I’ve been reading The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis, about the medieval idea of “courtly love”. Lewis sums up the concept as (emphasis mine):
The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim.
This topic is important because it fundamentally transformed the way we view the world:
They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature. There can be no mistake about the novelty of romantic love: our only difficulty is to imagine in all its bareness the mental world that existed before its coming…
This includes not only our idolization of romantic love, but also what we commonly call chivalry*:
Even our code of etiquette, with its rule that women always have precedence, is a legacy from courtly love
In this regard I learned I was incorrect in assuming that there had at one point been something noble to the idea of chivalry. Chivalry (as we know it*) has always been an expression of abject groveling. This is one of the reasons that adultery was a core component:
The love which is to be the source of all that is beautiful in life and manners must be the reward freely given by the lady, and only our superiors can reward. But a wife is not a superior.81 As the wife of another, above all as the wife of a great lord, she may be queen of beauty and of love, the distributor of favours, the inspiration of all knightly virtues, and the bridle of ‘villany’;82 but as your own wife, for whom you have bargained with her father, she sinks at once from lady into mere woman. How can a woman, whose duty is to obey you, be the midons whose grace is the goal of all striving and whose displeasure is the restraining influence upon all uncourtly vices?
Lewis describes the groveling and humiliation involved in the poetry of courtly love and it is truly astounding. Gladly bearing the deepest humiliation at the hands of the woman was seen as the greatest virtue.
The other reason courtly love had to be adulterous is because it was considered shameful for a man to have passion for his own wife:
…the impropriety (from the courtly point of view) of loving his own wife. Such a man is in propria uxore adulter. His sin is heavier than that of the unmarried lover, for he has abused the sacrament of marriage.
Lastly, it is fair to say that medieval fans of courtly love are the original cuckservatives. Chivalry and a quasi religious view of romantic love are conservative ideals today because they are seen as harkening back to a more virtuous time, the time of courtly love. Yet chivalry and courtly love has always been a longing for fictional values of the past:
What is new usually wins its way by disguising itself as the old.
…
What was theory for his own age had been practice for the knights of Britain. For it is interesting to notice that he places his ideal in the past. For him already ‘the age of chivalry is dead’.40 It always was: let no one think the worse of it on that account.
The concept of courtly love was a cuckold fetish from the start, and it has always been a longing for bygone days. The only difference between now and the medieval age of courtly love is that we now have a cross-dressing model of husband and wife, freeing cuckold fetishists to finally reverse the position of the husband and the interloper.
But some modern day chivalrous men still prefer the old school model, albeit modified for our age of technology:
*Edit: Oscar pointed out that there was an earlier form of chivalry prior to the concept of courtly love. This didn’t have the groveling to women and was a martial/Christian code. But the code we know today is really the courtly love version, the version that as Lewis explains includes putting women first.
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An American female was once very offended by my lack of groveling before wymynkind and demanded me to define chivalry.
I replied, “Chivalry is a way of social organization based on the horse. The man on horseback fights from horseback on behalf of the farmers who grows the oats, and the horse gets to eat the oats … the name comes from Medieval Latin caballarius, meaning ‘man who rides a horse’.”
She asked, “But isn’t it about protecting wymyn?”
I said, “No, it’s about protecting farmers. If the farmers get killed, everyone starves.”
“The other reason courtly love had to be adulterous is because it was considered shameful for a man to have passion for his own wife:
…the impropriety (from the courtly point of view) of loving his own wife. Such a man is in propria uxore adulter. His sin is heavier than that of the unmarried lover, for he has abused the sacrament of marriage.”
Is there a source for this sentiment? I wonder who came up with the idea that it was shameful for a man to have passion for his own wife.
There is a slight of hand to confound chivalry with courtly love. Early chivalry was associated with knights who took vows to remain celibate and protected the church. The knights may have had refined manners and showed deference to ladies, but they were MGTOW. The reason I think that the two ideas became merged is that it became popular in literature for a lady to seduce a knight and replace his fealty to the church, enjoying for herself the greatest feelz. The idea for a woman was intoxication with her own power; over men even over the church. Tingles replaced knightly virtue; those tingles were latter labeled romance and virtue was replaced with tingle production aka romance. Of course a wife was to be ruled and enjoyed less feelz with her husband, so Lady Guinevere had to bring a curse to the land, her husband and the virtue of a noble knight with her adultery – but it was worth it because the value of her feelz, besides a knight with a alot of lance is terrible thing to waste, better he provide good nights than be a good knight.
Speaking of Ms. Schumer, tuns out she’s a rapist: http://archive.is/qCEDz
After all the talk of our fathers on how to treat the women as gentle princesses, to be gentlemen, it’s liberating for a man not to be concerned for the welfare of random women formerly known as “The Fairer Sex”. Much easier on a cold and dark night to say “Sorry, no jumper cables” when I have them, or “Sorry I don’t know how to change a flat tire” when I do, and walking away. A carpenter, mechanic, electrician and all-round fixer of things, when I’m dating some broad and she needs something fixed around the house, I clam up because she wouldn’t appreciate it anyway and then the flow of requests would never end, even to the point of “loaning me out” to fix her friends’ shit. Why should I? I’m getting what I want from her anyway. This is the world they shaped. And who am I to interfere with their wishes, not that I could anyway? It’s what women wanted after all.
@ConantheContrarian
This was a very common belief, and goes back hundreds of years prior to the idea of courtly love. For example, St Jerome wrote:
Although the church fathers were not talking about romantic love, because the idea (as we know it), came into being through the concept of courtly love. CS Lewis says something to the effect that Augustin didn’t comment on romantic love for the same reason he didn’t comment on the steam engine: it hadn’t been invented yet.
Meh, it’s women’s own fault, or to their credit depending on whether you believe anything was lost. They rejected the chivalrous model of marriage, home and kids at the behest of feminist slags who were the uglies that never got invited to the prom. These slags most assuredly would never have been asked their hand in marriage so naturally, they screwed it up for everyone else. How THOSE women wound up dictating their loveless existence to hundreds of millions of women the past 100 years or so is beyond me, but it worked then and still does today. It’s what women want after all.
As for the notion that Western men welcomed said rejection of the marriage model, we didn’t welcome it. Rather, we only learned to “operate” within the new model of hitting and running, pumping and dumping, if you will, that feminists set up and dictated their sisters follow. That those women wound up unhappy, don’t blame me and my fellow horn dogs. Women after all, make the rules. From there, operators operate, the best operators being those men who at an early age, throw away chivalrous notions and treat women the way women need to be treated in the Post-Chivalrous age of modern feminism. It’s what women want after all.
Cervantes sent up chivalry in Don Quixote. Oh, his lovely Dulcinea (who was just the common whore Aldonza).
@ Jim Christian:
When did you serve with VA-35? Have a friend that flew with them.
Dear Conan:
I assume you mean a source for this specifically:
A problem with this passage is that “love” is overly ambiguous, but that’s a linguistic concern that I’m not qualified to really discuss.
The general sentiments here were specifically deconstructed to in a great popular television series called “The Power of Myth” (Bill Moyers interviews Joseph Campbell, PBS, sometime in the 1970s). The contention seems to be that in freeing the libido to chase the object of desire, we were getting closer to the humanistic ideal that also fueled the Renaissance. The primacy of eros over storge is a feature of humanism, and the erosion of erotic love in favor of the more holistic love that takes over in a healthy marriage is a loss that these writers felt needed to be compensated for.
To be fair to the original authors, The Lewis (and Dalrock) interpretation seems very one-sided and uncharitable. There are many ways you were supposed to compensate for the lack of eros, to “atone for the sin” of being stuck in a marriage where the fire is waning. Most of them are ideally civilization-enforcing sublimations: Acts of courage in battle, caring for the poor, etc.
Banging other women (playaz) or worshiping the concept of womanhood (feminists, cuckservatives) was never high on the list, though the Lewis-Dalrock interpretation is valid, in that the theory opened up an aperture to the worst parts of human nature, by declaring that idealizing eros is not prohibited.
There’s another interesting contemporary book along these lines. In Praise of Love by Alain Badiou touches on some of these things from a Marxist (or perhaps post-Marxist) perspective. He talks about the phenomenon of things like dating/swingers web sites and phone apps as being the logical end result of chivalry and feminism, and argues (persuasively) that being a playa and/or a cuck and/or a feminist is a form of alienation in the Marxist sense.
Anyway, I hope this has been helpful.
Boxer
“Jerome”
He might not be your best source on the subject, given his reliance on the support of rich wives married to other men and their doting on him.
“The primacy of eros over storge is a feature of humanism, and the erosion of erotic love in favor of the more holistic love that takes over in a healthy marriage is a loss that these writers felt needed to be compensated for.”
(a) That maturity is no loss to the man who can enjoy the fruits of the garden he’s thereby cultivated – i.e. children and grandchildren.
(b) What they are more likely compensating for is their lack of love for (and from) God which is impeded by their overweening pride.
Boxer,
“perhaps post-Marxist”
The sooner you, too, can join us there the better off we’ll all be.
I think a distinction needs to be made between Chivalry and Courtly Love. Chivalry was bastardized by the concept of courtly love, which itself was the one of the first social conventions for the Feminine Imperative. The sacrifice and deference to the feminine was really the first stab at feminism for the time.
https://therationalmale.com/2013/01/02/the-feminine-imperative-circa-1300/
So yes, Courtly Love had the latent purpose of cuckolding (at the time) powerful men, but we have to consider how this social convention enables women’s Hypergamy and sexual selection. All cuckoldry really is is the culmination of women’s sexual strategy. That was hard to control for in the middle ages, thus, as is the way of women, a social institution had to be created in order to remove men from their Hypergamous selection process.
The romanticized notion of what we think is Chivalry today is really the result of women invading male space and converting it to work in favor of their Hypergamous control. It becomes real obvious when you see Fempowered women pine for the good old days when men were chivalrous today. Open Hypergamy has made this want for old books chivalry a joke, but it also highlights the control over their sexual selection and breeding destinies that all women seek.
Dear Rollo:
I always enjoy it when you show up here!
I don’t know that this entirely resolves the problem of the Lewis-Dalrock hypothesis. Note that prior to the Rennaisance, (i.e. in feudal Europe) “love” was bifurcated into eros and storge out of necessity. The neoplatonic idea that erotic love is evil is a way for a very poor society to regiment itself and survive in uncertain conditions.
Campbell’s deconstruction of the humanistic eroticization of storge, that the troubadours talked/wrote/sang about, was a function of growing levels of trust, security and independence. This newfound freedom of individuals ruptured the macrosphere people lived under, and simultaneously made possible for a new one.
The idea that one can be master of his own fate (at least in a certain limited sense) inherently leads to the idea that eros isn’t all bad — and I don’t think it is. The eruption of “courtly love” was a much broader phenomenon than simple hypergamy and/or feminism. It was an outgrowth of radically changing material conditions and increasing levels of prosperity.
The covert social power that Chivalry (as bastardized by Courtly Love) empowered women with was abandoned for the more direct control that feminism represented to them. After the sexual revolution and the leverage that unilaterally female-controlled hormonal (covert) birth control gave women, there was little need for the covert control over Hypergamy that Chivalry used to represent.
This is the Code of Chivalry, as recorded in The Song of Roland.
To fear God and maintain His Church
To serve the liege lord in valour and faith
To protect the weak and defenceless
To give succour to widows and orphans
To refrain from the wanton giving of offence
To live by honour and for glory
To despise pecuniary reward
To fight for the welfare of all
To obey those placed in authority
To guard the honour of fellow knights
To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit
To keep faith
At all times to speak the truth
To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun
To defend the honour of women
Never to refuse a challenge from an equal
Never to turn the back upon a foe
Women are only explicitly mentioned in two places;
1. To give succour to widows and orphans, and
2. To defend the honour of women
Note that the mandate to care for widows and orphans reflects the Biblical mandate, and therefore supports the previous mandates to protect the weak and defenceless and to fear God and maintain His Church.
Also, note that one cannot defend that which does not exist. Therefore, if a woman is not “honourable”, the knight cannot defend her “honour”, and would be a fool to try.
Exactly. Medieval (dark ages) Europe wouldn’t be able to afford fancies of Courtly Love, particularly in an era of necessary brigandism. It should also be noted that even in its heyday notions of Courtly Love were limited to high-born society. The feudal serfs of the time could give a shit about acts of devotion to women. It was all very subsistence motivated and that meant than women (daughters) were better currency for a families success than a low-born son.
You always have to take into account the latent purposes a social convention serves with regard to enabling women’s Hypergamy. Affluence and socioeconomic status don’t change the basic Hypergamous equation, it’s just gets solved by a different method.
@Desiderian
That is the reference I had handy, but Jerome is far from the only one who thought this way. Lewis cites some others that are more contemporary to courtly love. At any rate, Jerome was easy to find because his argument was generally accepted. Even Augustin, who was a moderate on the subject, agreed that a husband should not have passion for his wife.
If you want to see the Middle Age vision of courtly love, read L’Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory. Malory compiled those tales partly from minstrel oral tradition, so we have a clear idea of their ideal depiction of Arthur the same way Howard Pyle’s version portrayed them with Victorian Age moral values.
Nearly every, if not all, of the romantic stories are adulterous.
