted to go out together. Both women feared that the authorities or their ex-husbands would take custody of their children if they found out they were in a lesbian relationship. “We knew that we had to be careful,” Vera Martin remembers, “and keep the knowledge that we had kids very quiet … very quiet.” Kay worked as a prostitute to support her family, and the two women lived in fear that someone would report them to authorities, possibly even one of the other women with whom Kay worked, in order to remove competition. They also feared that their ex-husbands would simply take their children away directly if they found out they were lesbians. Martin was an African American woman and Kay was Japanese American, and as two lesbian mothers of color, they felt particularly threatened by the courts.
Lesbian mothers who had left previous heterosexual marriages during this era lived in constant fear of discovery and exposure. One night in 1959, when Vera Martin and Kay were at the If Club, a lesbian bar in Los Angeles, a heterosexually identified man who knew Martin’s ex-husband walked up, said hello to her, and left. Terrified, Martin turned to Kay and said, “That’s someone that knew me when my husband and I were together, and they are still in touch.” Kay understood the danger immediately and said, “I think we better get out of here.” Vera Martin thought the man would use the pay phone and that her ex- husband would show up at the club or later at one of their houses. She and Kay lived in terror afterwards and did not go out in public “for a long time.” When the two of them eventually went to a dance together, they asked two men to accompany them as cover.
As parents, lesbians and gay men had no legal protections or recognition of their co-parent relationships in the 1950s and 1960s. As it would in later decades, this jeopardized their ability to maintain communication with their partner’s children. After Kay died suddenly in the winter of 1959, Vera Martin wanted very badly to take Kay’s children into her home and raise them with her own, as Kay had told her children’s caretaker she wanted before she died. However, Kay’s ex-husband, who lived across the country and had been brutally abusive to Kay, came into town with his new wife and took the children. “Oh, I wanted those kids so bad. … I was crazy about them and they were crazy about me,” Martin recalled, but she had no chance of competing for custody of the two children against an intact heterosexual nuclear family. In the era before gay and lesbian liberation movements there was no chance of legal recognition for lesbian households with children. Martin despaired when Kay’s ex-husband held an auction to sell all of Kay’s belongings. She came up with one hundred dollars to buy Kay’s address book, a potentially dangerous item in the hands of her ex-husband. In 1963, Vera Martin then married a gay man and “slammed the closet door shut behind her,” because she heard rumors that her own ex-husband suspected that she was a lesbian, and she was afraid he might try to use that to obtain custody of T., her son and youngest child.
Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II (2013), Ch. 1. (via captainnipple)
Off the top of my head, whatever it was that John did to put this look on Dean’s face.
But if you want to talk canon specifics, let’s take a spin through my fuck john winchester tag.
Okay, John was a child abuser. He was legally a child abuser for leaving his children alone the way the he did, when Dean was only 9 if not younger. He left his children alone in hotel rooms to fend for themselves for days at a time, sometimes without enough money for food. This is child abuse. You cannot leave a 9 year old in charge of a 5 year old and expect him to take care of the boy like he was an adult. Putting this kind of responsibility on a child is going to incur lifelong psychological damage.
I personally believe that John was physically abusive, especially to Dean, but I can’t prove that canonically beyond Sam calling John a mean drunk and the fact that violence is completely normalized between the brothers. John was patently verbally and emotionally abusive to both Sam and Dean and I’m not even going to go find gifs of that because it’s in literally all their interactions. Strong, brave Dean becomes passive and terrified in his father’s presence, and sweet, loving Sam becomes seething and full of rage.
Bottom line, the worst thing John ever did was putting the responsibility for Sam on Dean’s shoulders when he was too young to even take care of himself. This is neglect, this is abuse, this is shirking all of his own duty to his children and then laying blame on Dean when he cannot live up to impossible standards. But let’s go through some specifics.
How about when Dean was 16 and he lost their food money gambling (probably trying to get more food money), and so he ended up stealing peanut butter and bread – to survive and feed his little brother – and he got arrested?
Can we just talk about how the only real chance at happiness and a normal life that Dean actually got was at a home for juvenile delinquents? I mean can we just talk about how fucked up that is?
How about what John was out doing while he was leaving the boys alone in motel rooms?
How about when Dean was dying and John literally wouldn’t pick up the phone much less show up?
Or the other time Dean was dying and he didn’t care?
I could also throw in the fact that one of the biggest demons in hell actually made a better father than John.
This is all absolutely canon, indisputable. But what I find incredibly revealing is the episode It’s a Terrible Life. Here, Dean was raised by Bobby and Ellen, with Jo for a sister. Dean Smith is basically a photo negative of Dean Winchester.
He eats salads, he does the Master Cleanse, he has an espresso machine, he drives a fucking Prius. He’s a business man with fashionable clothes and an upscale apartment. I mean, can you say metrosexual?
This Dean doesn’t overcompensate, he’s not macho or butch, he’s not one step away from alcoholism, he’s not a broke high school dropout. He went to Stanford, and considering that Bobby and Ellen probably would not have had the money for that, we can hypothesize that he got in on scholarship. He doesn’t drive his dad’s old car because it’s not the only home and security he’s known since he was four. He also doesn’t appear to be a “ladies man”, as we never actually see him talking to a woman. The only person he seems to be flirting with appears to be his assistant, whom he talks to about Project Runway.
This Dean could easily be openly bisexual, because he grew up in a loving and safe family. This Dean embraced his education as well as his love of fashion, this Dean is successful and stylish. We don’t know what’s going on in his personal life or if he’s happy, but he is plainly a normal, functional, stable human being. This is who Dean would be if John wasn’t his father.
This is who Dean would be if John wasn’t his father. This is who Dean could have been if John had not turned him into Sam’s parent while depriving Dean of a parent himself, dragging him from place to place, isolating him, while turning him into a child soldier and a tool to further his quest for vengeance – and using him as an emotional if not physical punching bag.
He didn’t “try his best”. Trying his best would be not chasing down the demon, would be giving his sons a home and a childhood. Would have been at fucking least putting them in foster care instead of dragging them across the country with him. He didn’t love them. What he did is not love, it just fucking isn’t. Whatever ‘love’ he had, it was twisted and selfish and damaging. John did not love his sons, not the way I define love.
I literally, honestly don’t care that John traded his life for Dean’s in the end. I mean, to say “too little too late” is a vivid understatement. I don’t care what he said, I seriously, seriously don’t care what he said in that hospital scene. I’ve never been physically abused, but my father did fuck up my head and my life pretty well, and he says all kinds of nice things trying to get me back on his side, and I don’t care about any of it. All the “I’m proud of you”s in the world can’t change what you’ve done. And really all John did then was heap more responsibility and guilt on Dean’s shoulders.
So basically – everything. Everything John did to his sons was the worst.
