I’ve been thinking about chivalry lately, partly because of the focus this topic receives in the manosphere. Back in May grerp posted her take on chivalry (feminism killed it), and more recently Welmer had a post about a young man’s response to a young woman bemoaning the lack of chivalry. I also stumbled on an astounding column by our friend Liz Jones where she whines about the lack of chivalry men show today.
I approach this with mixed thoughts. By manosphere standards I’m probably more of a social conservative. Part of me mourns the loss of chivalry, even while I recognize that grerp is right; feminism has for the most part destroyed chivalry and turned what once was noble into farce.
I assume many of my readers are glad to see it go, and I can understand that as well. When I first considered writing about this my first challenge was even to identify what it was I somewhat ambivalently mourned. The biggest single example I can think of is the doctrine of women and children first. For the rest of this post I’ll share some of what I found about how this actually worked on the Titanic. I’ll follow up with a later post with more thoughts on chivalry and how I think men should frame the concept in the world reworked by feminism.
Probably the best known example of women and children first in action was on RMS Titanic on April 14th, 1912. More recently leftists have tried to spin the disaster as a situation where the wealthy were given preferential access to lifeboats, leaving the working class to drown in the frigid North Atlantic. However, an examination of the actual casualty figures by Chuck Anesi tells a very different story:
First of all, if you were a man, you were outta luck. The overall survival rate for men was 20%. For women, it was 74%, and for children, 52%. Yes, it was indeed “women and children first.”
But what about class? Well, third class women were 41% more likely to survive than first class men. And third class men were twice as likely to survive as second class men.
Anesi provides more insight into the lifeboat loading process a little further down:
All 14 lifeboats, the two emergency boats, and two of the Engelhardt boats were launched. These had a capacity of 1,084 passengers. Obviously, many boats were not loaded to full capacity. There were many reasons for this; at first, many women and children were simply unwilling to be lowered 65 feet from the boat deck to the water. Some of the men put in boats were put there simply to show it was safe, and allay the fears of other passengers. (The two Engelhardt boats that were not launched floated off when the Titanic sank, and were used as rafts.)
There were 1,690 men on board the Titanic, spread between the crew and the three classes of passengers. Only 338 of the men were saved. Those who perished and many who were saved clearly made a conscious choice to allow the women and children to evacuate before them, patiently waiting even as the women refused to board the lifeboats out of fear. Anesi suggests that more lives of men, women and children could have been saved had the captain not ordered the women and children first policy:
there was enough lifeboat capacity for ALL women and children (534 persons total), AND 550 men as well. (Total capacity of the boats launched was 1,084.) This explains why, especially as the situation became more urgent, more men were put in the boats. Indeed, if the boat crews had loaded one man for each woman or child loaded, they could have expected to save all women and children, plus as many men. [I believe that if this approach been adopted from the start, the boats would have been loaded more rapidly, passenger fear would have been reduced as families were kept together, and far more lives would have been saved in the long run.]
It is hard to fathom the amount of will it would have taken to stand by on a sinking ship and wait for those who were too afraid to board the lifeboats to go first. Often feminists try to claim that men were privileged back then, and that chivalry was merely ceremonial. But you won’t convince over a thousand men to step aside when their lives are in extreme peril unless they truly accept that they have a duty to protect others. No one knew the Titanic was going to go down. The men aboard were as close to a statistical sample of the day as one would expect to find. The Guardian reinforces this point in it’s article about the differing death rates between the Titanic and the Louisitania:
They noted that on the Titanic the women and children first order was enforced by the crew, and accepted by the passengers – “otherwise the passengers could have easily revolted against such a protocol”.
And by passengers, of course The Guardian euphemistically means the men who stood by while women and children boarded the life boats.
Titanic lifeboat photo from Wikipedia Commons.
See Also:
See here:
http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2010/07/empty-seats-on-titanics-lifeboats-and.html
http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2010/03/titanic-its-lessons-about-gender-still.html
The suffragettes belittled the sacrifices that the men on the Titanic made in its immediate aftermath. There were even empty seats on the lifeboats because of the social pressures on men to NOT survive.
[D: Wow. Powerful.]
Chivalry only makes sense when women reciprocate. In a feminized culture, like we have in the contemporary US, there is no more reason for male chivalry than there is for commitment to marriage.
What feminism has done is to disenfranchise males socially. In a culture where the only predictable outcome of marriage (for a male) is divorce, bankruptcy, a broken home and broken life, self-sacrifice is illogical. Women are unwilling to sacrifice for men, so why should we sacrifice for them? When a man has no stake in women’s welfare; in fact, realizes that most women actively despise him, how can anyone realistically expect heroic sacrifices?
There, likewise, is no incentive for men to sacrifice for the children’s sake. When women choose abortion over childbirth; and men are seen as nothing more than sperm donors or sources of child support— this disenfranchisement gives them no stake in the future.
Simply put, American women are not worth sacrificing a life, or much of anything else for. It’s best to avoid them altogether and seek out real women from non-dysfunctional cultures.
I’m a “get to the choppa!” kinda guy. Spliting up families is always going to create chaos.
“Women are unwilling to sacrifice for men, so why should we sacrifice for them?”
Ah, the most important question in the world.
Women and children first is only viable on a societal scale when the average anonymous woman can be trusted by the anonymous average man to abide by children before women. At least that has more to do with my personal rejection actively being chivalrous than some broader rejection of feminist philosophy or what have you.
I restrict my extra kindness for strangers and acquaintances to the trivial (holding doors, getting things from the top shelf at the market, lifting something heavy etc. ). I did make an exception recently when I saw two boys across the street, probably 10 and 12, clearing out their driveway after a large snow storm. Their mother is a divorcée and frankly shovelling heavy snow is a man’s job. I hate to see the boys have to take on something like that.
The question you raise will come to a very nasty head should the US ever require a draft again and said draft is employed only against males. My gut tells me that the whole notion of feminism has the draft being solely an academic concern as a prerequisite.
I was raised very traditionally, and part of that upbringing was the idea of chivalry. Not the cheap “open the door” chivalry, either – though on that note, I was taught to hold the door for anyone. My father made it very clear that, more than just giving up my seat for women and old folks, standing until the women have been seated, or allowing the person carrying the heaviest load to pass me in the halls, I was expected to generally respect, care for, and protect women, children, and the elderly.
That meant offering help with heavy objects, directions, or anything else to those people who looked like they needed it, without waiting to be asked. It meant listening respectfully when women and old folks spoke, refraining from coarse language, and respecting personal space. Treating women like princesses. Maintaining loyalty to family. There was a whole list of things beyond that, but more importantly, it was the attitude of noblesse oblige and protection.
I enjoyed that. I honestly enjoyed being helpful, respectful, and deferent. I still act that way towards old folks. But women and kids are such little brats that I’ve given up on it. Both groups react better to crass behavior. Kids listen when you shout and threaten to tell their mommies (you never have to specify what you’re telling, the kids react with Pavlovian paralysis to that phrase). Women respond positively to arrogance, personal space invasion, and dirty conversation (not to mention using plenty of coarse language themselves).
I’ve never experienced the stereotypical female anger at a held door, but I’ve been put in the friend zone too many times for otherwise acting like a gentleman. I hate acting this new way, like a dick, but hey, it gets results. The closest I’ve seen toa positive response is mild curiousity when women eventually notice that I always walk on the outside of the curb (haven’t been able to break that habit). I enjoyed being respectful, I enjoyed being chivalrous, and I don’t plan on being a real gentleman to a woman again for a long time to come.
What mainstream articles tend to miss is that a lot of guys my age would like to be gentlemen, and miss being able to treat women like little ladies. We didn’t get rid of chivalry because we didn’t want it, we got rid of it because even the shiniest white knight doesn’t want to take a vow of chastity.
Perhaps when our society collapses, which seems nearly inevitable to me, chivalry will make a comeback. This would be a good thing, I think, but only if it is accompanied by a return to women fulfilling their natural roles as wives and mothers. Feminism, like witchcraft, is rebellion against the natural order of things, and since our culture is in its grip, it is doomed.
A moment of curiousity, from a woman who has always *tried* to act like a lady – and who endeavors to be a good wife and mother.
What is it that men want from women? (Other than the physical, which obviously only my husband gets).
I listen to the accusations of female dreadfulness, which seem rather well-founded, but what would a good woman look like?
Thanks for addressing this, if you choose to do so. 🙂
Left one paragraph of what I intended to say out of that last comment –
I don’t know if I could have stood patiently ona sinking ship, waiting to die. I’d love to say I could, but I’ve never been in a situation that required me to do that. I feel the loss of that attitude represents the loss of the greatest single piece of altruism our civilization has ever created. In the every-man–womyn-and-child world of today, there is less nobility and love than their used to be, simply for that loss. Whether or not I would have had the stomach to contribute to it, that lost idea is a tragedy all by itself.
Modern American women would not be worth sinking over.
A modern scenario would go like this:
1) Ship is sinking – chivalrous beta males allow the women and children to fill the lifeboats.
2) Ship sinks while American women snap photos of it with their iPhones.
3) Women drift about in the lifeboats, infuriated that there are no men to row or catch fish for them.
4) Drowned beta males meet St. Peter who explains to them that they have just been saved from the Titanic disaster.
“Perhaps when our society collapses, which seems nearly inevitable to me, chivalry will make a comeback.”
I doubt it. The kind of chivalry we’re talking about here requires a functioning society. When civilization collapses, the strongest men subjugate the women and treat them far from chivalrously.
There were strict class conventions on passenger liners of the time although the shipping companies made their profit from the carriage of immigrants. A major reason for the underfilling of the lifeboats was fear among the officers that, fully loaded, the boats could swamp. They were unaware that the boats had been tested, fully loaded to capacity. There were also a number of men who had dressed as women in order to enter the lifeboats. There were also eyewitness accounts that gunfire was used against some men seeking to enter the boats.
[D: Do you have sources for any of this? Is it part of the formal inquiry, or more like 9/11 truther assertions from the day? Are you suggesting that the crew held over a thousand men at gunpoint to prevent them from boarding the lifeboats? If the boats were only partially loaded due to fear of swamping them, wouldn’t that make it easier to launch all of the boats? At least two of the boats were never launched, and they had hours.]
“I listen to the accusations of female dreadfulness, which seem rather well-founded, but what would a good woman look like?”
Take my opinion for what it’s worth, but I’m now beginning to wonder if most men outside of the manosphere may not be able to identify a lady themselves anymore. A woman I work with of Asian descent (and maybe that’s the key) strikes me as a modern day lady. She is well educated and good at her job. She dresses professionally, flattering yet not suggestive and through small talk she has made it clear that she takes the maintenance of her appearance seriously. The one thing which really surprised me is that in the 5 years I’ve worked with her, she has never raised her voice and doesn’t try to browbeat her subordinates or any other staff member in our company.
She simply states her opinion when dealing with jobs or projects and she never seems to get upset or ruffled, like she has a quiet confidence about her abilities which I will say are considerable.
Here is where I seem to get confused, it struck me that the other single guys where I work with one exception wouldn’t touch a woman like her with a 10 metre cattle prod. I will admit, that she is a little slow on certain things (she refers to any house which hasn’t been newly built as a ‘resale home’ and she is completely lost around things such as vehicle maintenance or construction projects) but to write her off completely? Sure when they worked with her on projects, she did the planning, and they had to do the grunt work and yes, if something did indeed go awry, she would consult them and if the need warranted it, would gladly hand over the lead to my co-workers. She’s friendly and willing to converse or assist in any way which she can even if her assistance would be somewhat limited. From what I’ve learned about her family, there is no question that her Husband is in charge of their relationship and I highly doubt she has a problem with the situation.
The guys I work with dismiss her as dumb and would rather a ‘smarter woman’ to settle down with.
The thing which really messed me up after I realized it was just how rare women like my co-worker actually are and I have to wonder what is it that guys are looking for in women these days? Maybe this is just my perception, but I have no issue holding doors open for her (which she always appreciates) or toning down my language when she is present. I’m not the only one at my job who feels this way as a recent hire who has gone through a nasty divorce echoed my sentiments regarding her. That the other guys I work with maybe don’t realize what a lady actually looks and acts like and that yes, you would have to take the lead if you where dating someone like her, something that the guys seem upset about at times.
A feminist would meet my co-worker and rip her to shreds for the very attributes that make her so rare, but the guys I work with don’t have very many positive things to say about her either, what’s up with that?
Omnipitron:
I think the problem goes back to what Bob mentioned earlier. From what I’ve seen of Anglo-American women, acting like a jerk around them is the only thing that gets their attention. It’s only in situations like the sinking Titanic or some other emergency (and only then) that they actually want a strong, reliable, intelligent man. Of course, once the emergency is past, the good guy gets thrown aside like a bag of garbage, and it’s back to the lowlifes for her!
It’s like the situation you mentioned with the Asian woman. Lots of American men have become so accustomed to seeing bitches instead of ladies, that they don’t know what to do with ladies when they actually encounter one.
Heathrose:
“What is it that men want from women?”
“A woman who always tries to act like a lady and endeavors to be a good wife and mother”.
LOL You asked and answered your own question!
Hearthrose:
How are you? Hope you had a great Christmas!
I agree with Eric that you answered your own question. For married women, I tend to remind them of the Proverbs description of a good wife: She does her husband good all the days of her life and the heart of her husband safely trusts in her. Sadly, that’s rare.
For single women, I think grerp covers it well on her blog. Be chaste, take care of your appearance, and endeavor to be useful rather than just pretty.
Chivalry, when defined as deference to women, doesn’t make one lick of sense in a society where men and women are competitors. There’s no ethical reason someone should give a hand up to someone who is trying to compete with them for the same goods, resources or prestige.
Society has progressed past the industrial era, women are provided with the tools to equality in almost all phases of life, so chivalry is dead. It doesn’t compute.
-waves hi to Terry-
I had a great Christmas, thank you! I hope yours was blessed. 🙂
I read a few of the MRM blogs (some of them have language and discussion topics that I frankly find upsetting) and it seems like the majority of men commenting no longer think women are useful for anything except non-reproductive sex. So I’ve gotten progressively more curious about exactly what you gents want us around for. (Other than DearHusband who pats me on the head and tells me that I’m a good wifey. LOL).
This post seemed close enough in topic to make me willing to ask the question. Hope it wasn’t out of place.
“What is it that men want from women?”
My answer to this question has become very simple. Men want:
To be happy; for their woman to be happy; and for their woman to be happy being with them.