Incidentally, the tales of Lancelot and Guinevere were the favorite of the French court – further incidentally, these tales were popular around the same time aristocratic French knights were crushed at the Battle of Agincourt by “peasant” English bowmen.
However, Rollo Tomassi is correct in that chivalry had much more going for it than treatment of women. As the Arthur tales indicate, chivalry had much to do with how knights treated one another. Even among enemies, respect and honor was due.
I think you need to distinguish between chivalry and courtly love. Courtly love is set in time and peaked about the same time the black death did. Neither is around much today. Chivalry is something else. My father would have described himself as chivalrous – he would give up his seat for a woman, and would make his feelings forcefully known if someone wasn’t behaving decently. All in all he was a pretty brave guy who believed in doing the right thing – which included volunteering and seeing active combat in a pretty hellish theatre of war. So don’t tell me that chivalrous behaviour in that sense is incompatible with masculinity.
@ ConantheContrarian
“Is there a source for this sentiment?”
That source is certainly not the Bible, which contains en entire book devoted to passionate love between a husband and wife.
If we believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, then we also have to believe that when the Bible devotes an entire book to a subject, that subject must be of great importance to God.
“Inside Amy Schumer”… there is 70 pounds of blubber and partially digested cheesecake.
@Rollo – “Originally courtly love was a much more pagan ideal…”
I’ve heard/read this too. That is, courtly love isn’t the source for romantic love, since it is seen at other times/cultures. Does anyone have any sources confirming this notion?
Many of these ideas get traced back to Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Symposium. I’ve been re-reading Diotima’s Ladder. After some study, it appears Socrates puts oneitis on the bottom rung below love of multiple partners. According to Plato, white knights rank below PUAs in their distance from the Form of Beauty/God.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diotima_of_Mantinea
@Oscar
This is a fair point. I think we are talking about different codes. Lewis mentions The Song of Roland, but he mentions it as a contrast to what came after. He writes:
Likewise, this page from Washington State University on courtly love uses Song of Roland to explain what the thinking was prior to courtly love.
The important thing is, I think, that the version of chivalry that we know today is not the song of roland version, but the courtly love version.
This may be true prior to courtly love, but not after it. For one example, after Lancelot sneaks in to Queen Guinevere’s bed chamber for a night of adultery, Guinevere is accused of committing adultery with a different knight (Lancelot bled into the bed from a wound he received breaking in). Lancelot then rises to defend her honor, not the honor of the man falsely accused in his stead:
The chivalry we know today is the chivalry of Lancelot, of the knights of the round table, not the song of roland.
At the time of Jerome, more and more people were becoming celibate both in and out of marriage due to the popularity of the Desert Fathers. Lust in marriage was as sinful as adultery or worse (why would you treat your wife like a prostitute?)
I think Dalrock mentioned in previous posts that Augustine was really a moderate in this context, NOT the source for Christian anti-sexuality.
Campbell’s contention was the courtly love was a new synthesis, an eroticization of storge (and perhaps philia too) which he termed amor. See pp. 172-174 in his Flight of the Wild Gander for a much better explanation than I’ve been giving. It’s an interesting idea.
I don’t want to speak for Rollo (he’s smarter than I am) but when he calls Plato “paganism” I think he’s being overly general. Augustine liked some ideas of Plato, and advocated for the integration of philosophical ideas into the church in Confessions. What’s called neoplatonism (see Plotinus’ Enneads) was widely thought by church fathers to be largely coherent with Christianity, including the idea of a metaphysical monism that brings all things about by mysterious means, the separation of body and spirit, and etc.
I suppose if Paganism includes the absolute complement of the set of all things Christian, then you can say courtly love springs partly from Pagan sources, but so does nearly every other cultural artifact, past and present. That’s not the way the term Pagan is used in the Bible, where it denotes backwardness, evil or stupidity.
Boxer
@Oscar
I would also add Ecclesiastes 9:7-9:
There is a carnal, matter of fact, feeling to this, since it is associated with enjoying food and drink. This passage is an echo of Ecc 8:15:
And there is also the obvious tie in with Proverbs 5, with the same exhortation to enjoy the “wife of your youth” :
This is an exhortation to be intoxicated with sexual desire towards your wife. To focus on her breasts (objectifying!) as sexually pleasing. It urges the husband to have the same posture to his wife as a rutting buck does to a doe (otherwise it would be a call for bestiality). And of course Proverbs 5 mirrors Paul’s exhortation in 1 Cor 7.
With all of this, it is still true that for a very long time, Christian thought was that it was shameful for a man to act like a rutting buck with his wife, to have sexual passion for her.
@TheQuestion
French knights were crushed at the Battle of Agincourt by “peasant” English bowmen.
More like “crushed by ‘yeomen’ Welsh archers”.
Wow that Schumer skit had ALL KINDS of physical appearance shaming aimed at men. I thought we were moving on from that as a society.
@Arthur Ritic
This was still in moderation when I replied to Oscar above, but this ties in. Giving up your seat for a woman was from the courtly love version of chivalry, and that is the version that dominates our thought process today, along with the concept of romantic love (as something different than sexual passion). It is so powerful precisely because we don’t know where it came from. To us it seems it has always been the case, but as Lewis points out it was not.
@ Dalrock says:
December 14, 2016 at 11:58 am
“Likewise, this page from Washington State University on courtly love uses Song of Roland to explain what the thinking was prior to courtly love.”
Well, that’s my alma mater, so I can’t argue with that…
My point is that we need to reclaim chivalry for what it is supposed to be – a code of honor among Christian men. We’re not knights, of course, but that entire code can be applied to modern life.
Oscar
My point is that we need to reclaim chivalry for what it is supposed to be
Should we do that right before reclaiming marriage for what it is supposed to be, or afterwards?
The first step in this reclamation is what Dalrock and Lewis are doing. Constructing a critical theory of something never entails wanting to abolish it entirely (if you wanted to do that, you wouldn’t bother with criticism). The first step to reconstructing a healthier honor code of men is analyzing specific faults in the status quo.
Compliments to everyone in this thread, from the author on down, by the way. The original and all the comments are exceptional. I’m looking forward to reading both Lewis and Malory. This is an undertheorized topic and I’m glad it appeared here.
Boxer
@ Anonymous Reader says:
December 14, 2016 at 12:35 pm
“Should we do that right before reclaiming marriage for what it is supposed to be, or afterwards?”
I don’t know, but my instinct is that we’ll need a code of honor among Christian men in order to reclaim marriage.
@ Boxer says:
December 14, 2016 at 12:42 pm
“The first step in this reclamation is what Dalrock and Lewis are doing.”
Agreed. I took the next step, but may have jumped the gun.
Kaminsky
Wow that Schumer skit had ALL KINDS of physical appearance shaming aimed at men. I thought we were moving on from that as a society.
Shocking, isn’t i? You’d think that someone who is public about “social awareness” the way Schumer does would have included a trigger warning at the start.
Oscar
I don’t know, but my instinct is that we’ll need a code of honor among Christian men in order to reclaim marriage.
Well, if there’s anything that the modern world has taught us, it’s the importance of trusting instincts. It’s right up there with “trust your heart”, and we all can see how well that’s turned out.
@ Anonymous Reader says:
December 14, 2016 at 1:04 pm
“Well, if there’s anything that the modern world has taught us, it’s the importance of trusting instincts. It’s right up there with ‘trust your heart’, and we all can see how well that’s turned out.”
If there’s anything war taught me, it’s that my instincts are pretty good, but I need to be ready to go against them when necessary.
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I’m on a phone, but quickly, Lewis was wrong. Read Malory. Courtly love kills Camelot because it breaks the code of chivalry.
That Schumer video is some of the worst androgyny I’ve seen in the public sphere. It glamorizes women taking advantage of vulnerable and desperate men. I can imagine some poor man watching that video and getting so angry he would want to commit violence (I’m not condoning, just saying, that’s some hard-core provocation with clear malicious intent).
The video illustrates the deception, emotional manipulation, and slavery culture in society, perpetrated by women against men. It’s actually IN the mainstream culture. There is no countervailing “rape culture.” For example, you would never see a similar skit talking about an app for PUAs to help them locate alcoholic or clinically depressed women to have sex with.
@ ConantheContrarian @Dalrock
The source you are looking for is the Greeks. It is they, afterall, who literally placed women on pedestals.
The Bible, New and Old Testament, is thoroughly patriarchal and as you pointed out, embraced and encouraged erotic love of wife. The Greeks may have converted to Christianity, but they brought with them a whole lot of baggage about sex and marriage. Really, a lot of what is wrong about Churchianity today traces back to them.
Campbell’s deconstruction of the humanistic eroticization of storge, that the troubadours talked/wrote/sang about, was a function of growing levels of trust, security and independence
While not contradicting this, it’s worth noting that source material/similarities for Romeo and Juliet date as far back as Ovid and Xenophon (3rd C). While trust and security may make this notion more tenable, it is something that seems to persist in W. Civ’s psyche regardless.
Once again, Lancelot’s chivalry was fake chivalry. He would have been killed by Arthur if he could have managed it.
“The video illustrates the deception, emotional manipulation, and slavery culture in society, perpetrated by women against men. It’s actually IN the mainstream culture.”
That is true, and it is abused that way. I think the actual intent of this sort of thing is similar to the purpose of hazing – to toughen men up and discourage them from acting in the way depicted in the video, which is actually good advice.
In other words, the makers of the video are as critical of courtly love as we are.
“That is the reference I had handy, but Jerome is far from the only one who thought this way. Lewis cites some others that are more contemporary to courtly love. At any rate, Jerome was easy to find because his argument was generally accepted. Even Augustin, who was a moderate on the subject, agreed that a husband should not have passion for his wife.”
Fair enough, just pointing out that there may well have been ulterior motives involved (and likely were in Jerome’s case). As you note, the view he espoused isn’t perfectly biblical. Of course with us now at the opposite extreme in many cases, anything that tends toward lessening the idolatry of both passion (for it’s own sake) and wives is likely good counsel.
@malcolmthecynic
The problem with that argument is we have a thousand years of literary and cultural absorption of the “fake” version. You may read epics like the Song of Roland, but culturally we know what we know of chivalry because the generations between us and the courtly love generation adopted and incorporated the courtly love view.
It is not that unlike our use of the word Malthusian. That Malthus was not a malthusian, and was actually arguing the opposite, doesn’t change the meaning of the word malthusian. And with malthusian we are:
1) Talking about a named individual.
2) Dealing with a mere 200 years of baggage, instead of 1,000.
It is so powerful precisely because we don’t know where it came from. To us it seems it has always been the case, but as Lewis points out it was not.
Also because people have not traveled. In Asia there is no real tradition at all of deference to women (giving them seats, holding the door, etc.) — it isn’t there. Yes, women were protected as reproductive assets (that happened everywhere), but that’s very different from deferring to them as the better/higher/more worthy sex. Simply never developed there. It’s specific to the West, and specifically because of the courtly love tradition which developed into both romantic love as the norm AND the pedestalization of women as the norm culturally.
@ iamadamalan says:
December 14, 2016 at 1:33 pm
“The Bible, New and Old Testament, is thoroughly patriarchal and as you pointed out, embraced and encouraged erotic love of wife. The Greeks may have converted to Christianity, but they brought with them a whole lot of baggage about sex and marriage. Really, a lot of what is wrong about Churchianity today traces back to them.”
That’s a really good point. A people’s thinking is largely shaped by their religion. Look at the relationship between Zeus and his wife/sister, Hera.
In Greek mythology, Zeus constantly cheated on Hera with mortal women and boys. He even made one of his male lovers, a boy named Ganymede, an immortal and his cup bearer in Olympus. The word “catamite” (a slave boy kept for sex) derives from Ganymede.
Greek mythology presents Hera as a jealous, nagging wife who constantly attempts to track down Zeus’s many lovers and bastards, and in many cases attempts to kill them.
High-born Greek marriages reflected this dynamic. Wives were reserved for child bearing, while husbands indulged in sex with slave girls and boys and other men’s wives. Wives were supposed to be chaste, but they clandestinely indulged in sex with other women’s husbands, slaves and each other. Thus…
Romans 1:26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
@ Novaseeker says:
December 14, 2016 at 1:55 pm
“In Asia there is no real tradition at all of deference to women (giving them seats, holding the door, etc.) — it isn’t there.”
True. I remember the first time I saw an Iraqi man strolling empty handed while his two wives walked behind him carrying heavy loads of firewood on their heads. Wives are a combination of
The courtly love dynamic does exist, though. Most ancient Arabic or Persian love poems are about some ambitious young man seducing a Sultan’s beautiful, neglected young wife.
“Yes, women were protected as reproductive assets (that happened everywhere), but that’s very different from deferring to them as the better/higher/more worthy sex. Simply never developed there. It’s specific to the West, and specifically because of the courtly love tradition which developed into both romantic love as the norm AND the pedestalization of women as the norm culturally.”
It’s also a function of taking Peter’s admonition to husbands to dwell with their wives “with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel” to a level that Peter never intended.
I don’t think anyone would mind putting the wife first IF she acknowledged and appreciated it. And if there were reciprocation with…. well other things that a husband might like!
