Control Freaks

06

Daddy issues. The internet's favorite three-word takedown of ambitious girls with complicated feelings and unapologetic rage.

But still, you thought of your father.

Of course you did.

The man who never praised you properly—not even when you won that regional competition in high school. All he'd said was: "No one serious was competing this year, right?"

The man who, when you argued at dinner about majoring in political theory, asked: "Planning to starve with those ideas? Or just make your brother look bad?"

You were raised in a house where love was handed out like a courtroom sentence: cold, calculated, full of footnotes and counter-arguments.

So of course you were drawn to him.
To Erwin Smith.
The cold-eyed, logic-wrapped professor who never gave applause—only pressure.

Because pressure was the only language you grew up learning.

You stared into the screen. Its blue glow burned in the rims of your eyes.

You wanted to scream.
At him.
At yourself.
At the entire system of father-shaped shadows that trained you to think ambition was a sin unless a man allowed it.

But instead, you just cracked open can number five.

The hiss of carbonation sounded like surrender.

And that was when you knew: this wasn't about the essay anymore. It wasn't even about school.

It was about how every time you tried to prove your worth, he was standing behind it.

Whether it was one of his smug provocations or a blank-faced critique or a single, excruciating glance—you always wrote toward him.

He was the wall.
You were the one crashing into it.
Again. And again. And again.

Not because you wanted to knock him down.
But because maybe—just maybe—you wanted him to finally look down and see you standing there.

You typed three letters: W-H-Y.

Then you deleted them.

Just like you'd trained yourself to do.

Swallow. Rephrase. Detach.

But this time, your fingers froze.

And in that pause, a sentence surfaced—cold, slow, and clear as the ice melting in your drink:

He never did anything wrong. You're the one who turned him into a patriarchal projection and then tried to wrest tenderness from his hands like it was owed to you.

That was it.

You didn't want justice.
You wanted a referee to break the rules for you.
You wanted one of "those men" to admit you were worth bending for.

Your fingers moved again—like possession.

You typed:

State intervention often masquerades as 'protection' when it is, in fact, control. Likewise, individual self-censorship often stems not from oppression—but from the failure to distinguish who is criticizing, and who is loving.

You stared at the line.

Three seconds.

Then you laughed.

"Fuck."

And you kept typing.

No more deleting. No more spiraling. You drank the rest of the can like it was gasoline and flipped open the Trost Online Archive.

Time to hunt.

You typed: Erwin Smith

Twelve results.

All history department. All under Comparative Politics and Cultural Memory Studies.

Five were authored solely by him. You scanned the titles—and immediately, one caught your eye:

"Narratives of Belonging: Multivocality and Ideological Legitimacy in National Tragedies"

Fifty-six pages. Nineteen footnotes. Forty-six citations. And sure enough—

Author: Erwin Smith
Advisor: Z. Darius
Trost University, Department of History

You opened the PDF. Your knuckles cracked audibly.

Page three.

Chapter title: "The Leader as Tragic Symbol: Legitimacy, Projection, and Voluntary Submission."

You let out a low, incredulous laugh.

Well, well.

So Professor Smith had written about submission too.

You scanned the text. Recognized the exact rhetoric he'd once critiqued you for.

"Submission is not obedience to coercion—it is self-embedding within an ideological narrative."
—Erwin Smith, age twenty-eight, wearing the same starched shirts he still probably owned.

You flipped to page 37. Highlighted the quote that made your skin prickle:

"The symbolic power of the leader as a tragic figure does not derive from force, but from the mass craving for a narrative that makes suffering legible."

You copied and pasted it into your notes.

Underneath it, you typed:

Professor, when exactly did the double standards begin? Before or after you decided you were allowed to write about seductive power structures but I wasn't?

You kept going.

His conclusion claimed: "Legitimacy is never built top-down—it is a collective processing of individual memory through narrative."

You replied in the margin:

So when I wrote "When Control Becomes Sexy," I wasn't being provocative. I was just plagiarizing your ideology with better shoes.

This wasn't homework anymore.

This was academic assassination.

You were going to walk into class next week and raise your hand. You were going to quote his own twenty-eight-year-old thesis back to him, line for line, and strip his soft patriarchal posturing bare in front of every bright-eyed first-year in the room.

You weren't his favorite student. You weren't the blushing girl with a B+ and potential.

You were the student who would write a paper about Erwin Smith that could ruin Erwin Smith.

You were going to smile while you did it.

Dog of a man.

Just wait.

Next lecture,
I'll destroy you.