“I’m now beginning to wonder if most men outside of the manosphere may not be able to identify a lady themselves anymore. ”
I think the manosphere and our own biases have oversold the depravity of American women. Probably 20% of couples today are happy and healthy with none of the problems we hear about daily in our corner of the Net. I’d estimate another 10% of women in couples are perfectly fine people but with mismatched partners.
That is a shocking percentage if you believe that American women are by and large rotten and unfit for adult society. Unfortunately (for me) when I meet one of these women they are either taken or single but “unavailable.” C’est la vie.
“Lots of American men have become so accustomed to seeing bitches instead of ladies, that they don’t know what to do with ladies when they actually encounter one.”
You are correct, there is some serious Stockholm Syndrome going on in America where men’s sensors are washed out by low-rent chicks and they can’t see good ones in front of them.
Re: Asian women, I find it hilarious when I hear white women complain about white men dating Asian women. Wobegone the man who leaves his AW and dates an Asian girl – “he’s just looking for a mail order bride who will be submissive and not question him!” Sometimes I break in and correct them “what they really like is a woman who doesn’t get up in their face all the time.” At which point they double down on the shaming (“men just can’t HANDLE a strong woman!!!”) and I exit the conversation.
I’m no stealth member of the Joy Luck Club, but having grown up around some Asian families and gone to school with LOTS of kids from both Asian and mixed Euro-Asian households, I can say the image of Asian wives as demure and submissive does not at all square with my experience.
Talking to myself,
“I think the manosphere and our own biases have oversold the depravity of American women.”
Don’t get me wrong though, the popular culture is so steeped in raising women to be selfish brats that it’s not enough for a woman to be intrinsically good. The forces of culture are so pernicious that she needs to be intellectually committed to avoiding corruption and keeping out of the path of the bitch squads. So if you find a good woman who surrounds herself with bad, you can only assume the whispers will get the better of her eventually.
@ Hearthrose
“What is it that men want from women?”
Just sticking to the realistic desires, I can come up with a few.
Be forgiving, but expect high ethical standards from yourself and others. Be humble, kind, and carry yourself with an understated grace. Don’t sleep around with alphas when you’re young and hot only to turn to beta providers when you’ve “had your fun” and the egg timer goes off. Don’t make promises or vows lightly, but keep the ones you make. Don’t associate with or make excuses for any woman who makes the world a worse place – or any man. Dress appropriately for the setting. Be genuinely thankful for the gentlemen in your life, but be able to handle yourself without them when something happens (or at least maintain composure, I don’t expect everyone to be able to handle every situation, like the stuck car referenced above). Keep your demands reasonable. Stay healthy. Don’t have kids out of wedlock, don’t have abortions. Above all, have some worth beyond just a pretty face, whatever that means to you and the kind of guy you seek.
I feel like I should point out that I do *not* expect women to be sexually aroused by pure beta behavior (though that would make it easier on most of today’s men, thanks to the feminized way they’re raised), to have an absolutely squeeky clean sexual/romantic past (a fling or two, an ex boyfriend or three, getting played once or twice, as opposed to a consistent pattern of alpha-chasing), to be perfectly rational 24-7 (I can’t even do that), or to even pretend to like my nerdy hobbies.
Most of that is basic, decent human behavior. A few are more sex-specific at first glance, but I’d also advocate guys keep their partner count low, not father kids out of wedlock, and so on. Still, I know very few women who meet even half the conditions above (all of them are taken), so doing that will help you stand out, and be intrinsically morally valuable.
Hearthrose – you have to understand that learning about women from the MRM is like learning about cars by working in an Emergency Room.
NAWALT.
Badger’s comment about the ‘whispers’ getting to a modern women who is not with a high-status male brings out an important point about what men want in a woman. If she is vulnerable to being influenced by the whispers, it means she cares more about the opinions of her girlfriends and/or social circle than about having a deep relationship with a man. No woman who is so motivated can possibly have the level of commitment needed for a marriage or LTR to survive. ‘Forsaking all others’ in order to ‘cleave only to him’ means exactly that, and so few women are willing to do that.
Hearthrose,
It seems you’ve started quite a conversation here! Lots of great answers from the men here. With respect to some of the language in the manosphere (and I can relate to your sentiments), I manage that two ways:
1) Stick to the blogs of happily married men. Not only are they more balanced, they write and moderate with their wives in mind without watering down the real problems men are facing as a result of our feminism revised legal system.
2) When I read places like the Spearhead, I try to avoid the comments section for the most part. Even if I leave a comment, I leave it and move on.
Good post Dalrock. I hadn’t seen that info about mortality rates before and it makes sense that more would have been saved had some bonehead chivalry guy hadn’t been breaking up families.
“she needs to be intellectually committed to avoiding corruption and keeping out of the path of the bitch squads”
Wise words from the Badger. And wise words from many others here, who have pointed out the obtuseness of chivalry in an age where women are peer competitors and practice lifeboat feminism.
I am polite to others because manners are the glue that holds society together and permits people to exist people to coexist in close quarters. Late-term pregnant women, the infirm, the elderly, and older vets get special consideration.
But I do not do so because women are somehow better than I. Women are not better than men, despite what most women and many men think.
[D: Well put.]
“it seems like the majority of men commenting no longer think women are useful for anything except non-reproductive sex. “
Sampling error, perhaps? A good many of the blogs in the manosphere are authored by two kinds of guys: the fellow who is less than positive on relationships between the sexes, and the gamer/PUA.
Both are likely to have a knackered view of women, and I can imagine that it’s hard to read that stuff and not come away a bit disillusioned.
But, just like NAWALT, not all men are like that either.
I echo Terry’s assessment. The scribblings of married MRAs are likely to be tempered by the example provided by our wives. By and large, we are living with a reliable counter-example to the constant current of horror stories that one reads about in the universe of MRM. It keeps us from getting too carried away.
I get curious. 🙂
And MRM stuff confuses me because I live in a military town. The guys tend to at leaast *act* pretty traditional/chivalric/alpha – they’re MARINES. Although I hear women acting like “that” VERY occasionally in women-only conversation boards, I don’t know any in person who are alpha-chasers/beta users, excepting the ones that everyone has on the fringe of their friend group. Perhaps we all act like that a little bit, unconsciously… ? I don’t know, I’ve been with my hubs since we were 14 and he’s very alpha. (I will vouch for an unending stream of women throwing themselves at him).
I pretty much only currently read Dalrock and Athol, with the smattering of others if I just *have* to know what that title on the bloglist is about. I went further afield and said, “eep” and came back to the married gents.
But I do care about increasing the goodness in the world at large, making the men with whom I come into contact happier people, raising my children well – all of that. I am aware of my own shelteredness and naivity, so… I asked. 🙂
Two random points: 1) Women are very motivated by guilt, most women I know have a need to “check in” with as many people as possible when making a decision (which is why we NEED a strong husband to guide us – you keep us sane) and that gets us in trouble. 2) Asian wives may be sweet to their hubbies, but do NOT mess with Asian moms.
I think it would be more accurate to characterize it as an artifact of selection issues. People who comment on any blog or website are going to be highly selected for people who have been affected by the issue/subject of the website. Go to a site about autism, for example, and you will find a significantly higher percentage of the commenters have an autistic family member than is true of the general population. Those with the most concern and awareness of an issue are the ones most likely to be found talking about it. I had a cousin die from ALS, for example, thus I am far more likely to know a lot more about the disease and its affects, and have a higher level of concern, than someone who has never even known anyone who had it.
The forcefulness of the expressions you will see in the manosphere – including the roughness of the language – are a by-product of decades of denial of men’s issues. Years ago men spoke of the issues in much calmer, more measured, more rational terms – and ran headlong into a stone wall of denial that took the form, “There is no problem, and if there is it is all your fault.” No one who has any understanding of human nature should find it surprising at all the frustration these men felt resulted in escalation of the intensity of their message.
Now, 40+ years on, even happily married men like Dalrock and a few female bloggers are finally getting around to conceding that “there is a problem.” For those of us who have been trying to point out that there was, indeed, not only a “problem”, but that the trend was toward it getting worse, not better, and met nothing but the stone wall of denial, this is a bit like having the neighbors finally admit that, maybe, your house really was on fire when you told them it was. Now that it has spread from a grease fire in the kitchen to the point where the whole house is in flames, wringing of hands and dithering “oh my, what to do, what to do?” doesn’t impress the people who have been affected very much.
It’s interesting that most waves of social change follow a similar pattern. Terry’s suggestion of sticking to the blogs of happily married men strikes me a bit like suggesting consulting only white people on their view of “separate but equal.” Those who are not affected by a issue are very likely to have a very different view of it than those who are directly affected. The MRM is still a very long way from rioting in the streets and setting fire to large sections of cities while chanting “burn, baby, burn.” However, if things ever would start to burn I would expect many of the men whose lives have been devastated by the corrupt family courts and runaway feminism to act much like their former neighbors and say “hey, there is no problem, and even if there is one, it is all your fault.”
To the best of my knowledge, there has been no meeting of the “International Union of Men” at which any man here was elected to speak for all men. The best that any of them can tell you is what one man, himself, “wants.” Following this approach will get you nothing but a lot of conflicting personal opinions, little consensus, and add to the confusion.
It is a question which simply cannot be answered when posed in that way, any more than the question “What do women want?” be answered by any of the women here.
Rather than waste time on some generic and useless answer, unless a woman aspires to be the next Karen Owen, the only relevant answer boils down to what does
one man , the woman’s mate or potential mate, want. As a general idea, I think Badger Nation puts it best –
Pretty simple, actually. No man wants to have to listen to an endless litany of complaints about him and enumeration of all his “imperfections” coming from the one woman that he has bet on to spend his life with. Any relationship is like a balance scale – put all the good on one side, and all the not so good on the other, and if the good outweighs the bad then it is a good enough relationship.
Or, as an old saying of a group I used to do a lot of work with put it –
“A lot of women would make much better wives if they didn’t put all their time and energy into trying to make better husbands.”
When Ford motor company put out a product that no one really wanted, the Edsel, and it flopped in the marketplace, they did not follow the strategy of refusing to listen to concerns/criticisms of non-buyers and trying to attack and harass the non-buyers into buying one despite their concerns about the product. American auto companies nearly went bankrupt when they started to have some competition who actually listened to their potential customers and did something to address their quality concerns.
Generally, when men today express their concerns and criticisms of Western women the argument really isn’t whether or not “all women” really are “like that”, but the fact that women who really are “like that” are causing immense personal and cultural devastation. And, as always, the blame always falls on the man for “picking the wrong one” and not having the good judgment to choose one of the NAWALTs instead.
Imagine a car company who actively bristled at even the mere suggestion of any sort of warranty, who simply kept repeating the mantra “Well, NOT ALL our cars are ‘LIKE THAT’, you just have to find one that isn’t.” And, if the poor fool happened to get one of the bad ones, the courts would assign a large percentage of all his accumulated wealth and future wages to its upkeep and maintenance?
The decline of “chivalry” is simply one symptom of a social system which is becoming progressively more broken, and will continue to become more broken unless and until a large number of people become willing to admit that there are some systemic problems which individual men who are affected by them are unable to be likely to address all by themselves.
BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN
Why American men should boycott American women
http://boycottamericanwomen.blogspot.com/
I am an American man, and I have decided to boycott American women. In a nutshell, American women are the most likely to cheat on you, to divorce you, to get fat, to steal half of your money in the divorce courts, don’t know how to cook or clean, don’t want to have children, etc. Therefore, what intelligent man would want to get involved with American women?
American women are generally immature, selfish, extremely arrogant and self-centered, mentally unstable, irresponsible, and highly unchaste. The behavior of most American women is utterly disgusting, to say the least.
This blog is my attempt to explain why I feel American women are inferior to foreign women (non-American women), and why American men should boycott American women, and date/marry only foreign (non-American) women.
BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN!
IIRC, from A Night to Remember, there were a number of factors at play loading the boats. On one side of the ship the “women and children” first was so strictly enforced that, in effect, it was “women and children only.” The other side boarded a lot more men. But plenty of men, esp. upper class men, acknowledged fairly early on that there weren’t nearly enough life boats and decided they would do the chivalrous thing and die as gentlemen. Many of them went back to the social rooms and played cards or drank until the end. It is less clear what was going on in the bowels of the ship amongst the people who never made it above deck and to the lifeboats.
Obviously the ship was utterly unprepared for the disaster and no trial emergency runs were done. The evacuation of the ship was organized at the spur of the moment, and class was definitely a factor in how information about the sinking was spread and who had access to the lifeboats. I think it would be impossible for any contemporary person to accurately say what he or she would have done as many of the social and moral standards have changed utterly. From a pragmatic standpoint, families should have been kept together because, especially for the poor immigrant families, a dead father severely impacted the ability of the family as a whole to survive. And from a moral standpoint a man’s life was no less valuable than anyone else’s.
Rambo:
Thanks for posting that link—I’ve been boycotting the bitches for the last two years. What’s been needed is a forum like that. I’ll be sure to check it out in more detail!
In the 90’s my wife convinced me to take one of those stupid ocean cruises. Ours left Vancouver and went into Alaska.
The first thing we did was lifeboat drill. The men had to stand behind the line, while all women went to the front. There were old men with canes, who had to step back, and young, strong, healthy women who looked ready to run marathons who went to the front. After 30 years of feminism, this was a perfect example of the hypocrisy of the modern women, not one complained about the sexism involved.
Well, from a documentary I had watched from A and E, it does corroborate Dennis’ points. The crew where very disorganized and the ship hastily rushed into service. Captain E.J. Smith apparently had never been in a wreck so he wasn’t barking out orders and trying to maintain calm like I suppose a Captain should. Grerp is right class, was a factor when dealing with the passengers and apparently the chaos mixed with the unpreparedness of the crew increased the amount of needless casualties.
Apparently, the sea was dead calm that night and they could have overloaded the lifeboats if they say fit, but they didn’t want to test their luck.
The documentary is known as “Titanic, Death of a Dream.” Definitely worth looking into.
“What is it that men want from women?”
This question is a distraction. Funny how certain types of women always find a way to make men’s discussions all about THEM.
Snark,
I disagree. I think we should respond in kind to women who in good faith want to try to dig out from the mess society is in.
I never was too bothered about fairness in life.
This view came, I think, from my parents who sacrificed this and that stuff.
It seems to me to be about doing what you can, if not for the people whom you love or who you love, for your neighbour.
I have found that the main section of the population to take the piss out of this outlook are women.
So, against the habits ingrained over a lifetime, I demand fair treatment from women. No-one else, just women.
I doubt it is just me.
Women are the authors of their own downfall.
>>I disagree. I think we should respond in kind to women who in good faith want to try to dig out from the mess society is in.