Kaminsky says: December 14, 2016 at 12:18 pm
Wow that Schumer skit had ALL KINDS of physical appearance shaming aimed at men. I thought we were moving on from that as a society.
it had all kinds of Game related wisdom and also pointed up a post Vox made today about why women aren’t funny.
and it’s being portrayed by a “Powerful Wimmynz”.
Boxer says: December 14, 2016 at 10:19 am
To be fair to the original authors, The Lewis (and Dalrock) interpretation seems very one-sided and uncharitable. There are many ways you were supposed to compensate for the lack of eros, to “atone for the sin” of being stuck in a marriage where the fire is waning.
that’s because you are inverting cause and effect.
as Dalrock has already extensively documented, it is the heterodoxy of the Catholic Church which claims that eros between the married is sinful and that this concept was promulgated as Dogma for centuries before Courtly Love existed.
your assertion about about lack of eros in the marriage due to poverty is absurd rationalization, poorer families tend to have MORE children, not less. were the Greeks ‘poor’? were the Roman emperors? there’s quite a bit of pornography amongst the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the art of the Hindu Indians, obvious expressions of eros. did Saul not have eros for any of his wives? we know that Solomon did and i find it hard to credit that you would consider him “poor”.
at what point is a society no longer “poor”, that they have enough wealth that they can maintain eros?
“It’s also a function of taking Peter’s admonition to husbands to dwell with their wives “with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel” to a level that Peter never intended.”
Which is most ironic considering the end result was the complete inversion of that verse; with men being seen as spiritually weaker and women the superior.
Which begs the question, how can we ‘give honor to the wife as to the weaker vessel’ without falling into the FI trap?
“The woman is the glory of the man and the man is the glory of God.”
Almost no one gets this. It means that men worship God and women worship men, most specifically wives of husbands but all women in general of men. In the world, which is contrary to God, and the church, which is willingly open to temptation of adulterous relationships, conventional wisdom [by definition 180º to scripture] places women in some fashion in the position of being worshiped. That gives her, by definition, authority. This is an ‘abomination’ to the Lord. This has been going on in all cultures but – comically — almost always in Christian influenced cultures and almost never in Eastern and Mid Eastern cultures.
This is the battle. It is to undermine God’s authority and the practical way to do this is to undermine men, His authority on earth.
Dear Bob:
You clearly didn’t understand my retelling of Campbell’s point (join desiderian in that corner). I’m sure I’m partly at fault for that, but the fault isn’t entirely mine. Rollo and others seemed to follow.
Glossary-
Humanism: as in Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration on The Dignity of Man
eros, storge, philia, agape: as in Classical Greek.
The Catholic Church does not hold that eroticism in a marriage is sinful, provided it is conjoined with storge and agape. These concepts all go together in the sacrament of marriage, and the elevation or deprecation of any one or two over any other one or two is sinful, but none are sinful in their own right. (Source, the 200-year old Jesuit priest who taught my freshman Religion and Human Experience course). Really, this is common knowledge among Catholics, and most people who know anything about Catholicism. It’s the reason that most forms of birth control are forbidden (the elevation of eroticism and recreation over procreation and human intimacy).
In the first place, you don’t understand what the word eros means. In the second, yes, even the wealthiest of the Greeks, in classical antiquity, lived in material conditions that were considerably more impoverished than the average inhabitant of 16th Century France.
Saul was “poor” in the way everyone in his historical situation were. Neither Saul nor anyone else in his frame had the ability to survive long in the world if they were intentional actors outside their collective. That’s a function of this sort of impoverishment.
The word “poor” is your word, and it’s a poor one, but it’ll do.
In historical terms, 16th Century France saw a freeing up of resources that led to a freeing up of the libido. Children were increasingly able to survive exclusive of the dictates of their own parents, and the social power of the landlord and priest were on the wane. This opened up an aperture in the social fabric which allowed for people (esp. young people) to rebel against the norms and start banging who they wanted, with or without society’s blessing. This is Campbell’s take on the eruption of courtly love (amor) — which is a synthetic ideal, an eroticized spiritual love.
That the Lewis-Dalrock thesis is uncharitable is a point I made first, but Malcolm The Cynic made best (far better than I did, anyway). Dalrock’s counterexample, while compelling, seems to me to have the elements of an appeal to popularity. The fact that the most popular troubadour stories concerned sexing up other men’s wives and idolizing women doesn’t mean that those were the most representative of the zeitgeist. That’d be like historians, 1000 years from now, talking about how our culture was sadomasochistic because our most popular books were crapola like 50 Shades of Grey. Sure, lots of people like racy stories, but the broad masses of people always tend to gravitate to the lower forms of entertainment, and those moods aren’t reflective of the totality of culture.
I hope this is helpful.
Boxer
My father would have described himself as chivalrous – he would give up his seat for a woman, and would make his feelings forcefully known if someone wasn’t behaving decently.
This, incidentally, is something that no man should EVER do for any woman today unless she is elderly or clearly physically disabled. Otherwise he is courting (i.e., enabling) nothing but trouble.
@Oscar
As Boxer noted, digging out from under the avalanche of courtly love would be the first step in doing this. I’m with you on that task, but I’m not sure the rest of the trip is really necessary. Chivalry has a meaning in our culture, and even if you start talking about the version you have in mind, and even if you always stop and take great pains to try to separate it from the courtly love concept of chivalry/romantic love, most people will still think of the latter even when they think they understand.
Even worse, the version you want to restore was the precursor to the same disease we are trying to recover from. Song of Roland was written just before the age of courtly love, and recounts an ethic that ostensibly (and perhaps accurately) existed several hundred years prior. And even here, it mixes Christian ideas with very unbiblical ones. Orphans and widows? Sure, we can find that in the OT. Defending the honor of women? I don’t think that is really a biblical concept, at least not as it is presented. To the extent that you can find NT or OT examples of this, they will be of something very different than the chivalry you are subscribing to, and of course this is an invitation to dive in head first into courtly love.
Oscar
If there’s anything war taught me, it’s that my instincts are pretty good, but I need to be ready to go against them when necessary.
Leaving aside the issue of intuition vs. instinct…
When your instincts tell you to ignore about one thousand years of human history are they right?
Or should you consider ignoring them?
@Boxer
It isn’t about the zeitgeist 1,000 years ago, but about the zeitgeist for the last 1,000 years. I think Lewis is right that this was a more major transformation than the Renaissance when it comes to our current way of seeing the world.
As for the appeal to authority, I’m merely speaking practically. You have to know I’m right, as you are forever trying to corral the term “Marxist” to mean what Marx actually advocated, one worldwide web commenter at a time. And you are dealing with 50 fewer years of acretion than Malthus, and 850 less than “chivalry”. You are free to have your own separate meaning for any given word, and in your case (marxism) you might even be right. But it still doesn’t change the fact that you are using the word differently than is overwhelmingly accepted.
Similarly, people are free to spell their children’s names as unusually as they like. But they should understand that for their child’s life, every time they tell someone their name they will have to include (and probably repeat several times) this unique spelling. This wouldn’t be different if the unique spelling happens to be the common version in 8th century France. You could be “right” in how you spelled your child’s name from that perspective, but you would still have to educate one person at a time on what you think the right spelling is.
Dalrock,
Sure. I’m just saying, that really isn’t what chivalry originally was. You’re wrong about that.
@Malcolm
You are right. I should have been more clear. I added an asterisk (with a note at the end) clarifying that there was an earlier version than what we commonly think of here:
The phrasing “what we commonly call chivalry” was in the original version, but the asterisk is new. I also added the part in parenthesis here:
Malory really can’t put it any clearer. Here is his code of chivalry:
This is the oath of a Knight of King Arther’s Round Table and should be for all of us to take to heart. I will develop my life for the greater good. I will place character above riches, and concern for others above personal wealth, I will never boast, but cherish humility instead, I will speak the truth at all times, and forever keep my word, I will defend those who cannot defend themselves, I will honor and respect women, and refute sexism in all its guises, I will uphold justice by being fair to all, I will be faithful in love and loyal in friendship, I will abhor scandals and gossip-neither partake nor delight in them, I will be generous to the poor and to those who need help, I will forgive when asked, that my own mistakes will be forgiven, I will live my life with courtesy and honor from this day forward.
Note this:
I will be faithful in love and loyal in friendship
This is DIRECTLY counter to the concept of courtly love. You literally can’t get further. What Lancelot did was a clear break of the code of chivalry and the oath of Arthur’s knights.
Now, the oath does say this:
I will honor and respect women, and refute sexism in all its guises
…But it’s worth it to remember not to read more into that than what is written. Over and over again in Malory and in Arthurian legend generally men who are seduced by women are shown as sinful and weak; see also “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight”. “Honor, respect, and refute sexism” means what it means; nothing more.
@Malcolm
Heh. I can’t help but add that I was wrong when I wrote that it turns out I was wrong about chivalry.
I think the actual intent of this sort of thing is similar to the purpose of hazing – to toughen men up and discourage them from acting in the way depicted in the video, which is actually good advice.
In other words, the makers of the video are as critical of courtly love as we are.
I disagree. At best you could say they are ambivalent, because they understand that courtly love has real advantages. Ideally, they get sex on the carousel, and ego-stroking, gifts, and servitude from the “courters.” I’ve known many women like this.
Also, most men have limited understanding of game. While most could improve, many will never excel at attracting women despite being excellent providers. They are not temperamentally alpha. The last thing we need to do is “haze” these men. Instead, they need instruction and encouragement. While hard criticism may “toughen up” a man with confidence, the sort of shaming portrayed in this video does nothing to “toughen up” your typical lesser beta. There has to be a big carrot with the stick.
Dalrock @ 3:01 pm:
“Defending the honor of women? I don’t think that is really a biblical concept, at least not as it is presented.”
I suspect it originally had something to do with Alphas in shining armor not bedding the women who flung themselves onto his lance. Knights were restrained by a code of conduct because they had a lot of power and status. Christian men today have neither.
Can you imagine a modern code of chivalry? “Be as sexy as you can without taking advantage of it. Protect your children from your wife. Serve Christ and oppose His Church. Eat only the food you earn while paying your ‘fair share’ of taxes. Show mercy even to people who don’t understand the concept. Obey the law and accept that doing so warrants punishment.”
Similarly, people are free to spell their children’s names as unusually as they like.
Ok, Darlok.
http://masteroforion.gamepedia.com/Darlok
Dear Dalrock:
Please see below:
Your points have merit, but while I have to admit you’re right, generally, I have reservations about the specifics. Marx has an identifiable corpus. If someone tells me “Marx advocated free love” it’s pretty easy to disprove. He himself was a mongamous, who had too many kids to count in a pretty happy marriage. His work, in context, doesn’t ever advocate for any such thing, and I’m motivated by a sadistic enjoyment of torturing people who have never read him into endless contortions in their futile attempts to justify these claims.
In the case of “chivalry,” we’ve got lots of competing sources, and a much wider lexical range, so I think we can agree that there’s a lot more room for people to disagree in good faith about what was or wasn’t the dominant idea back in those old days. I’m totally open to the idea that you’re right specifically, I just think there’s too much I don’t know to agree with you specifically, yet. (I haven’t read Lewis yet, much less the other good sources people have been citing).
Best,
Boxer
I will honor and respect women, and refute sexism in all its guises
LOL! Seriously? The word “sexism” existed centuries ago? Riiiight. Sure it did. Do you understand how an anachronism like that destroys credibility?
Whatever “chivalry” was, it existed within a larger cultural system that included feudalism. Good luck with any attempt to revive that. What we are left with now is a shambling, undead system that demands men bow down to anyone with a vagina, no matter what condition it’s in or what she’s been up to. It damages relations between men and women in a variety of ways.
Maybe AMC can create a spinoff show from The Walking Dead, something like Zombie White Knights.
(Scratch that; the sexism line is a bad translation. Properly:
…and always to do ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen and widows succour…
That is, to give assistance to unmarried women in times of hardship and distress, far more limited and specific than a silly “refute sexism” command, and related directly to the concept of women as the weaker vessel.)
AR,
You beat me to it. I was suspicious about the line and looked up a better translation.
@Malcolm
Malory’s version comes over three hundred years after the version I referenced by Chrétien de Troyes. Neither is of course the originator of the Arthurian legend, although as I understand it de Troyes’ version was the first with Lancelot as a major character. So de Troyes didn’t break Malory’s code, as Malory hadn’t been born yet. To the extent that they differ, it is the other way around.
But even then, you minimize the chivalric genuflecting to/pedistalization of women that Malory includes.
with
This isn’t trivial. It is, given the topic at hand (especially the larger topic of the sphere), huge. This is a massive shift from the thinking of the Bible, and from the frame of the Apostle Paul when he wrote (trigger warning!):
Sexist!
Sexist!
Sexist!
Not to mention Numbers 30, etc.
[Edit: I now see the corrected translation you posted as I was writing my own comment.]
People need to stop “Translating” Malory at all, actually. He wrote in English; all one really needs to do if they’re so inclined is update the spelling.
Dalrock,
You are quite right about the sexism line. It didn’t sit right to me and I corrected it.
[D: I saw that after I posted my comment. I left my comment intact with a note at the bottom.]
As for de Troyes, I don’t know him as well. All I can tell you is that in Malory’s version, the oath is directly and clearly broken by Lancelot. It can’t be clearer. Courtly love is utterly contrary to chivalry.
