Would you spy on your teenage daughter? Moreover, would you outsource said spying to her younger brother for $100 a week? This is exactly what throbbing man-chef Gordon Ramsay has admitted to.

Perhaps in an attempt to add credence to his well-cultivated media persona of “human jockstrap with rage issues”, Ramsay explained to the US chat show host Jimmy Kimmel how he had been paying Jack, 16, to report back to him about 17-year-old Megan’s relationships and social media activity. The cliche of the overprotective father is rearing its ugly, creepy head once more.

This is not the first time Ramsay has publicly suggested that he has a close interest in his daughter’s romantic life. Three years ago, he told Jonathan Ross of how he and his son conspired to secretly install a camera in Megan’s bedroom to make sure that she and her boyfriend at the time were revising for their exams rather than engaging in sexual activity. Ramsay later said this was a joke, that he never installed a camera.

So why does the role of the father as gatekeeper to his daughter’s sexuality still hold so much sway in the cultural imagination? Anyone who has been subject to such unreconstructive brain-fluff as the Disney sitcom 8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter will be aware that the trope of the protective (and generally American) father driven to distraction at the thought of some horny, spotty suitor pawing the body of his innocent little girl is a comedy mainstay.

Most of us will have come across the related, “if you ever do anything to hurt her …” mentality; men who joke jovially about kneecapping their daughters’ boyfriends yet may even applaud their son if he treats other girls the same way. This exposes the double standards to which some young men and women are still held: the girls are frail princesses whose purity and innocence must be preserved; the boys oversexed predators out to soil, cheapen and corrupt them.

It’s fair on neither the pubescent girls experiencing sexual feelings for the first time nor the boys, who may find the blossoming sexual confidence of their female peers frankly terrifying.

Some might argue that the pumped-up braggadocio of an inflated TV chef, or the foibles of a poorly drawn television sitcom character have little to say about real-world gender roles. But any woman who has written frankly about her sexuality, for instance, will have been confronted with comments suggesting an absent or uninterested father in childhood may have played a part; without a vigilant authoritative man there to control access to his daughter’s body, promiscuity is seen as the natural consequence.

Meanwhile, the “nobody touches my princess” routine implies that a woman is too weak to protect her own boundaries. Shouldn’t a man respect a woman not because he fears a bloody, violent patriarchal intervention but because she is human and deserving of that respect?

Such attitudes can be traced back to a time when women were chattels with little power over their own sexual or romantic lives, which were instead wholly under the control of their male relatives (in the Merchant of Venice, Portia’s father even manages from beyond the grave to control access to her vagina – surely the ultimate patriarchal act).

They can be seen manifested in everything from the disturbing tradition of the American purity ball, where fathers and daughters make chastity pledges in a wedding-style ceremony, to the far more disturbing problem of so-called honour killings. There were more than 11,000 recorded cases of honour crimes between 2010 and 2014 in the UK alone, so it’s clear that some fathers are showing an unhealthy level of interest in who their daughters choose to spend their time with. And women are dying because of it.

Those who see harmless, parental affection in controlling behaviours would be well placed to consider – as with cases of domestic violence – just what the consequences can be when those behaviours are taken to extremes. Which is why the overprotective dad trope is not a joke (I’m still reeling from the time I saw a T-shirt emblazoned with an ultrasound photo which, below the foetus, bore the legend “Daddy’s little girl”).

It’s difficult to find comments such as Ramsay’s amusing, cute or endearing. Rather, they are suggestive of an unhealthy level of vigilance and suspicion when it comes to female independence. That he has recruited a (younger) male relative to collude in this scrutiny speaks volumes about his attitude. Progressive parenting it is not.