Badger, there is a problem here. In theory I would agree with that statement. In practice, you are wasting your time. I have been at this for over 30 years, at some level or other, and at times very much a public activist. I was often asked by women what men wanted, etc., etc., etc.
Few women, including those asking on this board, really want to hear the truth. They want to hear “nice” and the truth is not nice.
They go to the MRA boards, and encounter large quantities of anger, which is pretty much where millions of men are today, and they go, “Oh, horrors, something is wrong with these guys. They are angry and bitter. They have no credibility.” And thus learn nothing about the inevitable result of modern feminism, as practiced by the vast majority of American women, even those who proclaim they are not feminists because they have no reference to compare themselves with.
There is no “nice” fix for our social and marital problems. Nice never has fixed problems as grave as we have today.
Nice didn’t stop King George. Nice didn’t free the slaves. Nice didn’t stop Hitler. Nice didn’t stop lynchings of black men. And, nice is not going to fix the breach between men and women today.
Yet, we have a lot of men who think they can be nice, and be effective in the Men’s movement, and we have women who think men MUST be nice if they want to accomplish anything.
In every case over nearly 30 years, when a woman has asked me what is needed to bring men back to marriage, I tell them, it’s better we don’t discuss it, whenever I do, the women get all angry.
And, it’s like a script. They insist they are “different” and just want to know. The minute I make it clear it is American Women who must change their behavior, they get all red in the face and start calling me ugly names. No more. With 45 years of vicious attacks directed at men, they imagine it is men who must change their behavior. I suppose maybe advance bending-over classes?
So, if you think you can get anywhere by being nice and explaining things to AW, be my guest. Heh, heh.
Make up your own mind.
http://notinfallible.weebly.com/1/post/2010/12/a-visual-acuity-test-for-you.html
So, it’s “eat, drink, and be merry, for in a few hours we will die.” Sweet.
This statement would be great raw meat for someone trained in interpretation of the Thematic Apperception Test – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_Apperception_Test
But, I like grerp, and think her heart is generally in the right place, so I won’t go all-out on what she just said. However, it is worth pointing out that a culture which gives men only the choice between being dead (and/or celibate) “gentlemen” or live rogues is going to have a hard time replacing all the “gentlemen” it ends up killing. Something needs to left on the table for men other than the opportunity to end up a noble corpse.
And, by all means, stay out of emergency rooms if you want to remain in your state of denial that there is any such thing as a “car wreck”, and they really don’t hurt that much anyway, and besides the guys who got hit “asked for it” anyway. And, if you do happen to wander into one by mistake, make sure you argue with and try to refute all the cries of pain, and critique every last one of them for not meeting your standards of eloquence – that will teach them!
Sincere SoCons really need to wake up and realize that their comfy little world is crumbling around them. The issue really is not “chivalry”, but simple civility. When men were “chivalrous”, women, in general, did not sleep with more than a dozen athletes and then make power-point presentations on their sexual prowess. There was a time when everyone, female as well as male, was expected to act according to civilized mores of the time, and if they didn’t they received social sanction.
The white knights who absolutely forbid the social sanction of women who act in socially destructive ways are as big a part of the problem as the women themselves. Those who tolerate, excuse, support, or any in other way enable socially destructive behavior are, to that extent, responsible for it.
There is a third group of men in addition to the white knights who fired guns at men to prevent them from being able to survive and the “gentlemen” who “do the chivalrous thing and die as gentlemen,” and that is the rapidly growing group of outliers and outlaws. These are the men who have watched Titanic after Titanic go down, and have seen the movie enough times to know that the ending is always the same – most women will survive, some children will, and few men. And, “nobly” riding at the back of the bus to their deaths simply does not have the appeal to them that letting them die has to the first-class passengers.
Apparently, being a “gentleman” is equivalent to holding the belief “I am a worm. I have no right to live.” Being a “gentleman” and having a sense of self-worth and a self-preservation instinct seem to be oddly mutually exclusive. So, these non-“gentleman”, having already been declared not worthy of living or enjoying the benefits of the culture like women, children, and first-class passengers do, are instead doing something pretty pragmatic – tearing up decking planks and smashing lounge furniture in order to lash together makeshift life rafts for themselves.
Those who want to see “chivalry” return probably need to give some thought to what sort of cultural values would allow men be “chivalrous” while living like “gentleman” rather than dying like them.
@ Anon age 68,
“Few women, including those asking on this board, really want to hear the truth. They want to hear “nice” and the truth is not nice.
They go to the MRA boards, and encounter large quantities of anger, which is pretty much where millions of men are today, and they go, “Oh, horrors, something is wrong with these guys. They are angry and bitter. They have no credibility.” And thus learn nothing about the inevitable result of modern feminism, as practiced by the vast majority of American women, even those who proclaim they are not feminists because they have no reference to compare themselves with.”
Thankyou. Yes.
Only, one quibble. You said:
“In every case over nearly 30 years, when a woman has asked me what is needed to bring men back to marriage, I tell them, it’s better we don’t discuss it, whenever I do, the women get all angry.”
I don’t discuss it for a different reason – I don’t have the goal of supporting a woman through life.
They can ask me what women can do to win my favour, and I say, “nothing.”
On the subject of marriage, I say, “no thanks.”
Somebody up there told us about her fear that men today see women as having no use apart from sexual objects.
Well, that’s not true.
I don’t even see that use. Quite frankly.
Nope.
Not even that.
But then, I don’t look at my fellow men and see a ‘use’ for them either.
So, women are now in the same situation. Equality is what they wanted, equality is what they get, equality is the last thing they want.
Too bad, I’m not your monkey. I don’t allow my life to be dictated by women’s caprices. I guess I’m just one of those big bad scary MRAs. You know, the kind of man who can’t be controlled by women showing flesh or crocodile tears.
Oh, please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think that the “chivalrous” behavior (and I should have put it in quotes the first time and almost did, but I think I use quotes too much in my writing and am trying to cut down) of the men who went passively to their deaths was romantic at all. It’s astounding to me that a man like John Jacob Astor just shuffled off when they told him it was women and children first (or only). From the point of view of his many workers, his life was far less disposable than his wife’s. It would have been far better had he protested and tried to interject a little more organization into the process, organization that would have included more men in the not full boats. But he didn’t and obviously it wasn’t because he was suicidal, but because he felt dying was somehow his part of the social contract.
This is why I can’t watch the movie Titanic. All these men behave courageously and sacrificially for reasons completely outside of self-interest, and Rose, the central character, the one we are supposed to sympathize with, spends the entire film moaning about how stifled she is and how she “can’t live in cage.” Instead she has to pose nude for indigent artists and cuckold her fiance with Jack in someone else’s car in the hold. And sass off to all and sundry. And then he dies and somehow how that is what catapults her to self-actualization. Barf, barf, barf.
Rest easy, grerp, I’m going after ideas here, not after you.
And, the central idea I keep hammering on is that the “social contract” only works when all participants are equally bound by it. Slaves and slave-owners were not equal participants in any sort of “social contract”, but were instead born into a caste system in which law was used to enforce special privileges for the member of one caste over another.
“Chivalry” is like so many words – such as “misogyny, oppression, patriarchy, and rayyyype” – whose original meanings have been “de-constructed” in the post-modern world to mean something entirely different than they used to mean.
Take the Liz Jones diatribe that Dalrock linked to. Does any of that have anything to do with “chivalry”? A rich bitch (who is a name-dropper and status-seeker on steroids) has her expensive car break down and because none of the workers on a nearby job site dropped everything they were doing, and whatever their employer was paying them to do, and rushed over to make her royal highness’s world “all better”, then all men are useless louts. Where was the chorus of female and mangina voices then with their claims of “NAMALT”? The silence was deafening.
This wasn’t someone’s wife or daughter who had a wheel fall off her horse drawn wagon and most men around would have the expertise to do something about it. No, this was an automobile which cost far more than any of those manual laborers were likely to be able to afford, which has to be hooked up to a computer to diagnose, and which none of those men could have done the slightest thing about. Liz’s real gripe is that she did not receive the supplication from those men that her royal female personage is entitled to.
But, the princess did not get her way, and all men everywhere must be punished by her tantrum.
This was the woman who whined for years about not being able to get a man to marry her, and when she finally did she used him as an object of ridicule in her daily columns for as long as the marriage lasted. Then, when she got tired of city life and decided to slum it a bit in the country, could not figure out why her new neighbors, who never asked her to move in and spoil their quiet little world in the first place, took such umbrage over replacing her ex-husband as the targets of her snarkiness and vitriol that they riddled her mailbox with bullets.
A bit dense, wouldn’t you say?
Back in the 1970s, I think it was Germaine Greer who suggested that women use what had been their traditional weapons – their tongues – against men. Thus was born the perverse profession of the “professional bitch.” Gone were the days when men were able to constrain women’s abuse of their particular form of power with things like the “scold’s bridle” or brank. To do so was “oppression.”
Thus did men and women enter into a collective dysfunctional marriage in which feminine-ism gave any and all women permission to bitch out any and all men, either individually or collectively. In times past, a woman was generally limited to being able to make the lives of only one man and a few children at a time completely miserable. Now, you have women like Liz Jones and Jessica Valenti who are “empowered” to make tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of men absolutely sick to death of listening to women. Not surprisingly, such men do not go out and seek to bring one into his own quiet little corner of the world.
I actually disagree with you about the suicide issue. I think it is an implicit part of the social contract for men to kill themselves, or any other man, if necessary to protect “wimminsandchilluns.” But, that is a holdover from the days when the majority of women were fundamentally decent people who were actually worth a bit of sacrifice for.
The fundamental shift which has occurred in the last half century is that women used to earn their privileged position through generally socially constructive behavior. But, what feminine-ism has done is demand that actually earning it be considered “oppression” and that any female is simply entitled to it as a result of being born with a vagina.
You see the results of several decades of this in men like snark. Suicide and self-sacrifice are not part of a social contract men will honor in a culture which allows women to get away with murdering their husbands in cold blood – shooting him in the back with a shotgun, and pulling the phone cord out of the wall so he cannot call for help and calmly watching him bleed to death. For some reason, I don’t think it makes any difference at all to Matthew Winkler that NAWALT – the one he married was, and she killed him, with the sanction and support of a whole lot of women who would probably claim to be “good” women (despite the fact that they are excusing murder) and a lot of white knights.
In effect, what we have is the continuing folly of Adam. Only today the rationalization serpent has been made into a warm and cuddly hamster. But, in either case a whole lot of men are taking what women are feeding them, and in the belief that women are just morally superior to men, swallowing it uncritically while they go along with evil.
The result of killing so many John Jacob Astors is that men who bought into the suicide clause for men under the social contract are being killed off – by suicide as one of the leading causes. And, the ones who smashed up furniture to build their own life rafts are – by definition of the very culture they were once part of – now totally outside the social contract and feel absolutely no obligation to give any woman a place in the survival mechanism that they had to build for themselves.
Will we ever see a return to civility? I don’t know. But, I do think that if we are ever going to do so that both white knights and so-called “good women” have to wake up to the fact that women are every bit as capable of evil as men are, and that they have to be restrained if civilization is to survive.
The cult of the inherently moral and more valuable woman needs to be destroyed.
“Few women, including those asking on this board, really want to hear the truth. They want to hear “nice” and the truth is not nice.
They go to the MRA boards, and encounter large quantities of anger, which is pretty much where millions of men are today, and they go, “Oh, horrors, something is wrong with these guys. They are angry and bitter. They have no credibility.” And thus learn nothing about the inevitable result of modern feminism, as practiced by the vast majority of American women, even those who proclaim they are not feminists because they have no reference to compare themselves with.
There is no “nice” fix for our social and marital problems. Nice never has fixed problems as grave as we have today.
Nice didn’t stop King George. Nice didn’t free the slaves. Nice didn’t stop Hitler. Nice didn’t stop lynchings of black men. And, nice is not going to fix the breach between men and women today.
Yet, we have a lot of men who think they can be nice, and be effective in the Men’s movement, and we have women who think men MUST be nice if they want to accomplish anything.”
Anon 68,
Do you mind if I make a post out of your above quote? I think this is spot on! Women will discredit anyone if they aren’t being ‘nice’. I get fingerwagged because as a “nice” christian girl, I shouldn’t have “mean men” on my blogroll. I did some posts awhile back about how being nice doesn’t mean much, its a smokescreen. What’s important is being good and while some in the MRM may come across as being “not nice”, I believe them to be entirely good.
Re: Titanic. This has been a personal interest of mine for many years. If you have questions I may have an answer. My favorite quote is this one from Jack Thayer (I blogged on it once):
“There was peace and the world had an even tenor to it’s way. Nothing was revealed in the morning the trend of which was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub it’s eyes and awake but woke it with a start keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.”
-Jack B. Thayer, Titanic Survivor
IOW, Titanic was the starting event that lead us to today. A world of less peace, satisfaction, and happiness, brought on by the death of chivalry, the rush for equality, and women getting uppity. 1912 was really when the feminist/suffragettes kicked it up a notch (my old articles are always around that period), from there you get the flappers and its all downhill. Titanic symbolizes the birth of the modern world and the birth of the modern women.
“And, by all means, stay out of emergency rooms if you want to remain in your state of denial that there is any such thing as a “car wreck”, and they really don’t hurt that much anyway, and besides the guys who got hit “asked for it” anyway. And, if you do happen to wander into one by mistake, make sure you argue with and try to refute all the cries of pain, and critique every last one of them for not meeting your standards of eloquence – that will teach them! ”
If this was directed at me, I am well aware that there are car wrecks. My point is that not every relationship is a disaster. There are happy and functional marriages out there.
Marriage is difficult and not for everyone. But it’s not an automatic Game Over either.
“Badger’s comment about the ‘whispers’ getting to a modern women who is not with a high-status male brings out an important point about what men want in a woman. If she is vulnerable to being influenced by the whispers, it means she cares more about the opinions of her girlfriends and/or social circle than about having a deep relationship with a man. No woman who is so motivated can possibly have the level of commitment needed for a marriage or LTR to survive. ‘Forsaking all others’ in order to ‘cleave only to him’ means exactly that, and so few women are willing to do that.”
So, so true. And so well put.
Most modern American women would throw their man under a bus to improve their social standing.
The idea that many women would remain loyal and true even through adversity is shown to be a lie by the divorce statistics.
I’ve seen quite a few comments on American women. As a 30 year old guy who has spent several years of his career in various places in Asia and traveled extensively in Latin America, let me make a few comments.
Going foreign in and of itself is not the answer. I currently live in Tokyo. I can tell you that the promiscuity is just as rampant here as in the States. The demure Japanese woman you see in the movies doesn’t exist anymore. Many want money, careers, and no strings attached sex. The divorce rate is going up tremendously here.