In the context of the time, I don’t think any reasonable person would have a problem with this. ladies = noble women, married to royal men
damsels = chaste unmarried women, daughters of your friends
gentlewomen = married women, wives of your fellow citizens
widows = women who may be single moms, and who have never divorced a good man
The problem in contemporary society is not the sensibility of chivalry, as it’s expressed in this phrase, but the paucity of women who actually fit into these categories. In our society, girls start having sex at about 14 (sometimes younger), few women behave like ladies, and almost half of adult women will divorce their man — most of these totally without any justification.
If a man wants to be chivalrous in this day and age, he should swallow the bitter pill, accept the code in its totality, and treat skanks, divorcées, and young trollops with the dignity their stations deserve (that’d be none).
@Boxer
I don’t know if it came through, but I have some sympathy for you here. I used the example of Malthus because this one really struck me when I actually read the essay where he is supposed to be predicting overpopulation. What he actually wrote was that a pie in the sky anarchist’s model would result in overpopulation, as the anarchist wasn’t taking into account the mechanisms in place that prevent us from over-stripping our food supply. Malthus was describing forces that prevent overpopulation, and it is claimed he was predicting doom. It is absurd, but I realized some time ago I’m not going to be able to change this popular (and really quite funny) misconception.
I think you would enjoy the book by Lewis, and you will only have to read the first chapter to get his history of the concepts. After that it is a deep dive into specific pieces, something you are no doubt better qualified for than I am. I confess that I pretty much gave up half way through the second chapter. Lewis has much to teach, but I got the 80% I was after in the first chapter and I have much else in my planned reading list so I switched back to puritan history.
I also think you would enjoy The Death of Christian Britain that I referenced in another recent post. Brown uses a good deal of (post?)modern literary theory to present his case, and several times references Foucault. I was willing to forgive the latter, because the book is otherwise solid. But I suspect that would be a positive for you and not a negative.
As Boxer noted, digging out from under the avalanche of courtly love would be the first step in doing this. I’m with you on that task, but I’m not sure the rest of the trip is really necessary. Chivalry has a meaning in our culture, and even if you start talking about the version you have in mind, and even if you always stop and take great pains to try to separate it from the courtly love concept of chivalry/romantic love, most people will still think of the latter even when they think they understand.
Correct. You will never be able to get out from under the trajectory that conversation will lead you into.
It’s like trying to explain Orthodoxy to the vast majority of American Christians I meet.
Average person: “Orthodox? So, is that like Orthodox Jew? With the black hats and the sideburns?”
Me: “No. I’m Christian.”
AP: “So is it like Catholic?”
Me: “Sort of. We recognize each others Apostolic succession, but we are not in communion with each other. You kind of have to read about the great schism of 1054 to really get it.”
AP: “So Orthodox is not the same as Orthodox Jew?”
Me: Blowing my own head off gesture
@sipcode
Its a good point. Glory and image point in that direction but I’m not sure its conclusive at first glance. I get real leery when someone starts talking about women worshiping men and not God. By what do you mean worship? How is that not idolatry?
There are women who are into worshiping men; usually confined to a fetish. So too also do other scriptures tread awfully close: commanding submission to husband ‘as unto God’, to reverence him, and to love him (love and obedience being integral to our worship of God).
Dalrock: Chivalry (as we know it*) has always been an expression of abject groveling. This is one of the reasons that adultery was a core component …
Lewis describes the groveling and humiliation involved in the poetry of courtly love and it is truly astounding. Gladly bearing the deepest humiliation at the hands of the woman was seen as the greatest virtue.
The other reason courtly love had to be adulterous is because it was considered shameful for a man to have passion for his own wife:
Ah hell, I knew all this about Courtly Love back in (Catholic) high school in the 1970s. I thought everyone did, 🙂 We were taught about Courtly Love in some European History or Literature class.
But as I learned it, the highest form of Courtly Love was chaste. No adultery involved. The Knight would have a pure love for his Lady, never to be consummated. Serving her without expectation of reward, other than maybe her handkerchief or nod of approval.
This is why a man could not love his wife. Because their relationship was polluted with sex.
I actually thought Courtly Love was quite romantic, though I disagreed that a man could not love his wife in courtly fashion, or have sex with her.
Excalibur came out soon thereafter, when I was at college. It was my favorite movie for a while: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082348/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Excalibur reflected all the ideals of Courtly Love. Sir Lancelot loving Guinevere, with no initial intention of sexing her.
By the way, in another part of reality:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/cuckold-fetish-sex-relationships-men-want-partners-cheat-new-high-a7423616.html
A self-confessed cuckold has revealed how he gives his wife ‘points’ based on the sexual acts she carries out with other men – one of the thousands of males turned on by one of society’s most taboo subjects.
The fetish of cuckolding – where men allow other men to have sexual relationships with their wives – is on the rise.
Sure, it’s a clickbait article, and some of the hits on Google searches surely have to do with the word “cuckservative” becoming more widely known. But still, this is the kind of stuff that you only read about in Gibbon’s Decline and fall. If it hits normalization, it wil be coming to a church near you, too.
Looks to me like AF-BB is now moving on to AF-Beta Cucks. That’s got to be a great way to raise stable, responsible children to adulthood. The blended family becomes, hmm, the blenderized family?
Some men already recognized the problem of chivalric love:
https://gynocentrism.com/2013/07/14/the-birth-of-chivalric-love/
Chivalric love was invented in the 12th century by noble women who unimpressed by the unrefined nature of the men at the time specifically knights. Thought to reform such men by shaming them and fixing their flaws through the worship of women.
Chivalry prior to the 12th century would be very similar or identical to the Samurai code of Bushido. If one wants to know true chivalry then one need only look at Bushido.
CS Lewis was a great Christian apologist. His personal life, however was sad, with refraining from marriage until late in life then marrying a distant relative.It all ended badly.
As a Professor of literature, he would have been immersed in literature that would have made him think along romantic / chivalrous lines.
The code of chivalry originally was about fighting fair: Do not strike the horse, do not strike the wounded, be honorable in victory. This sometimes backfired, as at the Battle of Crecy, where French knights ran through the ranks of English infantry and attempted to capture other knights for ransom, only to be unhorsed by uneducated footsoldiers and stabbed to death.The code, however extended right up to WW2. In 1945 a battalion of German Panther tanks were armed with a new weapon – night vision. They were extraordinarily successful as T-34 destroyers, but the general in charge thought it was unfair because it wasn’t very chivalrous!
Point is, Chivalry was about war, and it was only when it was grafted onto the treatment of women
https://gynocentrism.com/
that things started to get perverted. Even then, the code would still have been workable, until feminists demanded, and political manginas helped, dismantle the female side of the pact, without dismantling the male side.
Amy Schumer promised that she would leave to Spain if Trump was elected. She should be given the one way ticket. And her faux feminism is multi-pronged hypocrisy. She is perfectly happy to use her sexuality to pay a taxi driver, but woe betide a 17-year old young man who tweets something she doesn’t like:
Vile hypocrite.
@Jeff
Man does not put wife 1st but God. Adam put his wife 1st rather than God. And now because of this we all die.
More on the Schumer vid;
Rewatch and notice how all the nauseating betas are wearing plaid, cotton shirts that fit well. You know…normal.
Don’t be normal. You gotta be decked out as some cliché archetype of masculinity; tortured artist, hipster, bad-boy ex-con, alt-rocker, tatted up biker, hip-hop idiot, blue-collar redneck etc. Now you don’t have to be any of those things, you just have to wear the gear.
If you go out in slacks and a cotton, plaid shirt…..EWWWWWW. At that point you’re not an archetype that she can mention to her friends.
Imagine a woman in a decent, flower dress being seen as disgusting. How much of a surplus of good women would there have to be for men to be disgusted by decent, normal clothing? How acute would our criticism of women have to be (due to overabundance) so that a woman in neutral slacks and a blouse becomes an emblem of disgust. That’s how overwhelming the surplus of good men is in the US. No one even knows it.
Imagine a woman in a decent, flower dress being seen as disgusting. How much of a surplus of good women would there have to be for men to be disgusted by decent, normal clothing? How acute would our criticism of women have to be (due to overabundance) so that a woman in neutral slacks and a blouse becomes an emblem of disgust.
Not disgust, no, because men’s attraction is more purely physical and looks beyond clothing, really, but it’s notable that in major metros very, very few attractive women dress like that. Most dress much more edgily in sexual terms, even if how they dress isn’t seen as edgy (because everyone is dressing like that!). In my office, when we went to casual every day, the secretaries started turning up in skin tight “painted on” jeans and leggings, tight, low blouses and 4+ inch heels. At this point that is “normal” for women here — it isn’t seen as provocative sexually, due to strength in numbers (if everyone’s provoking, no-one is). Certainly “normal feminine” clothing is on the out, and the only women who are dressed that way are way post-wall unattractive women. Heck the attractive ones in their 40s and 50s in my office dress that way, too!
Point: *everyone* of both sexes is dressing sexually provocatively in they are in any way attractive. This is to be expected in a society which has elevated sex and lust to being the absolute center of life “for as long as you’ve ‘still got it’ “. At this point, it doesn’t mark someone as a player or a slut, because it’s ubiquitous. Best you can say is that people are followers and sheep, really.
I agree with you on all of that but I think my point wasn’t clear enough. I was reacting to the Schumer vid in which decent plaid shirts were chosen to top off the loathsomeness of the beta-orbiters. Not nerdy super hero T-shirts or childish striped T-shirts or stupidly tight clothes or something like that which would have fit the skit better. But all four guys in the end were in classic, respectable menswear that had a decent fit and that apparently added to what losers they were.
I saw something in that actually. It’s not some important observation (because it’s just a comedy skit) but it was somewhat revealing. Basically that a solid, conservative adult male decorum is loathsome just due to its association with males. So I tried to flip it around. I can’t imagine the day that normal women in normal, adult clothing will be loathsome. Does it mean that they have to be seen as attractive? Not at all, but I can’t imagine the scenario where men are so spoiled and there is such an overabundance of choices for us that we get so far off the rails that decent, female clothing becomes symbolic of nausea, simply because it is associated with women in general.
I get your point that women are moving away from classic wear anyway, but that doesn’t make classic wear something that anyone could see as repellent just due to its association with females. I actually love women wearing girly girl stuff, heels and nice dresses, no cleavage or excess leg necessary at all. But even for guys who don’t like it, it’s just there. It’s just adult females being adults. No one is going to downgrade Bella Hadid for wearing a conservative flower dress. Imagine being so bored with excess options that male critical antennae becomes so overactive and the zeitgeist so hateful of females that normal, feminine clothing sickens us just because it reminds us of females. That’s where they (females) are at with us right now. A classic male shirt used a prop to enhance the grossness factor.
If I were to make a skit which required a clan of horrible women, I wouldn’t think that putting them in mainstream, classic, decent female clothing would add to the effect.
(Much ado about nothing, sorry)
Boxer @3:55,
You are quite right.
“Average person: “Orthodox? So, is that like Orthodox Jew?”
Me: “Yes. If you’re going to do something, might as well do it right (which is what Orthodox means).”
Always better to lead with the positive than the negative.
@ Dalrock says:
December 14, 2016 at 3:01 pm
“Chivalry has a meaning in our culture, and even if you start talking about the version you have in mind, and even if you always stop and take great pains to try to separate it from the courtly love concept of chivalry/romantic love, most people will still think of the latter even when they think they understand.”
Men require honor. Honor requires a code of honor for a man to strive towards. Whether we call it chivalry or not, I really don’t care. I think the chivalric code makes a lot of sense because of its Christian roots, but I’m open to suggestions.
@ Anonymous Reader says:
December 14, 2016 at 3:08 pm
“When your instincts tell you to ignore about one thousand years of human history are they right?”
Where did I state that we should “ignore about one thousand years of human history”? Can you provide a quote?
Boxer,
“You clearly didn’t understand my retelling of Campbell’s point (join desiderian in that corner).”
How so? Genuine question. I often get the sense that you’re well ahead of my thinking, at times embarrassingly far, but I can never quite be sure that you’re not just pulling the wool over my eyes. With, say, Novaseeker, I don’t have that problem. He’s just straightforwardly ahead in an easily verifiable manner.
An interesting scene from Game of Thrones, wherein Sir Jamie laments the impossibility of a knight living up to the Code of Chivalry. Too many conflicting vows.
Oscar
Where did I state that we should “ignore about one thousand years of human history”? Can you provide a quote?
Earlier you wrote:
My point is that we need to reclaim chivalry for what it is supposed to be
Song of Roland, right? You insist that we need this now, as part of reclaiming marriage. Yet Christians were marrying for how long before then? Maybe 1,000 years give or take? Christians were in the military for sure after the Roman general Constantine became emperor, at least 600 years before Song of Roland. So you insist that man-made customs from 1,000 years ago are crucial to modern civilization, because of something or other, even though they really were just temporary things. For sure Augustine and Aquinas didn’t know a thing about chivalry – it had not been invented yet.
Just how important do you really think chivalry and feudalism are in reality, given that Christians were able to get along without those things for hundreds and hundreds of years? Is the form more important than the goal?
