No, Lindsay Lohan’s behavior is not the result of “not having a man in her life.”

From Broadsheet: “Lindsay Lohan’s slow meltdown: It’s all about Dad.”

If the red flags didn’t go up, they should have with the subhead: “The actress’s painful public drama is a lesson in how hard it can be to grow up without a good man in your life.”

It isn’t even an inaccurate headline, either. After delineating Lohan’s public sins (releasing a song called “Confessions of a Broken Heart”! Posing in underwear and stilettos and MAKING IT HER TWITTER BACKGROUND!), we see this quote: “But the Lohan family drama is, more than anything, a potent and painful example of what can happen to girls without good men in their lives.”

Never mind the fact that single mothers and lesbian couples can raise perfectly wonderful children, and have done so for decades. Because in the writer’s view, these people don’t exist, and Lindsay Lohan is living proof! The sample size of one that makes the rule!

What’s going on behind the scenes, so to speak, is the assertion that without a father — or really, a patriarch, because that’s what this is really about — to rule over the family, daughters are going to become uncivilized harlots who drink, do drugs, and take naked photos with guns.

This is the same rhetoric that Compare, for instance, this pamphlet from Concerned Women for America : “Why Children Need Fathers.” CWFA is a conservative, anti-feminist organization, and Broadsheet is a feminist blog, but it’s eerie how much these two match up. One is religious and one is secular, but the message is the same: fatherless children are going to be “future failures” (from CWFA), forever defined by their “missing limb”-like male parent (from Broadsheet.)

It’s a bullshit premise. I’ll come right out and admit it: my father was a terrible person, a borderline abusive adulterer, mean to practically everyone in his life. I cut him out of my life as soon as I was legally old enough to do so. But his presence does not, as Mary Elizabeth Williams argues, make me act out. I don’t keep “reaching for that phantom.” And it does not define me, not one bit. Any problems I have, and goodness knows I have them, are my own fault, not the fault of my Tragic Non-Nuclear Family.

Is it hard on children when their parents aren’t good people? Most of the time, yes. But the key word here is parents . Not fathers. It has nothing to do with “not having a man in one’s life,” but with having those who are closest to you let you down. And that’s not tied to gender at all.

In most articles like this, you’ll usually find the telltale sentence or two that tips the alert reader off to the fact that it’s all bullshit. And this one doesn’t disappoint:

“Of course, it’s possible to grow up with a less than stellar father and still remember to wear underpants and not drive off the sidewalk. You might wind up an Oscar-winning actress or the president of the United States . And there are probably all sorts of other reasons Lohan, who refers to Michael as her “ex”-father, is the hot mess she is today.”

Yeah. Probably. Too bad Williams chose to ignore them in favor of pop-psychology heterosexism.