If you’re not familiar with Bean Dad yet, then listen up, because this guy’s hectic parenting skills will shock you.
‘Bean Dad’ whose official name is actually John Roderick and is best known as the lead singer and guitarist of The Long Winters, is a father who posted a thread telling the story of how he told his hungry nine-year-old daughter to open a can of beans or go without food.
In the now-deleted Twitter thread (which you can read here), Roderick says his daughter bought him the can of beans and he asked her how she thought a tin opener worked. He said she didn’t know and it made him realise “a teaching moment just dropped into my lap”.
Shockingly, he says that she tried to open the can of beans for six hours. Yep, six hours.
“She was next to me grunting and groaning trying to get the thing. I should say that spatial orientation, process visualisation and order of operation are not things she… intuits. I knew this would be a challenge,” he said.
The post (obviously) caused an uproar when it went viral and there were plenty of child neglect accusations being thrown around the interwebs.
Thankfully, Bean Dad Roderick, has understood the offensive side of his post and is now back tracing his steps and apologising profusely. The podcaster and musician said in a statement on his website that he is ‘deeply sorry” about his tweets and that he wanted to “acknowledge and make amends for the injuries.”
Unfortunately, Roderick couldn’t simply apologise for his wrongdoing and leave it there, he defended his offensive actions saying the posts were framed in a certain way to reflect his “comedic persona”.
“My story about my daughter and the can of beans was poorly told,” he said, adding: “I didn’t share how much laughing we were doing, how we had a bowl of pistachios between us all day as we worked on the problem, or that we’d both had a full breakfast together a few hours before.”
However, credit should be given where credit is due. Roderick did acknowledge the pain he may have unintentionally inflicted on people who were triggered by his posts.
“What I didn’t understand when posting that story, was that a lot of the language I used reminded people very viscerally of abuse they’d experienced at the hand of a parent,” he said.
Realising the gravity of the situation, Roderick has also deleted his Twitter. However, things have gotten worse for Bean Dad when some internet sleuths uncovered old anti-Semitic and homophobic tweets he’d written. He has tried to explain the offensive posts by saying they were satire.
“[I was]taking the slurs of the oppressors and flipping them to mock racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry.”
“I am humiliated by my incredibly insensitive use of the language of sexual assault in casual banter. It was a lazy and damaging ideology, that I continued to believe long past the point I should’ve known better that because I was a hipster intellectual from a diverse community it was ok for me to joke and deploy slurs in that context,” he wrote.
He’s now Twitter’s first unofficial character of 2021.