The problem in contemporary society is not the sensibility of chivalry, as it’s expressed in this phrase, but the paucity of women who actually fit into these categories. In our society, girls start having sex at about 14 (sometimes younger), few women behave like ladies, and almost half of adult women will divorce their man — most of these totally without any justification.
THIS. The whole concept is rendered irrelevant when there is no one to whom it applies. It’s about as relevant as discussing how to care for woolly mammoths.
If a man wants to be chivalrous in this day and age, he should swallow the bitter pill, accept the code in its totality, and treat skanks, divorcées, and young trollops with the dignity their stations deserve (that’d be none).
Large (and growing) numbers of men are reacting in exactly this way. Given that fewer and fewer people pay any attention anymore to any formal behavioral codes (this being admittedly not a good thing), not only are fewer and fewer men familiar with either “chivalry” or “courtly love” as concepts, but most would reject out of hand the idea that what passes for “women” today* merit any such treatment even if they were familiar with them.
(* Tragically, many young men today have never encountered a real woman)
There does not seem to be very much romantic love or female-worship in the Old Testament stories. For example, patriarch Abraham’s wife, in her feminine weakness, distrusted God’s messianic promise, and she was rebuked for it:
“He said, “I will surely return to you at this time next year; and behold, Sarah your wife will have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent door, which was behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; Sarah was past childbearing. Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I have become old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?” And the LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, when I am so old?’ “Is anything too difficult for the LORD? At the appointed time I will return to you, at this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.” Sarah denied it however, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid. And He said, “No, but you did laugh.” (Genesis 18:10-15)”
The patriarch Job was also tempted by his weak, despairing wife.
“Then his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die!” But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” (Job 2:9-10)
Look at Proverbs 31. The Hebrew texts that speak of a woman’s “honor” are better translated as her “value”. A woman’s value are in her chastity, sobriety, etc. So, to guard a woman’s honor, is to keep her chaste and prevent her from falling into sin. Basically, Song of Roland code of chivalry recognizes that women are weak and depraved little sluts to the depths of their souls; they need help to be good.
My eyesight is not what it once was: I thought this was all about Courtney Love – who amazingly has never been divorced and is a widow and thus in need of chivalry.
Did Chivalry ever really exist, I wonder, or was it only the elite in their masochism or altruism who were wealthy enough to indulge in what is a charming but perhaps impracticable ideal. Is the Geneva convention its modern counterpart? What value chivalry when at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 (referred to above) 1,500 French prisoners including many members of the saleable aristocracy were murdered for fear that they would pick up the the weapons of their fallen comrades and resume fighting. When ones force is greatly outnumbered one must resort to such measures to ensure a safe passage back to Calais. Were the long bowmen Welsh or English? Happily, a journalist embedded with the troops and whom we only know him by his initials W.S. recorded the King’s address to the troops: “and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon St Brexit’s Day”. That journalist also refers to Captains Gower, Fluellen, Morris and Jamy respectively English, Welsh, Irish and Scots – so the matter is unclear although it might be Fake News.
As someone pointed out upthread, if there ever was a “chivalric code” (the military/war kind) this was one of the final acts of it, in WWII.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brown_and_Franz_Stigler_incident
I have the print of the Steiger/Brown incident up in my home.
It has nothing to do with women. In fact most women glaze over when I tell the accompanying story.
@ Anonymous Reader says:
December 15, 2016 at 12:16 am
“Earlier you wrote:
My point is that we need to reclaim chivalry for what it is supposed to be
Song of Roland, right? You insist that we need this now, as part of reclaiming marriage. Yet Christians were marrying for how long before then? Maybe 1,000 years give or take? Christians were in the military for sure after the Roman general Constantine became emperor, at least 600 years before Song of Roland. So you insist that man-made customs from 1,000 years ago are crucial to modern civilization, because of something or other, even though they really were just temporary things. For sure Augustine and Aquinas didn’t know a thing about chivalry – it had not been invented yet.
Just how important do you really think chivalry and feudalism are in reality, given that Christians were able to get along without those things for hundreds and hundreds of years? Is the form more important than the goal?”
First, I’ll point out that you were unable to provide a quote in which I stated that we should “ignore about one thousand years of human history”. The reason can’t provide such a quote is because I made no such statement. The reason I made no such statement is because I believe no such thing.
Next, I’ll answer your last question.
“Is the form more important than the goal?”
No. And I never stated that it was. As I wrote above in response to Dalrock, I think the chivalric code makes a lot of sense because of its Christian roots, but I’m open to suggestions. Do you have any? By the way, to which goal are you referring in that question?
“So you insist that man-made customs from 1,000 years ago are crucial to modern civilization, because of something or other…”
Because of what or other? Can you answer that question? Have you given it much thought?
@ Scott says:
December 15, 2016 at 5:33 am
“I have the print of the Steiger/Brown incident up in my home.
It has nothing to do with women. In fact most women glaze over when I tell the accompanying story.”
That’s because they don’t get it, and they shouldn’t need to get it, because it’s not their place to get it.
@ feeriker says:
December 15, 2016 at 1:19 am
“If a man wants to be chivalrous in this day and age, he should swallow the bitter pill, accept the code in its totality, and treat skanks, divorcées, and young trollops with the dignity their stations deserve (that’d be none).”
Exactly. Treat honorable women (and men) honorably and treat dishonorable women (and men) not at all. This is what I teach my sons and daughters.
Reward constructive behavior with honor, and punish destructive behavior with ostracism. That’s been the non-violent way to convince people to behave constructively since before recorded history because It works. Periodically, cultures forget that fact. The culture rots from the inside, collapses and the cycle starts over again.
Scott believes that our culture already passed the point of no return. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but either way it’ll be men who hold each other to a standard who either prevent our culture from flying off the cliff or rebuild in the ruins. As long as that standard is based on Biblical principles, I’m open to suggestions.
@infowarrior1:
Bushido is insane unless you understand that Japanese Culture has no conception of “Trust” anything like we take for granted in the West. We understand Trust in the Christian context: you are responsible for your actions & yours alone. That’s pretty much not true in any other culture, as you are responsible for your family’s actions as well. So Bushido existed so a Noble could trust his Samurai. It was a Noble-Vassal Trust System. Really nothing more, but it also allowed for a conception of Honor: a deep desire within most Men.
And it really shouldn’t surprise anyone in these parts that an utterly destructive cultural trend was started by Rich Women that wanted to indulge in Fantasy.
On the topic in general, it really comes down to issues of Excitement vs Righteousness. Sin vs Evil and the way that the excitement associated with most Sin. The adulterous lover is, at the end, the “taboo fling”, which serves the Risk-based Excitement very well. All dovetailing into Female Hypergamy at the same time.
Opus @ 4:17 am:
“Did Chivalry ever really exist, I wonder, or was it only the elite in their masochism or altruism who were wealthy enough to indulge in what is a charming but perhaps impracticable ideal.”
It existed because knights had great power that had to be restrained. They were liabilities in peacetime, like Special Forces with nobody to fight and not much supervision. This when a lifetime of devotion to martial skills would give one man the ability to defeat twenty men of lesser skill. Knights often resorted to thuggery out of greed or boredom, were the Alphas of the day (the Baron/King typically being inaccessible while knights traveled a lot) and had the skill at arms to unseat most local governments. That was why knights existed, after all, to be the military champions that conscripts were not. A compromise between the expense of a standing army and the quality of farmers with spears.
Chivalry was created to prevent such abuses. Such a code today would be just another burden of performance upon the backs of men without chests.
Classical: Chivalry means “manners of the war-horseman”
Modern: Chivalry means “whatever manners the war-horseman finds useful”
Post-modern: Chivalry means whatever the speaker of the word intends.
@Oscar
I’ve said similar in comments and posts, but I now think this is wrong. It is a category error to burden un-horsed men with codes of horsemanship. Most men will never have war horses, or their modern equivalents.
To give us an idea of what one would require for a modern chivalry, let’s look at the military. Today, the US Army’s modern equivalent of a member of the cavalry (war horse, armor, sword, squire, and supplies provided by serfs from your land) is a tank/armored artillery and crew, or a helicopter and crew. That’s representative of the power difference between a knight and a peasant or citizen.
As well, knights had incredible freedom of social movement. They could expect other nobles to feed and house them. They could demand serfs to provide the same. Feudalism makes that system run. So you can’t have knights without feudalism, nor, therefore, chivalry.
Whatever the system we have in mind for men, it should be a code for men. It should reflect the realities of the material world; for example that fact that I have no vehicle of overwhelming force that needs to be strictly regimented. I think that the code laid out in the NT is enough for most men; considering that I know no one who meets it. Warriors need a different, additional, code.
@Dalrock
The comparison of chivalry to Malthusian reminds me of one of my pet peeves: Middle Class. Today “Middle Class” is used to reference plumbers, IT engineers (bit plumbers), and so forth. But they are Working Class. They aspire to MC, but they are not. MC are lawyers, doctors, judges, accountants, bankers, and other professionals. Obama played into the WC aspirations when he proposed a tax hike on those he called “rich” and making $250,000 or more per year. In reality, $250K/year is about where the MC begins, from a financial perspective. He used the
delusionsaspirations and misapprehensions of the WC to sell a dead-typical socialist attack on the actual MC.There are entire books on the cult of “courtly love” out there, by the way. It appears to be a deeper puddle than most people would think. There’s surely a lot of No True Courtly Love arguments that could be had, too.
Never mind all that. We can all look around, especially with The Glasses, and see people who have adulterous affairs. There are physical affairs, such as one-time cheating on a trip; there are emotional affairs, such as becoming so enamored of a colleague at work that he / she become more important than family members. There are long term affairs that include both physical, sexual, components and emotional components. I’m not laying out anything new, but I do want to clarify the fact that it’s possible to have an emotional affair where no sex happens, but a transfer of loyalty still occurs.
This matters because while physical, sexual, affairs are obvious adultery to most people, you can get a “yes-but” kind of circular argument or a No True Affair falllacy fest going over emotional affairs. This is because it’s a fuzzy line. The legal secretary who is really dedicated to the partners she works for, but who scrupulously never allows any kind of touch is not engaged in an affair; however, if she also acts like a teenager with a crush any time the top senior partner is in the room and she is more concerned with his wellbeing than the condition of her own husband…is certainly emotionally entangled. Her hypergamy is engaged. She has a “work-husband” whom she favors and a real husband she neglects, because he doesn’t measure up to her vision of the Other Man.
With this wordy preamble setting things up: the purest form of Courtly Love, much beloved by women, looks like an emotional affair. If Sir Doofus is willing to abase himself in many ways just for a lock of Lady Snotty’s hair or a fragment of her scarf, he’s thinking about her all the time. She may not be thinking about him all the time – she may only think about him when he’s being amusing – but she’s still extending attentions to him that are emotionally intimate. What was called “courtly love” now we could call “an emotional affair”.
tl;dr
Courtly Love is merely the way that Hypergamy was served, or serviced, for centuries when women had no reliable contraception. Women don’t need Courtly Love anymore to get what they want both at the conscious and the hindbrain level. Therefore it’s gone. Oh, well, it was never really any use to men anyway.
Oscar
First, I’ll point out that you were unable to provide a quote in which I stated that we should “ignore about one thousand years of human history”. The reason can’t provide such a quote is because I made no such statement. The reason I made no such statement is because I believe no such thing.
Oh, get off your high horse. First you dragged the Song of Roland in. Then you made this statement:
Oscar
My point is that we need to reclaim chivalry for what it is supposed to be
I asked this obvious question:
Should we do that right before reclaiming marriage for what it is supposed to be, or afterwards?
You replied with this:
I don’t know, but my instinct is that we’ll need a code of honor among Christian men in order to reclaim marriage.
You want to reclaim chivarly, because we need a code of honor among Christian men in order to reclaim marriage. You defined “code of honor” in terms of the Song of Roland. Therefore you ignore the history of the first 1,000 years of the Christian Era. Is that clear enough, or do I need to actually go post every single URL from the comment thread so that you can see for yourself what you wrote?
Next, I’ll answer your last question.
“Is the form more important than the goal?”
No. And I never stated that it was. As I wrote above in response to Dalrock, I think the chivalric code makes a lot of sense because of its Christian roots, but I’m open to suggestions. Do you have any? By the way, to which goal are you referring in that question?
Look, all of this is just a rabbit trail away from the topic. Dragging in the Song of Roland is a distraction, not an illumination. The chivalric code is less and less relevant in a country where more and more people self-identify as “no religion”. The chivalric code has degenerated to a one-way deal where some poor suckers (men) pretend that all women are virtuous while women do whatever they want. The chivalric code in reality had both privileges and duties for all people of all stations in life. Since feudalism is long gone, the underpinnings of chivalry are likewise.
Feminism killed chivalry off. Deal with that fact. And again, this is all a rabbit trail. Why can’t you engage the topic of Courtly Love instead? That’s a more interesting question.
@Warner
There does not seem to be very much romantic love or female-worship in the Old Testament stories.
Jerusalem women sang, “Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands”. Their loins were wet for bloody-handed David. Maybe lust rather than love.
Concerning Jacob, “Rachel he loved, but Leah he hated.”
The Song of Solomon isn’t OT stories, but it’s a little funny that an ENTIRE BOOK is dedicated to romantic love.
Female worship in the OT may be seen in Isis worship. It’s not considered a good thing by the Hebrews.