My Han Chinese friends tell me now that much of the same is happening there now. My experience of Han culture leads me to believe that Han women are much more traditional and possessive of their men than a Japanese or western woman but I am told that it is now difficult to find a virgin even there. Again the divorce rate is going up very fast. Also keep in mind the disparity between the number of men and women.
Eastern European women– and in particular Russians are a hot topic. I lived in a CIS country. Where I worked, every single Russian woman I knew, without exception, was engaged in casual sex and the married ones were cheating on their husband. The Russians were also interested in coming to the States and didn’t seem to have much interest in raising children. The Kazakh women I knew had zero interest in leaving their family, language, culture, etc, but tended to be very traditional. If you want that route, I hope you have a permanent job in the oil fields over there. From the many Romanians I’ve known, it was much the same as the Russians.
As for Latin America, it is true you will tend to find women a bit more traditional than the States. But keep in mind that this is the older generation– particularly in Mexico. The younger ones go to college, want a high-powered career, and to ‘have it all.’ Sex seems just as casual in Latin America as anywhere else.
For any man that hopes to land a foreign woman and doesn’t speak her language, he will have access only to that subset who speak English. If she speaks English well and doesn’t work at a western company or attend a private language school, ask yourself where she learned it so well. Usually the answer is a succession of western boyfriends.
When you begin to separate out good women from bad, what you tend to find is that race / culture doesn’t necessarily have a perfect correlation with good or bad. In general you might try to find common interest groups of people who share good values– this often means a church. Again, have your BS detector on high.
I found the answer in ethnic churches in the States. One very small Vietnamese Baptist Church had seven single women of marriageable age, and six of them were virgins. I’m going to marry one in particular. Check out the many Spanish-speaking, Han, Korean, and Viet churches if you live in a metropolitan area. Arab Christians tend to be rather conservative if they were raised overseas. Check out any Antiochian Orthodox church or Melkite / Maronite Catholic church.
Protestant churches tend to have an extreme amount of marriageable women relative to men. And Orthodox synagogues are good places too.
Traditional cultures are imploding all over the world. There is a great chance that good men may not find a good wife and also that good women may not find a good husband. Culture alone no longer determines values– you must seek out these people in common interest groups. And you must be very aggressive about searching nowadays. Be on it like a dog on a bone and don’t let go until you have what you want.
Laura Grace…given your interest in the Titanic, you might enjoy the novel “Maiden Voyage,” by Cynthia Bass. One protagonist is 12-year-old Sumner, who is named after the near-martyred abolitionist and dreams of becoming a hero like his namesake. The other is 21-year-old Ivy, a feminist who believes women should have neither special disabilities nor special privileges. When the rule “women and children first” is announced, each of them has a decision to make..
Will we ever see a return to civility? I don’t know. But, I do think that if we are ever going to do so that both white knights and so-called “good women” have to wake up to the fact that women are every bit as capable of evil as men are, and that they have to be restrained if civilization is to survive.
From the evidence of the past 45 years, and especially the last twenty or so, I think it’s clear now that women are intrinsically not more moral than men and, given the fact that they’ve fewer restrictions on behavior and seventeen kinds of moral and social buck-passing built into the system currently, they are far more dangerous to society. Actually, considering that they choose whose genes get passed and raise those genes to maturity and too many are failing terribly at fulfilling this role in any kind of responsible manner, we really can’t overestimate how pernicious an influence women can have.
But, of course, hardly anyone is saying that, and those that do are considered crackpots, bitter rejects, or gender traitors. It’s such a harsh and unpalatable truth that no one wants to believe or swallow it. Everyone wants to think that the Amber Portwoods of the world are aberrations instead of, increasingly, representative. How many people know someone just like Amber Portwood? I know I do.
seventeen kinds of moral and social buck-passing built into the system currently
Sorry, that should be *legal* and social buck-passing.
It’s always good to remember that the orginal “white knight” is Lancelot. Maybe chivalry was just medieval Game. If so, the rules have changed.
“Traditional cultures are imploding all over the world.”
We’re getting to the point in history where the idea of “traditional” is becoming something closer to “archaic.” Old-time ideas fit less and less into today’s society (like chivalry as benevolent sexism). As Athol said, the way forward is not back – we’re going to have to figure out a way to make pair-bonding work in the 21st century, or resign ourselves to the historical dustbin due to social chaos and let China run the world show.
“It’s such a harsh and unpalatable truth that no one wants to believe or swallow it.”
The subtext of any story about teen sex, sexting, etc always carries the old “the boy made her do it” rationalization. Nobody wants to believe girls seek sex, and it’s hidden behind the ASD so there’s another level of indirection. Least of all the parents of a kid doing these things, they just can’t believe “our little girl” would do such a thing.
Terry’s suggestion of sticking to the blogs of happily married men strikes me a bit like suggesting consulting only white people on their view of “separate but equal.” Those who are not affected by a issue are very likely to have a very different view of it than those who are directly affected.
Not necessarily true. It is possible to have experienced some of the pitfalls of modern relationships and the corresponding complications of the “family court” system and still have some of your hope in relationships intact.
Elusive Wapiti writes some hard-hitting stuff, has been through the family court drama, and is happily married. My own husband would be another happily married man whose gone through some of the legal wranglings of family court.
My advice to hearthrose was based on a couple of things: 1) as Christians, we are interested in what we can do to solve this problem that is just as prevalent in the church as it is outside of it. To do that, it helps to gather information from people and sources not tainted by feminist ideology. The MRA blogs are good for that, but 2) the language on some of the sites definitely makes many women uncomfortable.
My suggestion to read MRA blogs by married men helps solve that problem. Besides, as Christians, we believe that good conquers evil at some point, and that marrriage is good when done right. We can approach this subject from an optimistic perspective without deluding ourselves about how bad things really are.
@Zed
Now, 40+ years on, even happily married men like Dalrock and a few female bloggers are finally getting around to conceding that “there is a problem.” For those of us who have been trying to point out that there was, indeed, not only a “problem”, but that the trend was toward it getting worse, not better, and met nothing but the stone wall of denial, this is a bit like having the neighbors finally admit that, maybe, your house really was on fire when you told them it was. Now that it has spread from a grease fire in the kitchen to the point where the whole house is in flames, wringing of hands and dithering “oh my, what to do, what to do?” doesn’t impress the people who have been affected very much.
I get your frustration, but if you want change new converts would seem to be what is needed. I’m not sure I’m exactly a new convert, but if I were I would think you would want more like me.
Generally, when men today express their concerns and criticisms of Western women the argument really isn’t whether or not “all women” really are “like that”, but the fact that women who really are “like that” are causing immense personal and cultural devastation. And, as always, the blame always falls on the man for “picking the wrong one” and not having the good judgment to choose one of the NAWALTs instead.
On first reading I had the impression you had me and/or other married bloggers in mind with this comment, but reading it again I see that you are likely talking about the culture at large. I agree that the culture does blame men when the rigged game doesn’t come out in his favor. But I don’t see married bloggers in the manosphere telling men it is their fault if they didn’t pick well, with the exception of Laura Wood.
@Anon 68
In the 90′s my wife convinced me to take one of those stupid ocean cruises. Ours left Vancouver and went into Alaska.
The first thing we did was lifeboat drill. The men had to stand behind the line, while all women went to the front. There were old men with canes, who had to step back, and young, strong, healthy women who looked ready to run marathons who went to the front. After 30 years of feminism, this was a perfect example of the hypocrisy of the modern women, not one complained about the sexism involved.
This kind of idiocy will get a lot of people killed one day. The right answer is to have enough lifeboats, and get people onboard as quickly and calmly as possible. Too afraid to get on the lifeboat? No problem, kindly step aside while those willing to get on take your seat. Watch that fussiness disappear in a hurry if others don’t have to wait behind you. Also, separating families creates hundreds of impromptu farewell moments at the worst possible time. Trying to put the least fit on first also doesn’t make sense, because the fit ones are the first to make it to the loading area. Where do you put them while they wait for the unfit to finally show up? How do the unfit ones make their way through the mobs of the fit? Do you have to wait for every last unfit person to board a lifeboat before the fit ones can board? None of it makes any sense.
I would bet money that if a cruise ship ever tries this kind of nonsense in a real emergency they will be sued out of existence.
@Laura Grace Robins
This has been a personal interest of mine for many years. If you have questions I may have an answer.
Excellent. Do you have any comments on the assertions above that the real reason they underloaded the life boats wasn’t because the women and children were afraid to board, but because the crew was afraid the boats couldn’t really handle stated capacity? Also, were the men held back at gunpoint, or did they generally willingly agree to allow the women and children to go first?
@grerp
Oh, please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think that the “chivalrous” behavior (and I should have put it in quotes the first time and almost did, but I think I use quotes too much in my writing and am trying to cut down) of the men who went passively to their deaths was romantic at all. It’s astounding to me that a man like John Jacob Astor just shuffled off when they told him it was women and children first (or only). From the point of view of his many workers, his life was far less disposable than his wife’s. It would have been far better had he protested and tried to interject a little more organization into the process, organization that would have included more men in the not full boats. But he didn’t and obviously it wasn’t because he was suicidal, but because he felt dying was somehow his part of the social contract.
I think it all depends on the reason behind the decision. Deciding to sacrifice oneself for the group in extreme circumstances can be a manly virtue. I think the key factors are that 1) There was a real need for such a sacrifice. 2) The decision was freely made, not out of a sense of obligation. 3) The reasoning behind the decision wasn’t that the man’s life was less valuable than the others, but that he saw what needed to be done and did it.
The soldier or marine who jumps on a grenade to save his peers comes to mind here. It isn’t a calculation of his life being worth less than his friends, but one of them dying vs all of them dying. I suspect many of the men on the Titanic realized that over a thousand people were going to die that night and made the calculation that their rushing to the life boats would only make that worse. An older man willingly offering the chance of life to a younger man or woman is a noble gift in that context.
The problem comes when such acts generate an expectation of obligation. Snark included two great links in his comment above which showed how the suffragettes spun the profound acts of selflessness by so many men on the Titanic. Not wanting to acknowledge it, they twisted it to say that the men were worth less and therefore had an obligation to die.
“Possible”, but neither inevitable nor mandatory.
There are a half-dozen pitfalls which plague these discussions that almost inevitably end up with a lot of straw men being slain.
As a black woman, I think you are probably aware of the Moynihan Report which came out 45 years ago and predicted exactly the sort of breakdown of the black family as a result of the “Great Society” policies which we have seen since then. People were warned, and went ahead and did it anyway. Moynihan himself was crucified by the “professional negroes” of the day for “blaming the victim”, and the black family went from weak, but still viable, to smoking ruins.
Optimism can be misplaced, and actually quite destructive, if the root causes are never acknowledged or addressed. “Let’s pretend everything is OK” does not solve problems.
Conversely to your statement above, it is also possible to mostly escape the carnage of family courts, personally, yet still witness enough of it to know how Kafka-esque it has become. Having never been married, I have only experienced the carnage as a spectator, and that has been more than enough to scare the beejeebers out of me. I watched the literal “girl next door” – a woman I grew up living next to – turn on the friend of mine that she married (probably the straightest arrow man I have ever met) and tried to take not just half, but everything.
Pointing out that problems exist is NOT saying that there are “no good women out there”, or that “there is no hope for good relationships”, but that is what the deniers always try to twist it into. It is just saying that there are some serious problems which no one seems willing to acknowledge or address, and which just keep getting worse as a result.
The reason for the stridency you see in men today is the result of years of apparent denial while the problems just kept getting worse and worse. In many respects, I’m in the same position that Moynihan was – he wasn’t black, but was concerned about the black family. I don’t have any kids, but I think that the kids of the people who do have them are heading into a world with some horrible systemic problems that their own parents seem unwilling to acknowledge and address because the people who are pointing out the problems aren’t doing so “nicely” enough.
Well, excuse us if the 20th time that we shout “YOUR DAMN HOUSE IS ON FIRE” because you didn’t want to hear us the first 19 times, we sound a bit agitated about the whole thing.
Things may have settled down a bit. I think the fall in marriage rates probably indicates that marginal marriages which might have taken place when there was still a lot of social pressure to marry simply aren’t happening now. But, as a Boomer, divorce has left a lot more carnage to my generation than even the Vietnam war did. One of my classmates did some research on my HS graduating class for her degree in social work. At the 30 year mark, 12% of that class was still married to their first spouse. The general breakdown was that a full 40% of us never married at all. And, of the 60% who did marry, the divorce rate for first marriages was 80%. And, at least two of that 12% which had managed to last had to make it through very public episodes of infidelity. At least two of my female classmates had to decide that it was better to have a husband than a hissy fit.
I get a kick out of all the Boomer-bashing on places like grerp’s blog, both remembering our own arrogance as youth, and being fairly confident that the gen-xers and beyond will get their turn in the box-o-blame soon enough.
My HS girlfriend died of ovarian cancer in her mid-40s while still married. Other than her, not one woman I have dated in my entire life is still married to a first husband. That is stacking the deck in a couple of ways. First, my dating pool already had a fairly large percentage of divorced women in it before I was out of my 20s. The majority of women that I have dated over the years had been married at least once before I met them. Second, the demographics of my HS class have followed me around – a surprisingly large percentage of women in my age and social circles have never married, including one real surprise – a nice Catholic girl that I dated back in the late 1960s. And by “dated” I mean what “dating” meant in the 1960s – I went to her house, talked to her parents, picked her up, we went and did something like see a movie, and I had her home by the time her father told me to. I ran into her a couple of years ago at our 40th reunion. Not only has she never married or had kids, out of a total of 8 children in her family only one of them ever married or had kids. That’s 7 out of 8 nice Catholic kids whose lives were significantly unlike what most people would expect.
Now, it’s your kids, and Dalrock’s, who are going to have to navigate this minefield that modern relationships have become. And, if you care so little about the problems that they will face that how those problems are described to you is more important to you than what is actually being said – well, they are your kids who will have to produce any grandkids you might like to have.
I don’t have a dog in this fight any longer, but I will be damned if I am willing to let it all swirl down the toilet bowl without giving my best shot at doing something about it.
And, as Anonymous age 68 says above – “nice” is not gonna get the job done. Forty years of “nice” has left far more of a mess than we started with, and 40 more years of it is probably going to leave families so decimated that they may never recover.
A Grerp wouldn’t shame you into marriage.
But a Laura Wood.
“Excellent. Do you have any comments on the assertions above that the real reason they underloaded the life boats wasn’t because the women and children were afraid to board, but because the crew was afraid the boats couldn’t really handle stated capacity? Also, were the men held back at gunpoint, or did they generally willingly agree to allow the women and children to go first?”
