Katriona O'Sullivan
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
But my dad was really inappropriate in front of me about women.
I have to say that for the kid that I was because my dad talked about women and their bodies while I was present an awful lot of the time.
We were at the time then where...
Page three was a big thing when I was small.
Well, it seemed like a big thing.
Page three models, there was men who would ogle women in the paper.
If you don't know what page three is, you're a half-naked woman on the third page of the newspaper.
And my dad would ask me to look at the picture with him.
And I didn't understand what was happening.
I had this creeping feeling.
And I'd be in the car with him and he'd be commenting on girls' bodies, women's bodies.
And he was also commenting in quite a sexual way or quite an inappropriate way for a child to...
And the reason I write about that about my dad is that my dad, I suppose, magnified kind of what the society actually teaches us a lot of the time about women is that we are sexual objects for men or that we're there to please men or to look pleasing for men.
But my dad did it in a really toxic way and in a really inappropriate way.
But my dad also...
loved me, Brendan.
And the reason I talk about my, like the book is themed around the people who influenced my body, but I had this real relationship with my dad that my dad would shine a light on me.
He taught me to read.
He taught me how to tie my laces.
There was this love that appeared sometime, but it was always dependent on me being a good girl, on me behaving well for him, on me being a pretty girl or a good girl.