@Gunner Q
It is easy for me to overlook the fact that for Americans those on the other side of the Atlantic ocean will appear an homogenous mass and thus I am entirely happy to accept what you say as to mediaeval Europe – I have never formally studied that historical period. I too look at Europe (where I do not reside) as an homogenous mass and as somewhat different from where I live, for something niggles with me (the English Common Law, Parliament) that tells me that England was rather different – as it usually is – and from what I have read, even towards the end of the middle-ages the English saw themselves as free and thus quite different. Subsequent European visitors attested to that difference.
Dear Dalrock:
Please see below…
It came through, but I did not know the details about Malthus all the same, until this thread. Funny!
I respect people who have not read (death-defyingly boring) books by the bearded economics bro, if they mention him in passing. When I’m in a forum like this one, which has a high degree of literacy, and people trying to source him in arguments, I try to encourage people to use the right words for the task (often eristically).
Thanks! I just found Callum Brown’s book in PDF someplace (I’m sorta terrible that way) and it looks like required reading! I doubt I’m more qualified at reading, writing or arguing than you are, but thank you sincerely for the kind words. You’ve written some pretty compelling stuff here, and seem to blast it out on the regular. It takes me a full week to do something comparable to your (often daily) submissions.
Foucault is a very strange cat. I found Discipline and Punish and Birth of The Clinic interesting, but almost too opaque to manage. I don’t ever see myself trying to get through another one of his books, as the payoff is not worth the price of admission.
Best,
Boxer
Dear Counselor:
lol! I think in many cases the rules of chastity, but not of ritual propriety, were loosed for widows. This comes through in pulp novels and popular cinema. Think of Clint Eastwood, talking to the parson, who excuses himself to go screw… er… to “go check on Widow Jones… She’s been feeling poorly…”
I tend to doubt that even the most charitable (or errant) knight would be paying undue respect to someone with a history of acting so abominably. I am forced to admire her for keeping baby Cobain out of the limelight, but otherwise she’s pretty beastly.
Best,
Boxer
@ Cane Caldo says:
December 15, 2016 at 9:35 am
“Whatever the system we have in mind for men, it should be a code for men. It should reflect the realities of the material world; for example that fact that I have no vehicle of overwhelming force that needs to be strictly regimented. I think that the code laid out in the NT is enough for most men; considering that I know no one who meets it.”
I agree. But an honor code is – by definition – relatively short and easy to memorize, which then makes it easy for a man to discern whether or not he or his peers are striving towards that code. For example, at the Sapper Leaders’ Course, we memorized the Sapper Creed*. At Ranger School they memorize the Ranger Creed, etc.
Has anyone actually summarized the code laid out in the NT in a way that is easy to memorize? I ask that sincerely, because I don’t know of any such summary. Would the Nicene Creed (for example) suffice, or does an honor code have to point out specific behaviors (as opposed to only beliefs) in order to function.
* Again, I recognize this is a military example that doesn’t apply to all men, but the military is pretty much the last place where honor codes are common and enforced, and even there the practice is in jeopardy, which makes it difficult to think of an example that applies to all Christian men.
One of the books I’m currently reading is Pussycats by Martin van Crevald. He brings a different perspective to history and current events; another book on queue is about 4th Generation War. In Pussycats van Crevald is outlining why Western forces keep losing against non-Western forces. He takes some time to discuss the k-12 environment in the West and what it does to boys, as well as some time to discuss the integration of women into the military. It is a thorough book, well written and amply footnoted. Very much worth reading for many men here.
In the section on “women in the military”, an anonymous woman pilot told van Creveld: “Sexual harassment is what I report to my superiors”. There is a nutshell we see where Courtly Love, the NeoVictorians and feminism all combine. It’s not sexual activity per se that is harassment to this pilot, it is sexual activity that she didn’t want. Or didn’t like after she got it. Or had regrets about later on. It’s the same thing as the “preponderance of evidence” standard for rape / sexual assault that has been crammed down into universities in the US. It is built on top of the feminist lie that “Women never lie about rape”, a lie that can only work if women are regarded as inherently truthful, moral, angelic beings – a myth that Victorians took from the romaticized, Sir Walter Scott-like view of Courtly Love in the 19th century, and that neoVictorian White Knight TradCons continue to peddle even now.
tl;dr
There are clear links betwen the cult of Courtly Love and the modern world of false rape / sexual harassment accusations, a weapon that any woman can wield at any time against almost any man…including her husband (or more often, soon-to-be-ex husband).
Over 100 years ago, Nonsense Novels was published, a short book of 10 chapters, each satirizing a popular literary genre.
Chapter 3 is called: Guido the Gimlet of Ghent: A Romance of Chivalry: http://www.online-literature.com/stephen-leacock/nonsense-novels/4/
An excerpt:
The love of Guido and Isolde was of that pure and almost divine type, found only in the middle ages.
They had never seen one another. Guido had never seen Isolde, Isolde had never seen Guido. They had never heard one another speak. They had never been together. They did not know one another.
Yet they loved.
Their love had sprung into being suddenly and romantically, with all the mystic charm which is love’s greatest happiness.
Years before, Guido had seen the name of Isolde the Slender painted on a fence.
He had turned pale, fallen into a swoon and started at once for Jerusalem.
On the very same day Isolde in passing through the streets of Ghent had seen the coat of arms of Guido hanging on a clothes line.
She had fallen back into the arms of her tire-women more dead than alive.
Since that day they had loved.
Isolde would wander forth from the castle at earliest morn, with the name of Guido on her lips. She told his name to the trees. She whispered it to the flowers. She breathed it to the birds. Quite a lot of them knew it. At times she would ride her palfrey along the sands of the sea and call “Guido” to the waves! At other times she would tell it to the grass or even to a stick of cordwood or a ton of coal.
Guido and Isolde, though they had never met, cherished each the features of the other. Beneath his coat of mail Guido carried a miniature of Isolde, carven on ivory. He had found it at the bottom of the castle crag, between the castle and the old town of Ghent at its foot.
How did he know that it was Isolde?
There was no need for him to ask.
His heart had spoken.
The eye of love cannot be deceived.
Dear Desiderian:
I’m just pulling the wool. You’re right in your other assessment though. I think Novaseeker’s easily ahead of both of us.
Best,
Boxer
@ Anonymous Reader says:
December 15, 2016 at 9:57 am
“You defined ‘code of honor’ in terms of the Song of Roland. Therefore you ignore the history of the first 1,000 years of the Christian Era.”
And that’s where you go wrong. I did not “define ‘code of honor’ in terms of the Song of Roland”. I presented the Chivalric Code as a good example of a code of honor, NOT the only example of a code of honor. As I’ve explained multiple times now, I think the Chivalric Code is good because of it’s rooted in Christian principles (and I’m a Christian) and Western Culture (and I like Western Culture), but there are many other honor codes that are also good. As I’ve also said multiple times, I’m open to suggestions.
Men need honor, and honor requires a code of honor. I think using (or adapting) an existing code of honor is better than inventing a new one, but I’m open to suggestions. Do you have any?
“Why can’t you engage the topic of Courtly Love instead? That’s a more interesting question.”
I did on December 14, 2016 at 11:35 am, December 14, 2016 at 1:56 pm and December 14, 2016 at 2:14 pm. Perhaps you’ll find those comments “more interesting”.
Hey Oscar,
You would probably like Jack Donovan’s work, specifically The Way of Men. Donovan used to occasionally contribute to the old Spearhead blog, but now he has his own. He is not a Christian and he’s not married, so most people in the manosphere dismiss him. That’s a shame, because his work is useful.
Always enjoy your posts, by the way. Peace…
Boxer
Oscar @ 10:34 am:
“Has anyone actually summarized the code laid out in the NT in a way that is easy to memorize?”
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and then your neighbor as yourself.’ Mark 12:30-31. I often mentally substitute “Love the Truth” into that for clarity’s sake; too many morons think ‘loving God’ means ‘abetting illegal immigration’ and such, and if you can get a Churchian to claim he “loves the Truth” then you can whip out your Bible and start thumping.
Oscar
Men need honor, and honor requires a code of honor. I think using (or adapting) an existing code of honor is better than inventing a new one, but I’m open to suggestions. Do you have any?
You sure are fond of your rabbit trail. I wonder why? Something about the cult of Courtly Love you would rather not discuss, perhaps?
Ok, I’ll run one step with you:
Why do men need honor, and why does honor require an explicit code, and what does this have to do with the cult of Courtly Love?
Bible doesn’t contain enough code of conduct for you? Need more than that?
Boxer @ 11:03 am:
“[Jack Donovan] is not a Christian and he’s not married, so most people in the manosphere dismiss him. That’s a shame, because his work is useful.”
I dismiss him because he’s openly homosexual. That isn’t a personality flaw, it’s an infectious conscience-killer. If you won’t trust God on this then trust a California urbanite: open sodomy is a metastatic cancer upon society.
Better to trust Karl Marx on economics than a flaming fag on manhood.
@Oscar
But what we think of as a military code really comes from literature that is very often far removed from the actual battle. Song of Roland, according to Infogalactic, was written over the period between 1040 and 1115. It is set, however, in the Battle of Roncevaux in 778, 300 years prior. How much of this code is literary in nature, vs actual history? Does it represent the code of conduct of war fighters who lived 300 years before the author? Does it represent the code of conduct of war fighters at the time it was written? Or is it largely fantasy, coming from the writer’s imagination for the purpose of telling a more compelling story? The best I suspect we can say is the audience of the period were very attracted to these rules. I don’t know that we can say much more than that. We know the people who enjoyed epic poetry loved the idea of chivalry as presented in Song of Roland. But I don’t think this makes it a real military code, any more than the musical South Pacific tells us what WW II in the Pacific was really like.
“and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon St Brexit’s Day”.
I saw what you did there despite being an ocean away. trollololol
Was the Immortal Bard’s speech aimed only at the English? Or was he assuming that the Welsh were too busy shagging sheep on St. Cadwaller’s Day to pay attention to foreign wars?
Anyway, the Welsh bards and archers are immortalized in English culture and history. And peasants didn’t have the time to learn archery…they were too busy farming…only yeomen had that kind of luxury.
@ Boxer says:
December 15, 2016 at 11:03 am
“You would probably like Jack Donovan’s work, specifically The Way of Men. Donovan used to occasionally contribute to the old Spearhead blog, but now he has his own. He is not a Christian and he’s not married, so most people in the manosphere dismiss him. That’s a shame, because his work is useful.”
I’m familiar with Donovan. I read some of his articles at Spearhead, and I’ve listened to a couple of his interviews, but I haven’t gotten around to reading his books. The Art of Manliness did what I think is a great series on manly honor that features a lot of Donovan’s work.
I hadn’t given honor a whole lot of thought until my oldest son approached his teens and I began to recognize his craving for manly honor. It was then (FINALLY!) that I began to realize that most of the big life decisions I made as a young man were attempts to earn honor.
Honor has become such a punchline that I think few men today realize their craving for it. Dalrock, of course, has done a lot of great work on pointing out the dangers of allowing women into organizations meant as a vehicle for men to earn honor. It never ends well.
MC are lawyers, doctors, judges, accountants, bankers, and other professionals. Obama played into the WC aspirations when he proposed a tax hike on those he called “rich” and making $250,000 or more per year. In reality, $250K/year is about where the MC begins, from a financial perspective. He used the delusions aspirations and misapprehensions of the WC to sell a dead-typical socialist attack on the actual MC.
Yes, which is why we have the term “upper middle class” — it’s intended to refer to the “tweeners”, folks who have family incomes of 250-500k or so, and who are therefore quite comfortable, mostly professionals highly educated and so on, but not “rich” people who are making 7 figures or who don’t need to work at all and live off investment income. By cutting things off at 250k, basically you drive a wedge between the professional middle class and everyone else, and you treat the “tweeners” as if they were all Warren Buffett. It’s pretty useful politically, but it’s bullshit. A family income of 250k in the DC burbclaves is not “rich” — it’s comfortable, for sure, but there isn’t a lot of extra to go around after living expenses, really. However, you can easily sell to most of the country that these people are “the wealthy”, and then tax them in ways that hurt them a lot, but hurt Uncle Warren not one bit. Oh, and then Uncle Warren will go off and join in the attack, saying how he pays less tax than his secretary and so on, so we should raise taxes — knowing full well that it’s the tweeners that will bear these taxes, and neither Uncle Warren nor his secretary.
It only looks like socialism, really. It isn’t socialism in fact. In fact what it is, is the real upper class, the real rich, fomenting warfare between the poor/lower and the middle/striver/tweener class, to prevent the tweeners from “getting too close” to them, and also to placate the poor and keep them confused and focused on the tweeners as an enemy (more visible and numerous), thereby preserving the likes of Uncle Warren from their quite justified wrath. Clever stuff, but easy to see through once you think more clearly about it, really.
@Oscar
That we struggle to understand and express the relevant biblical instruction is as I see it an argument against, not for, adopting a non biblical code. Like a cuckoo chick, the only purpose of such a code would be to further crowd out the legitimate one, to eject it from the nest. As we have seen, it has worked quite well in this regard for over a thousand years. We don’t need to clear our minds of the Chivalry of 1177 (Lancelot) so we can go back to the Chivalry of 1115 (Roland). We need to clear our minds of both so we can go back to the instruction of the Bible.