My understanding has been that lifeboats were not fully loaded for the main reason that everyone continued to believe the ship was “unsinkable”. This was so drilled into them, that I believe there are even quotes from survivors who said they still did not think Titanic would sink until it broke in two. Being a very cold night and coupled with the strong belief that Titanic would not sink, it was hard to convince men or women to leave the warmth of the ship for the freezing waters. I seem to recall also that those who were found in the coming days floating around, was relatively a small number in comparison to how many were lost. Hence, many were so certain the ship would not sink that they even refused to put on life vests.
I don’t doubt that women were afraid to get into boats because they would leave the warmth and comfort of ship and husband. Plus, husbands and the like probably reassured the women, “This is Titanic, she is unsinkable, stay here”. The crew should have known that the boats could handle the weight of up to 70 adult men (I believe that was the number), as they were fully tested beforehand. But, again, if you continue to think the ship is unsinkable, why even bother getting in them? It just seemed like it would create more fear and panic than anything. I think some of the crew even believed the boats were just being lowered for a “safety precaution”. Only Captain’s Smith inner circle knew that it would truly sink. Smith did not want to cause a panic amongst the crewmembers, because if the passengers saw the crew panic, passengers would panic. I will add that CHAOS and miscommunication play a huge role as well. Part though of what caused such chaos was the complacency and/or arrogant belief that “the hand of God could not sink that ship”. Humans at the time were making great technological advances and felt on top of the world. They thought they were invincible.
I don’t recall any stories about men being held back at gunpoint to let the women go first; however, anything is possible in the chaos of it all. Amongst the chaos, there was no real plan of how the lifeboats were to be filled. Protocol of the day did call for women and children first, but that was based largely if given crewmember cared to enforce that. Stories are that on one side of the ship, men could board if no women or children were around. The other side of the ship, men could not board, even if there were no women or children around, so therefore a lot of boats were lowered mostly empty (so, on one side of ship maybe you had more of an MRA type and the other, more of a whitenight type). I believe guns were fired in general to try to calm people down or get attention so that the crew could give directions. A survivor could have easily inferred several scenarios by gunshots and guns being waved around. One of the more popular ones being, the reported alleged suicides of an officer(s). So, a story about men being held back by gunpoint who did not let women go first, is very possible, but it also does not make it true.
It’s also kind of interesting that “chivalry” and even the “with great power comes the responsibility to do SOMETHING” has apparently been completely forgotten by women, at least until she want a given man to do something for HER.
Like Edward Cullen the heart-throb of tens of thousands of degenerate women. As a super-powerful, one-hundred year old vampire, he occupies his time going to high-school and listening to every brain-fart of Mary Sue… I mean Bella.
With great power comes the responsibility to do absolutely nothing unless Soccer Mom.. I mean Bella, is in danger. Or himself. Other than that, some people gonna die, right?
And you can’t excuse this with his need to “keep vampires secret”. Edward Cullen wonderfully illustrates his absolute selfishness when, since he can’t have some High school chick, I mean Bella, he decides to kill himself. By stripping naked… !?Is he even a guy?! and revealing his glowing skin to thousands and thousands of people at once.
Clearly, Edward cares little about the “vampire code”. So, what’s stopping him from doing… well something. Just something. Can’t he at least be bad? *bleep* he isn’t even a bad guy. He is too busy moaning about Bella and going to high school for the 80th year in a row to actually do something bad!
He can read people’s minds. How difficult could it be to benefit some causes/people/things he likes?
And how much easier would it be to do something bad with that? He is just such a total loser, it gets me mad thinking about it. *BLEEP*
Doesn’t this so wonderful guy care about SOMETHING besides the brain-farts of Bella, I meant Soccer Mom? He just sits there. This is admirable?
Soccer Mom and High School Girl apparently LOVE that.
@ zed:
Yes, I am quite familiar with the Moynihan report and grew up with a front row seat to the family dysfunction he foreshadowed in the black community. It was the disaster that matriarchy has produced in the black community that first caused me to “see” where disenfranchised men and feminist principles cause a society to end up.
Marriage rates are dismal in the black community and the divorce rate is awful as well. That said, I do know several black couples (including my husband and me) who have been married more than a decade to the only spouse we’ve ever had. The common denominator? A serious commitment to religious faith. There is a place for devout people at the table when these issues are being discussed, which brings me to this part of your comment:
And, if you care so little about the problems that they will face that how those problems are described to you is more important to you than what is actually being said …
I was simply answering a concern a Christian sister expressed about her discomfort with the way some of the anger is expressed in the manosphere. I don’t begrudge men the right to “raise their voices” in response to the injustice that has been inflicted on them. Not one bit.
It is probably impossible to historically prove that gunshots were indeed fired although there was survivor testimony to this effect. It was clear that the officers did not know that the lifeboats could be loaded to full capacity and consequently were underfilled. In addition, as Titanic foundered its list prevented some of the boats from being filled and lowered away. Some of the collapsible boats could only be floated off the deck of which some were upside down. Titanic exceeded the number of lifeboats that was legally required by maritime regulations but obviously lacked enough space for all passengers and crew. Most of the victims died from hypothermia and drifted away with the current. Only a relative handful were recovered when ships were dispatched from Nova Scotia looking for bodies. It is also a myth that the White Star Line, the managing company of Titanic (owned by the American J.P. Morgan) advertised that not even God could sink the Titanic. The sinking represents an early Twentieth Century example of technological hubris and helped mark the end of the certainties of the Edwardian Age and the beginning of the age of uncertainties. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Great War began slightly more than two years after Titanic’s sinking. The same air of technological complacency helped set the stage for the later Challenger disaster.
“As a black woman, I think you are probably aware of the Moynihan Report . . . ”
Funny Zed, I didn’t have you pegged as a black woman.
grerp, you are quite correct about Rose in “Titanic”. Her character is the apotheosis of feminist entitlement.
On the matter of women’ s moral status compared with men’s, it seems that Americans, despite their huge religiosity, don’t read some parts of the Bible. It is quite clear from the New Testament that women are not morally superior to men. Rather the reverse. What we have seen in the last fifty years is what women are capable of, simply given the chance.
“A rich bitch (who is a name-dropper and status-seeker on steroids) has her expensive car break down and because none of the workers on a nearby job site dropped everything they were doing, and whatever their employer was paying them to do, and rushed over to make her royal highness’s world “all better”, then all men are useless louts. Where was the chorus of female and mangina voices then with their claims of “NAMALT”? The silence was deafening.”
I should point out that her article appeared in the Daily Mail and the majority of the commenters plainly told her to f*ck off.
“IOW, Titanic was the starting event that lead us to today. A world of less peace, satisfaction, and happiness, brought on by the death of chivalry, the rush for equality, and women getting uppity. 1912 was really when the feminist/suffragettes kicked it up a notch (my old articles are always around that period), from there you get the flappers and its all downhill. Titanic symbolizes the birth of the modern world and the birth of the modern women.”
It may symbolize, but I think the real trigger event was World War I, which had long-reaching impact on demographics, politics, religion and the social order.
Part of the “code” was what we recognize today as civility, but that’s not what girls want when they bitch about chivalry today. Girls want the presumption of deference to their whims, the sucking up, the expectation of material transfer of a bygone era. It’s a form of what I’ve dubbed “obligation masculinity” and Marc Rudov calls “benevolent sexism.”
I can wax philosophic about chivalry, but my first reaction is always visceral – I’ll be damned if some girl is going to tell me I owe her something because she has a vagina. If you’re not my mother, sister, wife or daughter, I don’t owe you jack sh**.
But narcissistic cynicism isn’t the only motivation. Some of it may be well-intentioned – there have to be women out there who are disgusted at how they and their gender respond to the most venal assholes. And there’s the ever-present phenomenon of women spouting what they think they want (which their actions and reactions show isn’t really what they want). And there’s the fraction of women who HAVE responded to guys who do this behavior and thus think it was the behavior that turned them on – but that only holds if the guy starts with high value; a low-value guy pulling chivalry moves is a sap.
One of the wordpress automatic links:
http://homeschoolinghighschool.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/modern-chivalry/
has a deeply disturbed, in my opinion, take on the issue:
We now live in a society where a girl can walk outside, in the pouring rain, without a coat or umbrella and is no one offers their own coat or umbrella. Oh but surely that wouldn’t happen! Yes it would. Well, surely the homeschool movement is producing young men that would offer a hand! The instance I’m referring to happened at a homeschool event. We need to resurrect chivalry as a widespread perceived ideal, (it will always be an actual one) because when chivalry dies, manhood dies. And I think we’ve all seen that.
“Manhood dies” unless men are expected to give up their well-being for others? If you’re ill or infirm I can help but no one is entitled to my coat or umbrella because she has a vagina. This is the 21st century – I planned for the rain, you didn’t; get a coat before you leave the house. This is also a classic example of trying to solve the wrong problem. Teach your homeschool daughter to be prepared instead of teaching her that it’s a man’s job to cover for her incompetence.
On chivalry itself, I think a lot of people talking about “chivalry” today have a very dim view of what it actually was. As I understand it, back in the day knights were by far the best fighters in society and could if they so choose be terrifying highwaymen.
So chivalry was the purest form of a social bargain – “come under the aegis of higher leadership (i.e. church and crownn) and in exchange you can come to our parties and seduce our ladies in waiting.” This subsumed a major threat to royal/church hegemony, in much the same way the modern American military is sworn to uphold the Constitution and obey the president instead of being for-hire guerillas. Putting a woman on a pedestal is a turn-on if you are high value – as women say, they want a guy _with options_ to choose them.
I would bet it also served as a shibboleth, a social marker for those of noble breeding, in the same way you can tell a seasoned officer today by how he stands straight and salutes.
Interesting piece on chivalry by C S Lewis. Following the medieval model, Lewis specifies that the chivalrous man must be “fierce” as well as “meek.”
If the argument is made that women are a weaker gender morally, then that implies men must respond with domination of women as a whole in order to save the civilization from collasping. But once you have that situation, it seems to demand men also behave with chivalry towards women as the weaker sex, or women will be abused by the men. Plus it’s this endless chivalric bailing out of women that creates the moral hazard that allows women to behave with moral impunity in the first place. It all seems circular.
In the end, medieval chivalry just seems to be a kind of Game for knights to get into the vagina’s of married women. Lancelot being the orginial model and we all know what he did to the woman he was sworn to protect (and supposedly his best friends wife).
A “Women and Children first” lifeboat drill on a cruise ship is probably a meaningless exercise anyway. People will stampede for the lifeboats in an actual emergency and without husbands and fathers throwing a few elbows and shoving people back a bit, their wife and children could easily be just trampled underfoot.
It’s all quite simple. “GET TO THE CHOPPA!” Save your family first, then worry about society as a whole.
Thanks for the clarification, Terry. It’s always extremely difficult to handle new people who join a war in progress but don’t know the history of it or the issues, which can be quite subtle and complex. There are a lot of divisions along ideological lines which are poorly understood, and it is quite easy for sincere comments to be misinterpreted.
Lots of us have had front row seats to the massive family breakdown of the past 50 years. The pity is that there are a whole lot of people who see it as a good thing rather than a bad thing. And there are a lot of other people who have had a significant role in contributing to it that they don’t realize they have had. Convincing such people that they are part of the problem rather than part of the solution is always an uncomfortable process. Ones who bolt at the first sign of discomfort never get convinced, and remain part of the problem.
One of the worst pitfalls which destroys many discussions is when they begin to resemble arguments between a person in Seattle and a person in Tucson Arizona over whether or not it is “raining.” If the one in Tucson responds to something the other has said with “Well, it’s not raining here” and seems to imply the belief that if it isn’t raining where he/she is then it can’t be raining anywhere, effective communication has just run headlong into a brick wall. It can be bone dry in Tucson and people can still be dying in floods and mudslides in northern California. The ones waist deep in water and mud are going to find Tucson weather reports little other than annoying and conclude that the person is so clueless that they will never be of any help with the problems anyway, so it is pointless wasting any more time with them.
Once again, BN has captured the essence of the issue in one succinct statement. The thinking which underlies the statement he is reacting to represents a huge social undercurrent and a lot of beliefs and attitudes which are regarded from the outside as an unbearably arrogant attitude of entitlement to privilege.
It does, indeed, seem that “manhood” as it is currently defined means having so little self respect and self-worth that the “man” considers himself the lowest possible form of life whose needs come only after the needs of anyone and everyone else, if at all. Two terms which come to mind to describe such a being are not “man” but rather “slave” and “robot.”
Related to the subject of chivalry is the use of the term “RealMan(tm).” This is probably one of the worst abuses of social power in use today. It generally takes a form similar to “I’m hungry. A RealMan(tm) would cut off his arm so he could feed it to me and make the inconvenience of being hungry go away.”
Um, no, that would be a “RealIdiot(tm)” not a “RealMan(tm).”
Implicit in the example BN shows above is what I call the “Responsibility Transfer.” The girl’s failure to plan ahead for some reason becomes the boy’s problem. This is a very common principle we see in action, and it is similar to what BN also pointed out about a girl sexting a boy always carrying the old “the boy made her do it” rationalization, because “nobody wants to believe girls seek sex.” (a very large topic by itself)
Does it really serve girls and women to expect them to be too stupid to plan ahead and require that some man or boy always rescue them if they get into problems because of it?
And, does it really serve our culture to go along with a definition of “masculinity” which obligates any male to give away personal resources to random strangers? What if his own family needs those resources?
It is this construction of men and boys having no worth at all, and the entitlement of any creature born with a vagina to have blank check to draw on his resources even if the need is due to her own lack of planning, that the manosphere is up in arms about.
And, the fundamental disconnect between the manosphere and the SoCons is that if that is the definition of “masculinity” that they are trying to shove down men’s throats, then there are a lot of men who are going to come up with their own definition of what a “RealMan(tm)” is, and tell those of you who regard us as nothing more than junk cars to strip of whatever parts you might find useful to you, to go pound sand.
It was clear that the panicked “person” that launched Lifeboat 6 with only 23 people on board, even though it was rated for 65, was in a state of blind panic. Spare me your absurd excuses for obvious cowardice and panic. Yes, yes, I am aware the “person” and his backers have their excuses, and they will never, ever admit differently. Who cares?
It’s also clear that the passengers, had they been braver and less obedient, should have tossed said “person” over the edge, saving many peoples lives.
