Ah, here comes Father’s Day again with its traditional half-arsed gifts — these days it’s all cans of gag-inducing BrewDog and sugar coma-inducing Lola’s cupcakes — and half-arsed ‘thanks’ to dads. It’s interesting to note how mums have become more popularly regarded as the gritty heroes they are, while dads are still mostly painted as either lobotomised drones who’ll only do childcare for pizza, or malicious grifters with one eye on the kids’ money boxes. Katherine Ryan said on her podcast recently that some women had been accusing her handsome, muscular husband of taking advantage of her, since he’s seemingly loving being the primary carer to their children while she goes off to work. ‘How anti-feminist can you get?’ she asked.
The big dad talking point recently has been about old dads. Given we’re in an era of extremes, the ‘talking’ has gone straight to ‘yelling’ with regards to the new dad status of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, which has been held up as the most nauseatingly immoral behaviour outside of the ITV green room. The oddity of these two screen Mafia legends, who have been dubbed ‘The Dodfathers’ (well, by us), timing their successful tommy-gun ejaculations as if locked in a Little Italy turf war, is uncanny. But their ages are the main issue of course: 79 and 83 respectively. Pacino’s girlfriend, Noor Alfallah, is 29, which is a punchy age gap, while De Niro’s girlfriend, Tiffany Chen, is 45, which is somewhat better optics — but both are fully grown women who can make their own decisions. Yet the ‘age appropriate’ chat has been less prevalent than the alarm over them being elderly dads. ‘It’s irresponsible because they’re about to die,’ has been the tenor of it, along with: ‘Imagine having those creepy old men dribbling on the side of your football game.’