@ Dalrock says:
December 15, 2016 at 11:48 am
“The best I suspect we can say is the audience of the period were very attracted to these rules. I don’t know that we can say much more than that. We know the people who enjoyed epic poetry loved the idea of chivalry as presented in Song of Roland. But I don’t think this makes it a real military code, any more than the musical South Pacific tells us what WW II in the Pacific was really like.”
Good points. So, what do you think? Do modern Christian men need a code of honor? Obviously, my answer to that question is “yes”, but I could be wrong.
If, however, we do need a code of honor, how do we assemble one?
@ Dalrock says:
December 15, 2016 at 11:57 am
“We don’t need to clear our minds of the Chivalry of 1177 (Lancelot) so we can go back to the Chivalry of 1115 (Roland). We need to clear our minds of both so we can go back to the instruction of the Bible.”
I wrote my last reply before I read this post of yours. Do you think there’s any need to summarize the instruction of the Bible in such a way that it’s easy to memorize and measure oneself against?
Red Pill Latecomer
Thanks for that pointer. It’s been years since I read Leacock, or James Thurber for that matter.
The early 20th century American and English humorists were often subtle, too subtle for modern tastes.
@Oscar
I haven’t given this much direct thought, but my initial take is this wouldn’t be practical. I think part of the digging out process will require examining our unquestioned beliefs and showing how different this is from what the Bible teaches. This is of course what I’m trying to do, whether successfully or not. This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a short summary as you describe, but it probably means I’m not the man to attempt such a task.
@ Dalrock
I thought I may have jumped the gun. I’ll drop the subject, since it appears we have a lot more work left to do before we get to this step (if it’s even necessary).
@Nova
Agreed.
Ha. That will teach me. I wrote socialism because I didn’t want to say Marxist. That word is pregnant with misunderstanding, too. What I should have wrote, and what I meant was class warfare.
Well… this is irritating. All this discussion about 1000-year-old literature and knightly codes of conduct…
… meanwhile I have two of the most useless degrees to be found outside of a “Women’s Studies” department: English Lit and Military History, and I can’t join in because I’m on the road with a spotty internet connection.
Oh well: I should be able to jump in tonight.
Way to go, Lyn. See what happens you let the Mechanical and Geological Engineer run his mouth about Roland?
Novaseeker
Yes, which is why we have the term “upper middle class” — it’s intended to refer to the “tweeners”, folks who have family incomes of 250-500k or so, and who are therefore quite comfortable, mostly professionals highly educated and so on, but not “rich” people who are making 7 figures or who don’t need to work at all and live off investment income.
People tend to confuse “high income” with “wealth”. Perhaps because they are taught to do so.
@Oscar
GunnerQ quoted Jesus’ summary of the “Biblical Code” as succinctly as can be done. The Nicene Creed (and the Apostles’ Creed) aren’t codes of conduct, but of the tenets of Christian belief.
@Dalrock & Oscar
This is the idea of the Fundamentalists; a socially discredited group of (mostly) Baptists and Presbyterians…among whom I count myself. And it was Martin Luther’s basic approach in his criticism of the Church of Rome. His view was that the theology of the Church had over the centuries accumulated too much non-Biblical–and even anti-Biblical–theories and doctrine. The Fundamentalists’ idea was that we ought to get good at the fundamentals before we start adding to them; if we ever should, or even to know if we ever should.
As I said I agree, but there is a problem in that we aren’t machines. We can’t shut down between training sessions until the training is perfect. We have to act today on things which we don’t yet do well and don’t even fully understand.
One example of the problem are The Virtues. The virtues in the NT are “faith, hope, and love”. The Ancients (and the RCC) recognized (what are now called) the Cardinal Virtues: “courage, prudence, temperance, justice”. You can find evidence for the cardinal virtues in the Bible–even in the NT–but strictly speaking they aren’t things the Christian wills of himself. They are gifts of the Spirit; e.g. “for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.”. Yet we can see that even atheists can have courage, prudence, etc. and they can lead to good effects.
So while a man waits for his son to take up his Christian life, should we have a code for him? I think so, even as a Fundamentalist, but I recognize that they are training wheels. To my mind, the Cardinal Virtues are actually descended from faith, hope, and love–only seen darkly through a glass and so not understood, and erroneously understood as separate things.[1] You have to have faith in someone, hope for something, and love for someone to choose to be courageous, or prudent, or temperate, or just. Being just (for example) on the basis of no reason but itself is not only foolish, it’s impossible.
[1]I’m sure someone can find a theologian or 50 who has said the same thing. I don’t claim to be the first.
I don’t think those are useless, especially if you aspire to be a military officer. They are sorta impractical for most other people; but, these are degrees that bright kids tend to get when they already have money, and are going to go back home and get handed a sinecure in the family firm.
In case anyone’s wondering, the dumb and illiterate wealthy kids (a related but characteristically different type) rarely study literature or other serious liberal arts/social sciences. That’s too much boring reading. They tend to study things like Sociology, Wimminz Studies or Art History. The sociologists are especially funny at graduation. They have never heard of Pareto, and believe they don’t need to. They are scientists, and sheeeit!
Even the NT does not teach “wife-worship”; Jesus Christ directly exhorts and warns us to “remember the wife of Lot!” – another OT example of a weak woman who could not find strength to escape the stronghold of evil.
“Even Augustin, who was a moderate on the subject, agreed that a husband should not have passion for his wife.”
Have been studying Gospels lately, and the term “Passion of the Christ” made a lot more sense when I learned that “passion” meant suffering. It’s not about Jesus’ feelings, but His suffering costs in pain and humiliation for God’s mission.
I wonder if there is a translation error when we look back on “no passion for wife” and treat it as about feelings. Perhaps it is better to understand that as not being subject to desire for one’s wife, to the point where a man suffers pain and humiliation for the sake of his wife’s presence.
Game relates to this in that a man should not develop one-itis. “Plenty of girls on the girl tree.” Detachment here in fact builds a stronger attraction for the relationship – she’s replaceable and she needs to woman up.
I think it makes sense that a Christian’s passion (suffering) is properly oriented towards the mission of fulfilling God’s will and serving His kingdom. “I cannot live without this woman” puts her in a place that Jesus rightly occupies.
Kind words from Brother Boxer… I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek, as my degrees have been very useful to me in my career as a military officer and subsequent gigs as a DRC (Dirty Rotten Contractor). I can testify that I grew up in the not-very-well-off class (my father pastured a small church), and there is certainly no lucrative family business for me to go to, as all my wealthy relatives currently alive got that way through felonious activity.
I was just having a bit of fun with the manospherian article of faith that the only proper fields of study were under the STEM umbrella. Somebody has to “do” culture, and we clearly cannot leave it to cucks, ninnies, hipsters, and feminists, or they’ll just wreck it like they wreck everything else they get their grubby mitts on.
Oh well… I have a plane to catch.
One of the books I’m currently reading is Pussycats by Martin van Crevald.
van Crevald is a fifty pound brain, like some of the men that post here. A couple of times that I know of, he has taken a more than passing interest in the effects of the feminine.
The Privileged Sex
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17996697-the-privileged-sex
Men, Women & War: Do Women Belong in the Front Line?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2150437.Men_Women_War
I read all the Chronicles of Narnia somewhere between being a child and an adolescent, but have not seen the movie. Lewis’s marriage was made famous by another movie I never saw, and his wife was previously married to W. L. Graham who wrote Nightmare Alley, the movie of which I have seen (more than once) and which I thoroughly recommend. Irishman Tyrone Power is cast against type. It’s a Noir with A-list production values (which is unusual for Noir movies).
Oscar says: “Has anyone actually summarized the code laid out in the NT in a way that is easy to memorize?”
You can argue whether these are specific enough not to be relativized into indifference (as Scouting has fallen prey to in recent years), but plenty of boys have memorized them:
The Scout Oath
“On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law*; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
*The Scout Law
“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”
@theasdgamer
W.S. coming from Stratford on Avon was thus fairly close to the Welsh border, but the plays were of course aimed at their original London audiences who were not surely from the farming community. You can watch them still at the rebuilt Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames and will feel quite at home as the audience comprises predominantly vacationing American students. I seem to recall that around the time of Agincourt it was illegal for young men to play what we now know as Soccer as it was felt to interfere with Archery practice, Archery practice being very important as it was the best way to kill Frenchmen. That law has been repealed apparently but we have still no love for the French – we last sank the French fleet as recently as 1940 and The Sun always has rhyming headlines such as Up Yours Delors*.
* Delors is a French Eurocrat
Surprise, surprise, that cow Amy Schumer is running down men.
A guy’s dating app for women such as Schumer would be called ‘Hello M’heffer’
Her despicable feminist attitude would create impotence in the most virile of men.
Her new ‘Barbie’ movie is another fat feminist wet dream. I predict dismal box office receipts.
@Anonymous Reader,
Added in to your nutshell of service women and their various harassments is…massive financial incentive.
I’ve never served but somewhere in the manosphere (likely here) a vet has made a few very believable and memorable posts about how rampant fake sexual assault claims are. Unlike private sector life (where the result might only be punishment for some guy) in the military, the females can retire early with full bennies for a misguided game of touch-butt in the supply room. Or even the vague accusation of it, whether or not it happened.
I came away with the impression that a culprit doesn’t have to be specified and the act certainly doesn’t need to be proven. I wouldn’t doubt that Obama wanted those sexual assault claim numbers UP in the military so those claims are on greased rails.
Amy Schumer’s could be in a late stage, anorexic death rattle and her face would still be as chubby and boyish as that annoying fat buddy you had on the little league team when you were ten years old.
Another App for Amy Schumer’
“Hello M’ Haagen-Dazs”
@ craig says:
December 15, 2016 at 2:38 pm
The third stanza of the Ranger Creed reads…
“Never shall I fail my comrades. I will always keep myself mentally alert, physically strong and morally straight and I will shoulder more than my share of the task whatever it may be, one-hundred-percent and then some.”
CSM Neal R. Gentry must have been a Boy Scout. What’s happened to the Boy Scouts recently is a shame.
Dear Oscar:
TWOM is worth a read. As a father you’ll probably find the first two thirds most valuable. The book suffers from a sadly common flaw in self-published efforts, in that the arguments get progressively less defined toward the end. The end also paints an unnecessarily (in my opinion) bleak view of the future, that (the author admits) is a worst case scenario. I’m glad I’m not a father for many reasons. I don’t think I’d be a particularly good one, either to boys or girls, but I’m especially glad I’m not a father in this particular era, because it’s unnecessarily difficult. Having a son must be doubly painful, as the social order is intent upon abusing your kid at every conceivable turn.
Somebody who has clearly never read the book above calls the author a “flaming fag,” which is funny, because Donovan himself calls effeminate men the same things (and as an openly gay dude, he tends to get away with this sort of thing). It’s true that he’s an androphile (his term for non-flaming-fag gay men), but he’s done important work.
As an aside: It’s also true that I’m a heterosexual whoremonger. We all have our weaknesses, but that doesn’t excuse each of us from attempting to do our part to pave a way out of this feminist shithole for the benefit of future generations. Jack has done more than I have (and much more than his average critic).
In any event, my hat’s off to you for trying to raise kids in this decadent society. I know lots of men who seem to manage to turn out functional children, despite the odds, and I honestly don’t know how you guys manage it.
Boxer
@ Boxer
In regards to Donovan, I take the 1 Thessalonians 5:21 approach: examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.
His articles I’ve read and the interviews I’ve watched contained a lot of good. But, I haven’t read “The Way of Men” yet. I’ll get to it eventually.
I appreciate your encouragement for those of us raising kids. You’re right that it’s unnecessarily difficult, and I’ve found that raising girls is just as difficult as raising boys, though for different reasons.
There are plenty of people reinforcing my instructions to my oldest son about the temptations he’ll face (his brothers are too young to hear all that yet), but my daughters receive no such reinforcement. That leaves Mom and (mostly) Dad as the only voices warning them.
God willing, and by His grace, we’ll train them up in the way they should go, and when they are old they will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6).
Casey @ 3:03 pm:
“Her new ‘Barbie’ movie is another fat feminist wet dream. I predict dismal box office receipts.”
This is confirmed? EXCELLENT. The death spiral tightens and Trump will probably not be good for a bailout. Looks like Amy’s already hitting the donuts to prep for the role!
Will her inaction figure be a sponge or a Tid-E-Bowl pellet? I’d buy either. Uh, maybe not the sponge.
Kaminsky
Another App for Amy Schumer’
“Hello M’ Haagen-Dazs”
I’m not an application programmer. But there might be a niche for an app similar to Tindr, except it locates the nearest Baskin & Robbins or similar ice cream store. We could call it “Fattr”. A lot of women like Schumer would pay for that.
@Looking Glass
”And it really shouldn’t surprise anyone in these parts that an utterly destructive cultural trend was started by Rich Women that wanted to indulge in Fantasy.”
It seems that certain women are so uncomfortable with masculinity that they sought to civilize it by this destructive invention. Its unfortunate that we are still paying for it to this day.