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Link is here:
It’s amazing to me that anyone ever thought Titanic had a happy ending because Rose survived and went on to have a “full and rich” life. Jack saves her three times in this short clip alone. She can’t even get the energy together just to hang on after he gets her on the floating door. He has to give her a pep talk and tell her how happy he is to have won his Titanic passage because it meant meeting her (and, coincidentally, dying). There’s an interesting bit in the middle showing the people in the lifeboats (mostly women) choosing not to go back.
What Rose has to offer in terms of outlook and ability can’t compare in any way to what Jack does. She is supposed to be a strong and modern woman and worth his sacrifice, but, really, he’s the one who should have been on the floating door. She is just an idle, dissatisfied mooch.
To clarify, I am not of the opinion that nothing is wrong, however when extremely coarse language and anger-at-all-women is being thrown around, I feel unwelcome in that space. When unwelcome, I leave. Is this odd? I thought it was me being respectful… ???
I *do* live in Tucson. Birds of a feather flock together, and my friends and I (the real friends, not the people-you-know-on-the-net) are all happily married, and we talk about our hobbies and our kids and occasionally compare notes about what our husbands like and shake our head at the modern world and make tsking noises.
My apologies if my presence or my question upset anyone.
Hearthrose:
To clarify, I am not of the opinion that nothing is wrong, however when extremely coarse language and anger-at-all-women is being thrown around, I feel unwelcome in that space. When unwelcome, I leave. Is this odd? I thought it was me being respectful… ???
I can understand all of the above. It could be that you do not really understand the depth of the anger that you are encountering, nor how long it has been going on. On a site such as “Spearhead” it might be most useful to you to read the articles and leave the comments alone, because even when such comments are moderated, there is always a tendency for the most strident voice to become a dominant theme.
Part of the reason, I suspect, for some of the “anger at all women” in some web site comment boxes is the simple fact that feminist web sites, such as Feministing, basically ban all comments from men save those that are 100% supportive of feminism. Thus it is impossible to critique the feminists in their own little playhouses, so some choose to “double down” on the criticism, both in intensity and in anger, at sites where it is possible to do so.
Another reason is simply that there are now men in their 20’s who grew up in feminist-dominated homes, often presided over by single mothers, who slogged through feminist-dominated schools, who see men derided and attacked in every way on the main stream media — and when they find a site such as Spearhead, or this one, or Mala Fide, etc. they have 20+ years of anger suddenly rising up within them. I don’t know if you have ever had the experience of a decade’s worth of anger just welling up within you, I can assure you it is an intense experience. It can leave one speechless for a while, too full of adrenaline to even speak.
So I would ask you to continue to read this site if you can, because Dalrock runs a fairly polite place, and it’s rather calm her compared to some other places. You might also look at Grerps site. I’ll also suggest that you try not to take anything written here or in other comments at other sites personally. All too often, I am sad to say, I see men who vent their anger at any and every person who seems even remotely “targetable”. It’s not the actual person, it’s what they represent.
Finally, the rather impersonal nature of these comment boxes makes it all too easy for people to write things they would never say to someone else to their face. It’s not at all unique to this venue, I see it in music weblogs, model railroad, etc. you name it. People just let their ego’s get the best of them. It’s the human condition.
Grerp, with all due respect, I refuse to view even a moment of video from that movie. It’s just rotten to the core. I saw “A Night To Remember” years ago as a child on television when no adults were around, and it made such an intense impression on me. Turns out that it was taken from a book written by an author who sought out Titanic survivors in order to record their experiences. It is still the definitive book on the disaster in my opinion.
The 1990’s movie just spits on the graves of all concerned.
@Hearthrose:
I want to add a bit to Mister_Y ‘s excellent answer above, because I believe that you are sincere and genuinely a bit puzzled.
First, you have to understand that this “war” has been raging for more than 40 years, and there are lots of casualties. In 1960, about 60% of all black women were married, and even higher percentages of black men and whites of both sexes. Today the percentage for black women has dropped by more than half, and rates for the other 3 demographic groups have also dropped significantly. In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. 45 years later the rate for black babies is close to 70%, despite the fact that almost 60% of all black babies are aborted, and about 40% for the population as a whole.
The US has the highest percentage of its population in prison of any country in the world. Almost 1 out of ever 3 black men has a prison record, many of them due to the senseless “war on drugs.” Around 80% of all prison inmates come from single-mother homes.
In the past 3 years, 2 boys that I watched grow up from babies have been shot to death.
Despite huge amounts of evidence that the social policies of the past 4 decades have been a dismal failure, the government does nothing except expand and increase the intensity of those policies.
Because so many of those policies have to do with “empowerment” of women, any man who dared criticize them has generally been viciously attacked, by both women and manginas. Warren Farrell, the uber “male feminist”, 3 times elected to the board of the National Organization of Women (the only man ever to be elected, a factoid that no bit of self-promotion he ever puts out, no matter how brief, fails to mention) even admits in the preface to “Myth of Male Power” that “When women criticized men, I called it “empowerment”, when men criticized women, I called it “backlashing.” A recent comment here on Dalrock’s blog from some ostensibly “Christian” counselor said something to the effect “When dealing with problems between a man and a woman, I always start from the assumption that the man is completely to blame.”
Double standard to the max – women right, men wrong, women good, men bad.
And, for years and years and years, any time a man would dare say anything to imply that women were not always perfect, and the man always completely to blame, he would be attacked by hordes of women and manginas, never addressing what he said but instead using personal attacks on the man himself as a way to get him off topic and on the defensive. The attacks were all so predictable and stereotypical that one guy even cataloged them as “The Catalog of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics.” http://exposingfeminism.wordpress.com/shaming-tactics/ It was like arguing with Chatty Cathy dolls, and the intent was clearly not to understand anything the man was saying, but just to find a way to make him shut up.
Now, let me tell you about my buddy Doc. Everyone called him that because he was an orthopedic surgeon. He is the guy I mentioned above that was the straightest arrow man I have ever met in my life. Compared to Doc, your average Morman man is a lecherous libertine satyr.
Doc did everything strictly by the “traditional” book. He went to college and medical school back in the 1960s, got out and established a very successful practice as a single man. Doc was probably one of those “40 year old virgins” that have become so popular to ridicule these days. Did I mention how straight-arrow he was?
So, anyway, once Doc had established himself in his career, and was in the position to be a “good provider” (what men needed instead of “Game” 40-50 years ago in order to attract a wife) he began looking around for a wife to “settle down” with. My sister introduced him to Betty, who was my next door neighbor when she and I were in HS. A very “traditional” courtship followed, then a “traditional” wedding, followed in a year or so by the “traditional” baby.
In order to be able to cut back on work and spend more time with his family, Doc merged his practice with another so he would only be on call one week out of 4 instead of basically all the time. They only had one child because Betty was a juvenile diabetic who typically tried to deny her condition and did not take care of herself and arrived at the cusp of middle age with numerous serious health problems. At one point, she spent more than 2 years making multiple visits per week to a wound treatment specialist for a sore on her foot that would not heal – paid for out of Doc’s comfortable income, of course. It eventually healed and she avoid having to have her foot amputated like happened to Ella Fitzgerald and Waylon Jennings.
Their one child lacked for nothing – not music lessons, nor dance lessons, nor summer camps in Europe, nor anything else her only-child’s heart and mom’s ambitions desired. Due to her “delicate” condition, Betty always had household help. Her role as wife pretty much boiled down to playing hostess at the parties she loved to plan and hold.
Eventually, the self-neglect of her younger years caught up with her and both kidneys failed and she had to go on dialysis. Doc used his contacts in the medical field to get her on the short list for a kidney transplant at John’s Hopkins. In preparation for the transplant and her convalescence, he sold out his share of the medical practice to his partners and basically retired. For the next 2-3 years he was her nursemaid, caretaker, companion, and whatever else she needed. She improved slowly, but steadily.
She began to have some odd symptoms, but nothing that seemed terribly worrisome. They went back out to John’s Hopkins anyway, and discovered that she was rejecting the kidneys. For some reason (a minor detail in the story that I never knew), they had made plans to fly back separately. When he got home, he walked in to the now classic story of a house cleaned out, down to the last chipped cup and oddball fork, with divorce papers lying on the kitchen counter. Her parents had come in while they were gone, and cleaned out the house.
Doc was stunned, shocked, devastated. He had no idea why, and like so many husbands with similar stories, he never saw it coming.
But, unlike a lot of other guys, he didn’t just lay down and accept his fate. He got really angry over the betrayal. Being already retired, he didn’t just rely on his lawyers to do all the legwork at $300+/hour, he did a lot of the research and investigation himself.
It turned into a really bloody, ugly, nasty divorce. Betty tried to accuse Doc of the most unbelievably foul things, and time and again he had to dig up evidence to prove that she was lying. Fortunately for him, she wasn’t very smart – as evidenced by the fact that she decided to pull the trigger on the divorce just as she was rejecting the kidney and need his help and support more than ever – so her lies weren’t very good.
The divorce dragged on for 3-4 years. His legal bills were only a bit over $30,000, due to his own work on the case, while hers were well over $100,000. She hadn’t been trying to go for just half of all his net worth, she tried to go for it all and leave him nothing with no choice but to go back to work practicing medicine – as someone else’s employee – when he was almost 65. But, when the smoke cleared and the dust settled, he kept the property he had inherited from his parents before the marriage and the proceeds of his medical practice, was not responsible for her future medical bills, or her >$100,000 of legal bills, and she was awarded alimony of $1/year.
I think she pissed off the judge.
Now, is Doc angry about all this? Ooooooo, baby, is he ANGRY!
Is he “bitter”? BITTERLY bitter.
When he is talking about it among other men who understand what he went through and how devastating that sort of betrayal is to a man, what do you suppose his reaction is to someone who just has to try to sweep all that aside to make the point that “Not All Women Are Like That”?
Doc didn’t marry “all women”, he married Betty. Betty WAS “like that.”
Doc has never dated again. He never will. He’s done. He took his one shot at marriage and family, and got what he got – betrayed in the foulest manner possible.
I don’t know if there is any way to convey to a woman the impact a man feels from this sort of betrayal and loss. Maybe it would come close to imagine that you had a child, raised it up through HS, sacrificed so he/she could go to a top-notch college, and then on graduation day have someone come up and shoot him or her dead.
Everything he had worked for his entire life, she tried to take away from him. And, while she did not leave him destitute, as many divorcing wives do leave their husbands, he didn’t work all those years building something just so he could have a nice retirement – he did it so he could provide for his family, and that she did take away from him.
He spends his days now being as straight arrow a boyscout as he always was – tutoring school kids who are struggling with classwork, reading to people in a nursing home, and the cornball pastime of singing in a barbershop quartet. He still is, as he always was, a really nice guy, and beyond that a good guy. Good grief, he is a Mormon mother’s wet dream.
Betty is not doing so well. Last time I saw her she was clerking in a Wal-Mart and looked at least 80 (she is about 58-59). She goes to dialysis 3x/week. I think she is on Medicaid. Her betrayal brought not just ruin to her, but disgrace to her entire family for their part in it. It’s a smallish town. News travels fast. There are no secrets this big which get kept. Her father, who was once a fairly respected businessman in town, now couldn’t borrow a quarter for a parking meter.
Is is the schadenfreude that grerp once asked about which makes everyone who watched this all go down really really glad that Betty did not get away with that sort of betrayal and profit greatly from it? I don’t think it is. I think it is more the characteristic within decent people that hates to see evil rewarded and good punished and is really glad on those rare occasions when that does not happen.
So, I’m going to echo Mister_Y’s advice. If you go to sites where guys like Doc go to sort out just how and why they could be so loyal, and give so much, and get such bitter betrayal as their only reward for it – it will be best to observe, listen, and learn, and keep your 2¢ in your own pocket.
And I keep saying, please Americans who pedestalise women and who are Christians as so many of you are, pick up the New Testament. It is all there. Women are just as “fallen” as men. Arguably, worse. What lunacy is it that makes people imagine that women are not capable of great evil?
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David Collard, a very good point. Many American evangelical Christians focus primarily on the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They read parts of Acts. They don’t read much of Paul’s letters to Timothy, to the church in Corinth or to the Romans. They skip over the fate of John the Baptist, or regard the cute little entitled woman who demanded his head as a present as a one-off bad woman, rather than an example of what women can descend to, given a chance.
More broadly, far too many Christians don’t read the Old Testament at all. That is a mistake. Many of the original Reformers were very insistent that books such as Proverbs, Samuel I &II, Kings I & II were very important. It is no accident that early American universities such as Harvard taught the Hebrew language; it’s the language that the OT is written in.
Every young man should read of Potiphar’s wife, Jezebel and other, similar women, so he avoids putting any woman above himself. Re-reading the OT with the psychology of women in mind as understood through Game, many things that were previously confusing to me become quite clear. David was a cad, an alpha male who took advantage of his position. But let’s be clear, a truly innocent woman wouldn’t be bathing herself in such a way as to be visible to certain parts of the king’s palace, now would she?
It’s all there, for Christians who choose to look.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction. ”
Proverbs 7
Actually, DC, I think it is covered quite well very early in the Old Testament. Eve has her rationalization serpent whispering in her ear – “Go ahead, do what you want. There is no harm in it. The ones who say there is harm are lying to you. They just don’t want you to have any fun. It’s not fair. You are being ‘oppressed’ by ‘patriarchy.’ “
Only now, we have cutened up the scurrilous serpent to make it more non-threatening (and “nice”) with a cute fuzzy coat like a hamster. It’s still the same thing.
And, what did Adam do? He took what Eve was trying to feed him and swallowed it uncritically, even though he had been warned not to. Adam was the original mangina.
It’s a very old story we are living now.
But, grerp, it’s all just so, so… “roMANtic.”
My guess is that the reason you see this movie differently that most women seem to is because instead of seeing yourself in the place of Rose, and having a man so “romantically” give his life to save yours, you are seeing your son in the character of Jack, and are not liking the idea of seeing his life thrown away so that some self-centered ditz can go on to a life full of self-actualization.
You are one of those rare women who seems to really get what it is that men are pushing back against.
This post of Dalrock’s got my wheels turning, and I have a post over on the Spearhead (in my typical not-so-nice style) that goes a bit more into the resentment men are feeling about women appearing to feel entitled to throw away any man’s life she wants any time she wants if it makes her feel good to do it. http://www.the-spearhead.com/2011/01/03/the-three-laws-of-romantics/
@Hearthrose: re: generalized anger of some men toward all women, and what men want
As Mister_Y says, this movie just spits on the reality of men who lost their lives on the Titanic. Being spit on tends to piss men off, particularly at the people doing the spitting and all those around seeming to be entertained by it.
There is a subtle but complete dehumanization of men as a subtext. Men didn’t make this the highest box office film of all time. Stuff like this is emotional crack-cocaine for women – “oh, isn’t that romantic, he loved her so much that he sacrificed his life for her.”
Men will, and often do, sacrifice their lives for something they value. But, they do so in a context where people understand what they have sacrificed and why. What is sticking in men’s craw these days is what appears to be an attitude among women that it isn’t any real sacrifice at all – being just a lowly “man” – and that any female is simply entitled to it by virtue of having been born with a vagina. Women are no longer required to be good and act in goodly ways to get all the goodies that used to be their reward for doing so.
What do men want? Terry says you are a Christian woman, so read your bible. What does it tell women about how to treat their husbands? “Women, respect your husbands.” The first thing men want from women is respect, not contempt. Terry not only respects her husband, she does not allow other women to disrespect him. What some woman would try to trash her husband, either individually or as part of the group of “men”, she won’t allow it and certainly does not go along with. Women today sit around trashing their husbands, and nod in silent assent while witches like Liz Jones trash all men.
Second, men want women to appreciate, value, and respect what men do for them and give them. A man will gladly give his life for a woman who makes it clear that she realizes it is something of value. He will not give the time of day to a woman who thinks his life is worth so little that it is hers to throw away at a whim.
Coming late into this discussion, but I’d like to paste some comments by a “Craig” that I saved from some Christian blog concerning this exact issue. Long, but a good read:
Re: Titanic, Chivalry, and the Former Social Contract
Comment by Craig, on the former Social Contract between men and women:
“Here’s the thing, though….men and women on a sinking ship are absolutely equally vulnerable to the harm threatened by the bottomless, icy sea. When the ship sinks…everyone drowns. So it was NOT an actual unique physical weakness or vulnerability that justified the expectation that men would act to protect women on the Titanic. It was, rather, a felt moral obligation rooted deeply in the then universal understanding of the discrete responsibilities of men and women to each other.
This is an important distinction. Most of us would agree that if a thug approaches my wife and me on the street, I have an obligation to step forward and place myself between her and the threat. But is this because I am bigger, stronger, and a better fighter than she is, or because I am a man? The former reason is more limited than the latter. If, for instance, my wife were a martial arts master with equal or better defense ability than mine, I would be excused from my responsibilities if they are based on my superior physical strength, but not if they are based on my manhood.
The actions of the men on the Titanic indicated that they believed their obligations were based on something more significant than their greater physical capacity. Specifically, it was understood at that time (though not always spoken about) that men and women had mutual obligations and responsibilities. This was an era in which men were expected to provide for and protect their women, period. And a society in which women were expected to obey their husbands–the “love, honor and obey” wedding vow was commonly used without irony. It was a time when men’s status as supporter, protector, husband, head and father was acknowledged, respected and upheld by the culture. It was the “glue” that bound men to women and children, and in return women pledged fidelity to ensure men that their investment was aimed at their own children. This commitment and obligation had an explicit spiritual root in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which had evolved through the medieval chivalric era and into the gentlemanly codes of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In other words, the obligations of men and women had spiritual substance, and were not based primarily on physical skills. The authors of “Votes or Boats” were likely reflecting on this reality, and their logic is quite sound. Preferential and protective treatment of women in circumstances in which the physical capabilities of men were of no real significance was based on strong societal beliefs about what each sex owed the other. A very real, very significant and very long-running part of those beliefs was that the devotion of women to their families, husbands and homes precluded them from taking part in the affairs of men. When that part of the “contract” was broken by the entrance of women into the voting booth, the workplace and the public political “space” of the nation, the reciprocal part of the contact became much, much harder to sustain. Men began to ask themselves, “How can I be expected to protect and defer to women when they are making every effort to compete with and displace me politically and professionally?” This was a subtle conversation, but a very real one.
I respectfully submit that while Ms. Koerner is correct in her theological assertions regarding the equal value and different responsibilities of men and women, she is missing the long-term significance and effect of the suffrage and women’s rights movements. Today we have women in dangerous military and police positions and have become dependant on their service for national function. When the British sailors were kidnapped by the Iranians, the Iranians scoffed at the “barbarism” of a nation that would place a young mother into harm’s way on a warship. I found myself agreeing with Iran for the first time in my life. The result of a national and cultural rejection of the traditional “Contract” between men and women on the part of women has been a mirroring rejection by men of their old responsibilities. Koerner focuses on her physical fragility because that is the only argument left for those who “feel” that men ought to protect women but continue to reject fundamental aspects of the civilizational Cultural Contract that for centuries justified that “feeling.” Her reference to physical weakness while describing a situation in which that weakness is utterly irrelevant (because ALL would be equally certain to drown) makes it clear she is struggling to endorse a result she likes while rejecting its foundation.
This is not to say that I disfavor women’s suffrage or other recent changes. On a personal level, I strongly favor the changes of the past century, as I generally enjoy women as professionals, and appreciate the more thorough common life I can have with a beloved woman via our common professional and educational experiences. But I cannot help but suspect that my feelings here are selfish, and that on the whole society was more just and less barbaric when the old Contract was in force.
Lesson: the societal “Contract” matters.
Again:
Heather–I think we agree generally as well, but I wanted to press you a bit on what has actually happenned societally and culturally in the West.
Here, I agree that you’re directly on point: “So, because of that I would quibble a little. Yes, all were facing death on the Titanic. But that doesn’t mean they were all vulnerable in the same way. I don’t believe that the men and women were equal and that God just randomly assigned the men to take the risk. I think He instructed and equipped them to take the risk, even though it would probably end in death. In the same way, He doesn’t randomly assign men to lead and provide, He designs and equips them to do both.” Definitely true. My point was that the old “Contract” recognized this reality implicitly, and accounted for it broadly in social arrangements. I’m not arguing that those particular social arrangements were “mandated by scripture” or any such thing, but only that they were a logical, coherent and accepted system that effectively protected women by imposing felt obligations on men. The “System” or “Contract” did that in part by imposing countervailing obligations on women as well. The issue isn’t that it would be “impossible” to construct a system or Social Contract that was different in some respects but accomplished some of the same things, but rather quite simply that we haven’t done so. Instead, the old Contract was torn to the ground and the earth was salted. Devotion to absolute equality between men and women in every sphere of life–professional, personal, athletic, military, educational, political–is now required of all, on pain of accusations of sexism.
Again, here you are on point: “Suffrage recognizes that women are independent moral and intellectual agents, capable and deserving to participate in choosing those who make, enforce and interpret laws.” As I said above, I’m not “against” women’s suffrage. I agree with your assessment here, and on the whole I think the extension of the franchise is a good thing. And certainly it would not have been logically impossible for the “Contract” to survive in an altered form after the women’s suffrage movement. But I think that might have required our society to have stopped demolishing the public differences between the sexes shortly after the suffrage movement–far, far short of where we are now.
Again, I appreciate the spiritual and intrinsic equality of all human beings in the eyes of God. But that has been Christian doctrine for millennia without mandating the sort of equality in public life that all of us–even on this website, including myself–are most comfortable with today. What we are dealing with here is not religion or spiritual truth but societal reality, which depends partly on underlying religious beliefs but partly on the law of incentives. It is extraordinarily difficult for a man who spends his days competing with women for professional jobs and promotions, wrangling with women in political debate, running against women in military training or athletic competition, voting for or against women candidates for office, and watching women action heroes on nightly television…to nevertheless believe he has an obligation to accept an icy death so that a woman can live. Without SOME countervailing public expectations of women, this balance of power begins for him to feel less like chivalry and more like slavery.
Again, I think we agree more than we disagree. But I want to push you on the subject of your article–“what is required of me [as a woman]” in response to the man’s societal obligation to sacrifice himself? What would your response be to the man who sees the world as I describe it in the paragraph above? You and I would of course agree about the power of scriptural mandates, but direct quotation of scripture is not a societal system that “makes sense” to most people; believers, moderate believers and unbelievers alike. Assuming that we do not wish to go back to the days before women’s suffrage, what public, societal countervailing obligations on women do you propose SHOULD be in place to balance the sacrifices men ought to make on their behalf? Are you comfortable with the full extent of modern women’s empowerment in politics and the professional world, and do you think this can be maintained while also managing to re-ignite in men a felt obligation to step forward sacrificially?
And again:
Kellie (#23) is just another example. She’s a faithful Christian no doubt, and a good person, and acknowledges you can’t have it both ways. She likes equality and says she’s willing to let the old chivalry die so long as her husband loves her individually.
I’m not sure she really believes it though. Would she be willing to fight in combat on an equal basis with men? Or be drafted to do so? Would she really feel no indignation were a man (not her husband) to throw her to the wolves to protect his own hide? The question is–how comfortable are we, really, with the world we’ve created? Is it a more just, honorable, noble world on the whole than the one we’ve dismantled?
I think a civilization in which men can without shame shove aside women–any women–in a rush to the lifeboats is teetering into barbarism. I don’t know what price is necessary to reconstitute a Social Contract that could really stop that downward slide. I would think it could be done without sacrificing women’s suffrage. But some serious things would have to change, and there would be tradeoffs. Sadly, if a conservative Christian message board doesn’t have the votes for that sort of change, it’s going to be a while before you see any of it. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
The ethos of Titanic was carried through into the First World War where soldiers were encouraged to join up to protect their wives, girlfriends and sisters from German rapists. The idea was that men should sacrifice themselves to protect the women they loved. A lot of this, in fairness, was exploitation by the propaganda arms of government rather than by the women in question (most of whom would probably hae preferred their men to stay alive), although some women did behave disgracefully with white feathers and so forth.
Grerp, your comment brings back memories of how a date and I nearly got lynched in a cinema in Dublin in 1997, for not taking Titanic seriously enough, 1996/7 was a very strange time, with Titanic and Princess Diana’s death driving even the most normal people into frenzies of emotion. I agree with you about Rose’s purported journey of self-discovery at Jack’s expense, which I also found annoying.
zed et al,
The following was just posted in the comments at Hooking Up Smart.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/255977/what-do-women-want-dennis-prager
Dennis Prager:
“In my previous column, I offered an answer to the question: What do men want?
I made the case that what men most want from the woman they love is to be admired.
If my answer is correct, and if we presume that the natures of men and women are complementary (a presumption many men and women understandably doubt given how often men and women do not get along), what women most want must be related to that which men most want.
I believe it is.
What a woman most wants is to be loved by a man she admires.”
Zed,
My goodness, you put into words the very thoughts that ruminate in my mind whenever I read this blog and the comments. It is often a foolish thing to ask as to why the men are so angry. It is the total double standard that we are often accostumed to taking and swallowing in silence. When you see left-wing nutjob feminists crying and wailing about their rights and opportunities and doing so in high, and often times inappropriate, emotional outbursts..we are expected to listen and empathize with them. When men speak up for their rights and balance of power, and often do with firm vigor and a stern voice (admittedly with a bit of anger) we are told to “chill out.” A day will come…as we have seen continuously in human history, when men will say enough is enough and a war will ensue, one that will take a physical precedence vs. one simply on the manosphere. It will not stop at bantering words with so-called self-righteous “fredom fighting sister suffragettes.” It will result in blood…and I am hoping and praying for that to happen.
Heartrose, prepare for the language and candor of these sites to get worse as more suffocating legislation is passed against men. There is only so many times a friendly dog can be kicked in the stomach before it barks and even bites back. Please disregard the suggestion on going to a happily married man’s perspective. That is like saying that if you want to learn about the tragedies that happened to those who went through the Holocaust, you should ask someone who lived in Germany or Europe at the time…instead of going straight to a more credible source vis’a’vis, an actual Holocaust survivor. If you are serious about standing up for men’s rights to help recover from and restore the immense damage that has been wrought on families today, you will need to build up an iron constitution regarding not being so sensitive or appauled at the language or so-called “woman-bashing” that goes on. Quite frankly, making realistic observations about general women’s perceived behavior is a starting point in coming to grips with what is wrong.
“Good medicine always tastes bad going down”
Regards,
Alucard
I wish we could stop tossing around the generalizations. About men, about women, about “feminism.”
There are many of us out here who are neither angels nor devils. Just individuals trying to do the best we can to be respectful and caring with each other, to learn from our mistakes, and to raise our children well. For some of us who were part of 70s feminism, it was about opportunities to make a living, opportunities to learn – and not a zero sum game, or a competition.
Some of us liked men then, and we still do.
As the mother of sons, I have taught my kids to be respectful of people, and what you call chivalry, I call good manners – certainly recognizing that the “women and children first” issue is extreme, and not the stuff of everyday life for most of us.
And aren’t we here reading and writing to make sense of our everyday lives in a world that seems nonsensical far too often?
I believe in manners, for men and women both. I grieve the loss of appreciation for character and honor. Feminism hasn’t killed off these behaviors – for some of us they’re still being taught in our homes, and we seek them out in friends and partners. These are not attributes that are gender specific. They are attributes. And in our society that is so quick to point fingers, to classify, to rage without listening to the other voices even if rage has grown with good reason, if we don’t take the time to listen, we will surely lose the goodness we have to give to each other.
http://dailyplateofcrazy.com/2009/09/23/chivalry-here-today-gone-tomorrow-always-in-fashion/
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BLW:
The problem I see with your linked posts is it’s all about men’s “obligations” (which is not quite the word I want, -The word I want is not quite as “inflexible” as that, but it will suffice, i guess. ) towards women. Where, exactly is the reciprocity?
And I’m not talking just about opening doors and pulling out chairs, those are fairly easy and cost nothing. I’m talking about a basic give and take, here.
Men and women used to have a deal. Men did Y, women in turn would do X. (you can put whatever you want into those variables, chivalry, protection, cooking cleaning childrearing, whatever. It doesn’t particularly matter to my point)
But at some point, women then decided that their doing X was oppressive and they weren’t going to do it anymore. This, in and of itself, wouldn’t have been a problem except that they still wanted men to do Y.
I notice that you say on your posts that you expect men to pay for dates, what you don’t explain is what you do in return (except for the pledge to be a *relatively* cheap date, which is nice, but $30 a week, say, over the course ofa few years is quite a bit more than $0)
For the record, I don’t really mind engaging in “chivalrous” behavior. I do, however, resent it being “an expectation” if I pay for dinner, it’s because I think the woman is worth the money, (and believe me, many women really aren’t) not because it’s supposed to be “my job” because I have a Y chromosome.
[D: Well put!]
BLW has enough shaming language in her response to not even elicit a rational and logical counter-argument. Women such as herself like to wag the finger in front of men and use ad hominem attacks to defame the character of everyone on this forum. She likes to say comfortable things like how feminism hasn’t killed off the chivalrous “manners” that women like her grew up in…again the same old “not all of us are like that” argument. Honestly, you would think such a plebian species would learn to develop an original, logical, and thought-out response instead of colorfully reorganizing the same bovine excrement that war-mongering feminists like to spew out whenever anyone challenges their world views.
BLW, we wash ourselves of you and your ilk.
@Paul – I would look more closely, and read beyond that one post which was written awhile back and in part, in good fun. Note that I say I think it’s very difficult for men today to figure out what a woman might want, and I also think that women who respond rudely to men who are good-manner should be ashamed of themselves.
I firmly believe in reciprocity, and again, I would say – read what I’ve written and it’s quite clear that I believe men and women both need to focus on the other and also on community. Selfishness abounds in our culture (and is glorified by the mean girl
media models); I believe we owe each other genuine listening, genuine support, and looking at the person – not the wallet, not the job title, not the checklist of attributes on a page that have nothing to do with the man. The real man.
@Alucard – to “wash someone of my ilk” is to prove my point, sadly. The tendency to not listen to an individual. To not be able to hear beyond what sounds to me like your anger or your hurt. You don’t know me; I don’t know you. I am not an ilk, and frankly, despite your remark I don’t think you are an “ilk” either. You are an individual with experiences that form your opinions. And if you haven’t had experiences of women who know how to love and give than I’m sorry that’s the case.
One last note re the cost of dates – that is a topic on which I always take my cues from a man. Some men are mortified if a woman offers to pay or to split. When I made good money, I would try to read the man and the situation, and act accordingly. Single parenthood has brought debt and financial struggle. I rarely go out. I don’t have the bucks, period. These are harsh economic times. I don’t need a man to spend $30/week on me. I need a man to want to spend time with me and get to know me. I’m happy to make him a cup of coffee in my kitchen.
I’m old enough and wise enough to know what matters and what doesn’t. The way the “real world” can chew you up and spit you out – male or female. A good heart is a good heart. It isn’t gender-specific, and political movements have little to do with it – in my experience.
@BLW
Thats all well and good, but the fact of the matter is there’s only two options here. either
A) You define “chivalry” the same way you define “good manners” (which is what many in the post-feminist world are attempting to do to show it’s not “dead”) in which case it’s not gendered (and thus not really chivalry)
or B) It is a set of behaviors that are specifically expected of men, and only men.
If option B is what society chooses to go with, then there must (morally speaking) be a female analog to chivalry, set of behaviors expected specifically of women.
Your post doesn’t really mention anything like this female analog. (i’m fairly certain no such thing exists anymore, if it ever did) The only thing that comes close is your admonishment of women to not be rude to the “chivalrous” men. Otherwise every other time you mention the behavior women should engage in, you say that men should do the same. (otherwise known as “option A”)
Now, I realize your post wasn’t really about the behavior of women, but this *is* the reality for many men these days. We’re told we’re still obligated to play by the old rules, but if we expect anything in return, we’re being sexist/misogynistic/”entitled”
“For some of us who were part of 70s feminism, it was about opportunities to make a living, opportunities to learn – and not a zero sum game, or a competition.”
For some of you. What about the others?
“Some of us liked men then, and we still do.”
Again, what about the others?
You chose to associate with them. Birds of a feather…
The 70s was almost 40 years ago. Much has changed since then.
@zed – And a great deal hasn’t. Certainly not for the better. Not for either gender.
BigLittleWolf says:
January 3, 2011 at 11:24 pm
Single parenthood has brought debt and financial struggle.
GOOD! I hope you sink. I hope no man will touch you. You western women are liars and hypocrites in the main and I hope men stand by and allow you to sink just like you stood by and allowed good fathers like me to be victims of crime.
“I hope no man will touch you. “
I’m sure some probably will. One thing is certain, however, we are all 40 years older and the behavior of women my age over those 40 years has given men my age absolutely no reason to do anything other than avoid them if at all possible.
Exhibit A: Liz Jones.
Big Little Wolf says:
“I ate my cake. Can I still have it?”
Reality says:
“You are about 35 years too late with this request.”
@BLW
Look, the fact of the matter is that “modern chivalry” (pulling out chairs, opening doors, standing when a *lady* leaves the room) was an act of respect. Respect needs to be earned, and the way women did that was by acting *like a lady*
Can you honestly say that the majority of women now a days act like ladies? No. Why then, are men obligated to act like gentlemen?
(and as I said before, if I find a woman who I decide is worth the effort, I am more than happy to be as much a gentleman as you could want)
Let me try a different tack here: Men were obligated to treat women with respect because they (women) had considerably less power than men did. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.
Feminism changed the game (for the better? for the worse? I don’t know, I leave that for future generations to decide) in that they gave women a much greater degree of power, and men less (you can say it isn’t all you want, but power IS a zero-sum game) and thus implicit with this was a greater degree of responsibility for women.
Fact of the matter is, you wanted in on the Men’s game, you have to play by the same rules we do.
The Titanic is a perfect example in the differences of men and women in power. The men who “earned” the “power” to be in charge saw it as their duty to ensure the safety and wellbeing of those who weren’t in power. This is the only correct use of power.
Now let’s move into the modern world where women are artificially “given” the power to be in charge socially, economically and politically by the guns of the state.
A successful abortion produces a dead zygote. Everybody on the planet was an individual zygote, using soft language like “my body my choice” only aleviates a womans concience. Calling it the wholesale slaughter of innocent children would be a little tougher sell. This is not the law of nature, man or god, (if you happen to be religious). This is a right granted by the state and men have no say if their child is allowed to live.
If it’s called no fault divorce why does a man have to “fight” for equal custody of his children? Why is his own taxes used to imprison him if he is laid off and can’t afford to pay child support?
Affirmative Action gives women preferential treatment…Try putting two indentical resume’s on monster for Mechanical Engineer one as a woman the other as a man. The woman resume’ will have your phone ringing off the hook, how do I know? I used to be a Mech E. and got laid off and just for a laugh threw one out as a woman and was told on several occasions, “we’re looking for a woman.” For the past few years I’ve been an installer of conveyor’s where I hang out 50 feet in the air (risky) for half the pay. Why? I’m not a woman.
Lets address some of the percieved injustices of women past oppression. The vote? Only land owners had that right and men were given that right as a gender a mere 10 years before women. How about locking women in the homes and forcing them to cook and clean, (how horrifying). What were the men doing? Partying? No, they were getting black lung in mines and running logs down the river, (when they fell off the logs sometimes they didn’t come up), maybe they were digging canals 12 hours a day with their sons to ensure the welfare and security of their wives, mothers, sister who were at home. I’ll bet those women were unbelieveable grateful and prayed every day for the men to return safely.
The modern day women complain endlessly about the drudgery of housework as if their beating rugs on clothslines or hauling the washboard and bucket down to the stream to do laundry. Why the little princesses even need thermocouples installed on hot water faucets so they don’t scald their delicate skin. Whats a thermocouple you ask ladies? Why its a magical device men invented and built just for your protection. I’m sure you could have invented it yourselves if you weren’t so oppressed, or could you?
Heres two links to the differences in male and female brains.
http://www.boysadrift.com/2007Giedd.pdf
http://medicaleducationonline.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46&Itemid=69
Apparently it wasn’t mens oppression after all, it was that darned biology that stopped you from creating all those great works of art, music, literature, science and invention. Although since men invented biology…Hmmm.
The list of female entitlements is quite endless. Since modern day women have artifically been “given” all this social, economic and political power how do they use it? Do they weild it in the same way as the men who “earned” their power so long ago to ensure the safety and well being of those without the power? Do women constantly vote themselves further entitlements that directly hurt men? Do they even care?
@BLW
You say…”For some of us who were part of 70s feminism, it was about opportunities to make a living, opportunities to learn.”
The goal of 70s feminism or any feminism was never about equal opportunity in learning or employment.
Heres a link where she clearly states women were already privileged in 1972….Schlafly became the most visible and effective opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s as the organizer of the “Stop the ERA” movement, widely credited with stopping it from achieving ratification by its legislative deadline. “STOP” is also an acronym for “Stop Taking our Privileges”, because Schlafly argues the amendment, if passed and ratified, would take away privileges enjoyed by American women, including “dependent wife” benefits under Social Security and exemption from Selective Service registration.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Schlafly
If women were already privileged 40 years ago the only thing they could possibly get is more privilege. Equal opportunity was never the goal of feminism, equal or superior outcome without accomplishment and entitlements and privileges was always the goal.
How come in the Hofsra case where a girl had sex with mutiple boys and falsely cried rape, the boys behaved badly. Now Julian Assange has sex with multiple women and they’re falsely crying rape and whenever I see a womans comment if she says he didn’t rape them HE still behaved badly. When will I see women putting the blame where it belongs, on other women?
I’m no pedestalizing mangina but I must say I didn’t view the Titanic film in any such political terms.
It’s a movie. So Rose gets a different standard of judgment than the hundreds of anonymous passengers who die? Big whoop. That’s not really different from the fact that action characters shoot up dozens of enemies while never taking a hit themselves.
I saw the film not as a romance but as a tragedy wrt Jack. Here is a crafty charming rogue who all but stows away. His living on the edge takes a spoiled rich woman to a new level of sincere emotion. But his ultimately his lack of self-worth, which is part of what got him where he is, led him to sacrifice himself (I may be reaching here, I only saw the film once.)
The limitations of his character dictated that he would die in the disaster – he certainly couldn’t “go legit” if he had survived, it’s not in his nature. He’s a bad boy with a good side, he turned good for a bit, but ultimately couldn’t bring himself to save himself.
For me, Rose was just a (delightfully curvy) prop against which Jack’s character was projected and examined.
Boy, there’s not much that’s more frustrating that attempting to make a thoughtful post, and taking time to do so, only to have it ignored completely.
guess I’m not terribly surprised, though.
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I feel the need to add a couple of comments from libertarian feminist Camille Paglia’s column on Titanic. First, this column has this cherce quote:
I’m sick of you championing “Titanic” in any way… if it weren’t for that ship going under, there’d be no reason to watch that waste of celluloid. I remember sitting in the theater, incredulous at the idiocy unfolding in front of me. Most offensive was the misuse of its stars. DiCaprio was laughably miscast as a man, and Winslet was given nothing to work with. (A friend of mine says he always remembers Kate running down the hallway carrying Leo in her arms!)
Even funnier, after Paglia defended the movie (she loves, as a lesbian, the lush sexuality of Winslet in the movie), another letter writer got her the next time with :
Kate Winslet’s character, Rose, was one of the vilest and most disgusting characters ever to grace the silver screen. From beginning to end, she displayed nothing but character flaws and a lack of concern for everyone else around her. As the movie starts, she is a rich brat who is depressed that she has to marry an incredibly rich and handsome man because he treats her badly. Perhaps she should have taken into account his personality rather than his bank account when she accepted his proposal.
Rather than take responsibility for her own actions, stand up to her mother, and tell him to his face that she is not in love with him, she instead decides to take the easy way out and kill herself. Now, the whole world would be better had she just jumped off the back of that damn boat. Instead, our boy Leonardo DiCaprio talks her down from the ledge, and she sees him and thinks, “Ooh, cute poor boy.” So then she decides to slum it for the weekend and hook up with the cute poor kid. Then, to prove her total lack of morals, she decides that she will ask Jack to “draw her” — naked, of course.
So, while engaged to someone else (because she never had the decency to call it off), she decides to get naked for a guy she has known for all of about 24 hours. Immediately afterward it’s time to consummate the hours-old relationship in the back of a car that is not theirs. Wow, that’s a real “moral” Victorian woman for you! Of course, that is not enough. The ship hits the iceberg (we didn’t see that one coming). By the way, she was on deck when that happened. I wonder if our lookout was too busy snooping on her and Jack to notice the iceberg. Maybe it’s actually her fault the ship sinks in the first place.
Anyway, our hero Jack puts Rose on a lifeboat. Of course, being safe is not enough, so she jumps back onto the sinking ship — a prime example of great decision-making. After it goes down, Jack is safe on a door of some sort, but he has to give up his spot to save Rose. Now Rose is on the door, and Jack is stuck in the freezing waters. So in a sense she kills Jack in a slow, frigid, painful way — sort of like the experience I felt while watching this movie. She holds on to Jack’s shivering hand, telling him, “I’ll never let go, Jack, I’ll never let go.” Of course, after a few minutes in Arctic waters, Jack’s hand is no longer shivering. Winslet, in tears, continues, “I’ll never let go, Jack, I’ll never let go.” Around then, the lifeboat arrives, and Winslet immediately lets go, “Hey, I’m over here!” Jack sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Ms. Winslet grabs a spot on the lifeboat. Real nice, Kate, real nice: Whatever happened to never letting go?
We then hear the rest of Winslet’s life. Her fiancé loses his mind and ends up killing himself (you’re two for two, Kate). However, she finds a nice man, marries him, and lives a great life. Eventually, he dies (I wonder what she did to make that happen), and we see Winslet’s Rose again at age — I don’t know, let’s say 126 — with her granddaughter or whoever is on the ship trying to find the Titanic’s wreckage. At the end of the film, Rose walks to the back of the ship and takes the priceless diamond necklace that she could give to her grandchildren, which would set her family up for generations, but instead she throws the freaking necklace into the ocean! Queue overplayed, overhyped and over-sung Celine Dion song (I mean, seriously, by the end she is practically screaming the lyrics — like Celine, we get it, you have a great voice, stop assaulting us with it already).
Back to throwing the fancy necklace: She might as well have thrown three generations of her family over the side of the ship. Could she possibly be more selfish? Well, yes, she could, because then, apparently Rose dies, and we see her in heaven. For some reason, heaven is the Titanic (not exactly what I picture paradise to be). She opens up a stateroom door, and there is Leonardo’s Jack waiting for her in bed. Not her actual husband, mind you, but Jack. So she is even cheating on her husband in heaven.
I rest my case. The vilest, most horrifying character in cinematic history. An Academy Award for playing the she-devil would be one of the greatest travesties in mankind’s history since … the actual Titanic.
Hope you all enjoyed that.
My rule on the Titanic would be: women of clearly reproductive age and children first, then men under 55, in order according to class of ticket on the boat. That seems the most eugenic to me.
Yeah grandmas and grandpas would have been shit out of luck. So would men compared to women and children.
Outstanding! When something works, just reinforce it,right? Point out how well everything went when they chose a certain action and how if they choose that again they can have a similar result. but i dont understand why the viewpoint changed drastically.
[D: Defanged spam too funny to delete.]
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We all know women crashed the boat into some ice after some other women didn’t put enough rescue boats aboard after the female riveters failed to assemble the boat properly. It’s not because the women were incompetent, but because they were evil!
They did this to get rid of their men.
Case closed, gents.
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