Someone may have addressed this above, but Karl Marx had lots of kids because his long-suffering wife stayed with him despite his dalliances– including one with a peasant servant girl, who bore him a son.. whom he sent away. He was a liar, a mooch, an adulterer, a snob, a hypocrite, and a tyrant over his wife and children. He depended on the successful capitalism of the Engels family furniture business for money all his life. He even forced his ‘favourite’ daughter to marry his disciple Aveling.. she died in a suicide pact, Aveling survived. See recent non-Marxist biographies of the man, which focus on his life instead of whitewashing it in deference to his ideas.
Here is a full timeline of the development of courtly love since the 12th century.
https://gynocentrism.com/2013/10/11/timeline-of-gynocentric-culture/
I wanted to say something else about Agincourt which ties into my observation some threads ago that in England the past is always with us. In 1415 the French had declared (should they have won the battle which their pundits had surely given them a 98% chance of doing) that they would sever the bow-fingers – that is to say the first and second fingers of the right hand – of the English Archers. To this day, in England (but not I think America) the rudest sign one came make is to quickly raise the spread first and second fingers of the right hand with the palm facing inwards; what is known as a V-sign – not to be confused with Winston Churchill’s use of the same fingers but with the palm in his case facing outwards, which is a Victory sign. The V-sign derives from the French threat of 1415. It is usually accompanied by the verbal admonition to ‘fuck off’. One never uses the sign to a female – there is chivalry for you.
When in France we are never outwardly rude to the French but privately are appalled by their sanitation and their eating of the legs of Frogs, and entire Snails and Oysters (which always reminds me of something else). To this day, like Henry and to escape the continent, we hurriedly make for Calais to board the Ro-ro Ferries that sail to Dover and its imposing white cliffs.
@ Gunner
Yep, it’s confirmed.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/dec/03/amy-schumer-barbie-movie-set-for-title-role
Her inaction figure will be molded using the left-over die casts from 1983’s Return of the Jedi’s runaway hit character……….Jabba the Hutt.
The premise of the movie is that she is cast out of Barbie-land for eccentricities.
Not being ‘perfect’ enough. ie. skinny? pleasant?
No one is asking women to be perfect. We as them to be presentable & pleasant.
(An angry SJW Twitter army is amassing their forces after reading that last sentence)
Seriously, why should men shy away from stating what they find attractive in a woman? Women don’t; they just lie about what they find attractive.
Hence her parody dating app – M’Lady.
Pity the man that believes women really want new-age, sensitive, snivelling wimps as boyfriends/husbands. Pity him for exactly .0000001 of a second.
Then write him off as having no observation skills.
Dear Casey:
Jeeeeezus Christ, I need to meet Amy Schumer’s agent. Seriously. This is bloody amazing work. S/he is either the best agent in the history of agents, or s/he is providing sexual favors/drugs to everyone in the film industry, or she has blackmail dirt on all those same people.
Equally astounding that Mattell, which has dumped billions of dollars over the better part of a century making this iconic toy a household name, is not objecting to the casting of a loud, ugly, horsey, dumpy looking bitch in the part of their creation.
Dear Boxer:
The past 5 to 8 years has seen a real ramping up of the whole feminist movement; and also the fat acceptance movement (one in the same, really)
Mattell never would have allowed this universally recognized trademark ™ to be sullied in such a way as little as 10 years ago.
The problem as I see it, is that for all relevant purposes (ie. the span of a human lifetime) we’ve lost the war.
Women bringing the worst of themselves to the table (workplace, marriage, motherhood, Hollywood) is now an ASSET. It meets with no resistance out of fear of reprisals.
Look how wantonly Hillary’s campaign embraced the ‘Nasty Woman’ mantra.
Trump didn’t win the election because he was the best candidate.
Hillary lost the election because she was the worst candidate.
Anyone trying to get their opinion across in the conquered liberal media is lambasted for having an alternate viewpoint. The left cannot, will not listen to opposing viewpoints.
Amy Schumer is a success because she stands on the shoulders of those who cannot air a contrary opinion about her (limited) talents.
Schumer isn’t funny. She’s crass.
I never really found Andrew Dice Clay very funny at the apex of his career 30 years ago. She is less funny than he.
They both deploy vulgarity and bait/switch it as comedy.
I have seen both male and female comedians. It takes a great deal of talent to be funny without resorting to being crass.
Female comedians seem to go to crassness more often than male comedians.
Sex sells. And apparently so does being crass, so long as it’s a woman peddling it.
@ Boxer
From the Guardian article:
“The film, to be released in summer 2018, is an Enchanted-style mix of animation and live action which sees Schumer evicted from Barbieland for eccentricities.”
“She then has an adventure in the real world, and realizes that “perfection comes on the inside, not the outside, and that the key to happiness is belief in oneself, free of the obligation to adhere to some unattainable standard of perfection.”
“Barbie then returns home to save her fellow dolls.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
This movie is feminism wrapped up neatly in a fat little bow.
With a neatly placed dung heap upon any societal expectations of women.
Men want to be attracted to women.
Men tell women what they are attracted to in a woman.
Women decree those desired traits as ‘sexist’ or ‘patriarchal’, or whatever childish name-calling that will end the discussion.
I don’t believe men have ever expected perfection from women.
Our current lack of standards has taken us so far and away from ‘pleasant, loving, and presentable’ that it’s a moonshot to even expect those basics.
Perfection isn’t even on the table of expectations, or even desires.
Boxer @ 10:44 am:
“Jeeeeezus Christ, I need to meet Amy Schumer’s agent. Seriously. This is bloody amazing work. S/he is either the best agent in the history of agents, or s/he is providing sexual favors/drugs to everyone in the film industry, or she has blackmail dirt on all those same people.”
Ever wonder why so many movie types are willing to waste their lives in indie productions and other low-level employment? They pay each other in sex, like printing their own money until they hit either the big time or The Wall. Even the techy types. LinkedIn doesn’t know how right they are when they say it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know. Anybody with a dirty mind and lots of time could have fun linking names across movie credits to create a map of harems and sexual alliances. Anybody with $25US to burn can enable this behavior by seeing Rogue One today.
I have several contacts in the industry and the most marginally employed of them just happen to also be the lowest SMV.
“Equally astounding that Mattell, which has dumped billions of dollars over the better part of a century making this iconic toy a household name, is not objecting…”
CEO: Look at all the money Marvel and DC Comics are making! Even Star Wars is back! We have an action figure, too, let’s get our slice of the pie! Big is Beautiful!
NCO: Uh, sir, remember all the times we’ve tried to market Chunky Barbie? This script is worse than Ballbusters and the lead should be starring in Bridezilla not Barbie.
CEO: Yeah, I know, but if we do traditional values then the lawsuits will kill the profits. Don’t worry, I’ll word the contract so we get paid a flat licensing fee. Zero risk.
NCO: But there’s LOTS of money in traditional values! Why, Pixar…
CEO: Enough of that, Larry, or I’ll make you develop your Bridezilla idea.
@ Gunner
Yes, it’s all about peddling what’s selling.
And what is selling is feminism.
Women and girls alike will go see it (given the fascination with Rebel Wilson’s crappy movies).
Men and boys will not.
This type of movie will be relatively low budget, and will not be marketed towards men.
It will not count on men contributing to the coffers.
Contrast this with Ghostbusters which ABSOLUTELY needed the traditional fan base to come out and see it to cover the freight charges of filming that turd.
Marketing 101: Know your target market; and peddle what sells
Accounting 101: Don’t produce what won’t be profitable.
Perhaps Paul Feig can crawl out from under whatever rock he has been hiding to direct this crap-fest too.
Unlike Ghostbusters, I’m sure the Barbie will turn a profit……..by design.
They won’t overspend and then blame men for refusing to go patron the movie.
They should know going in that men aren’t gracing the doors of the theatre screening this hot-mess of a movie.
Opus
To this day, like Henry and to escape the continent, we hurriedly make for Calais to board the Ro-ro Ferries that sail to Dover and its imposing white cliffs.
Why? The Chunnel is much faster. You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?
Boxer says: December 14, 2016 at 2:50 pm
The Catholic Church does not hold that eroticism in a marriage is sinful, provided it is conjoined with storge and agape.
Jerome states otherwise, Dalrock has already provided multiple quotes proving that you are wrong. regardless of what the Church may teach *today*, the issue is what was being taught back in 500AD.
the fact that Catholic dogma does NOT conform to Scripture is no surprise to non-Catholics, we’ve been pointing that out to them for more than a thousand years.
Boxer says: December 14, 2016 at 2:50 pm
In the second, yes, even the wealthiest of the Greeks, in classical antiquity, lived in material conditions that were considerably more impoverished than the average inhabitant of 16th Century France.
and it didn’t impact their desire for their wives.
which means that your assertion of poverty being the cause was wholly wrong.
which was my point.
“Yes, it’s all about peddling what’s selling.”
But Pixar proved this wrong. I’ve said it before, if Hollywood was pure mercenary then they’d be family-friendly Red Pill from dawn to dusk and let themselves be virtue-shamed all the way to the bank.
My post was a hypothetical Mattel CEO not caring about the fate of the Barbie IP. Whore it out, cash the check, let it burn, never mind that Red Pill Barbie would create a much bigger check than Cankle Barbie.
Casting Amy Schumer is solid proof they aren’t even trying for mass appeal. Both men and women would turn out in droves to watch affectionate, graceful, long-maned, kind-hearted Thin Barbie in the modest dress of a peasant. Make the movie about her being loyal to Ken during a bout of low-status poverty between his being “outsourced” in favor of H1B migrants and reinventing himself as an entrepreneur who puts his old company out of business. Barbie ends up in Pebble Beach because she stayed with her husband. $$$$$$.
@ Gunner
What Pixar movie are you referring?
For sure, this Barbie movie is not being marketed for ‘mass appeal’. They are discounting 50% of the moviegoers straight out of the gate.
But for damn sure, they aren’t going to overspend on it in the wake of Ghostbusters.
Given obesity rates are ever rising, the female moviegoer market continues to expand (literally and figuratively) for crap-fest movies such as this one promises to be.
There is an ACTIVE and PERVASIVE movement underway to hammer the ‘big is beautiful’ and ‘girl power’ mantras into the heads of western women.
It never abates; and it’s ulterior motive would appear to be misery for the middleclass and lower-class.
An increasing portion of young women have been totally brainwashed by that crap by the end of High School.
I’ve watched it in my son’s high school where they invite local ‘Women’s Studies’ professors (I use the term very loosely) to come ‘jack up’ these teenage girls in a mandatory assembly.
When it comes to making money, the trend is your friend.
And the trend is fat, miserable, unaccountable, feminist women.
@Anonymous Reader
I had wanted to add that those same imposing cliffs were what Henry and his Archers saw when they returned home. It is always a stunning and reassuring sight. I was thinking of the French holidays that as a child/adolescent I spent for nine consecutive years of hair-raising travel by car – on the wrong side, for a right hand drive motor-car, up the N roads – through Northern France. One year we missed the ferry my Father calling out to the Bridge of the Ferry ‘Why did you leave us behind?’ the reply coming back, ‘Why didn’t you get here on time?’.
The Ferries, despite predictions of their demise, remain and continue to grow in size, the largest now displacing some fifty thousand tons – almost the size of Titanic – yet when I first crossed over to the continent (as we call it) the Ferry would not have displaced more than about Four Thousand Tons. The Hovercrafts – British invention – were faster but so I am told, less than smooth and have, like Concorde – ditto – gone the way of the Do-Do. Hover Lawn-mowers are still sold. It was until 1960 possible to fly your car to Lille from what is now called London Ashford International Airport, that is to say Lydd and indeed in 1960 Lydd was England’s second busiest airport, but the arrival of the Ro-ro’s that year instantly killed off that mode of transport and returned Lydd to the delightful backwater that it remains – I love that part of the world.
@ Gunner
If you are referring to Frozen, yes……….those characters are thin/beautiful princesses. And that movie did A-M-A-Z-I-N-G !! at the box office.
Feminism is splashed around unabated in that movie too.
Her Father’s character was demonized for telling Elsa to control her powers. “Conceal it, don’t feel it”. (This could be compared to female sexuality in a heartbeat)
Anna’s prince Hans turned out to be a bad boy bent on killing her and her sister and taking their kingdom.
In a ‘girl power’ moment Anna saves her sister, and later punches out the villain (Hans).
Kristoff’s character would be your basic blue-piller cast in the background for decoration.
In the end, the movie was less about ‘getting their prince’ and rather one of ‘girls stick together’.
Even the lyrics to the much vaulted theme song has threads of Feminism throughout.
It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me,
I’m free!
Let it go, let it go
And I’ll rise like the break of dawn
Let it go, let it go
That perfect girl is gone
Here I stand
In the light of day
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway!
Opus,
I always enjoy your perspective, and I wish I had had the time to drop in and say “Hello: (or is it “Hiya?”) when I was on your island earlier this year.
Alas, I was at the other end of your country walking the Hadrian’s Wall Path (I’m assuming that you don’t consider Scotland to be part of your country), and my time in southern England consisted of two brief layovers at LHR between Edinburgh International Airport and the sandy hell-hole where I spent most of the past year.
I was amused when one of my English hosts commented on the bank notes I got from an ATM in Waverly Station with “Bank of Scotland” on the front, especially the part about them perhaps not being accepted if I went to London. Last I checked the United Kingdom has been united since the reign of James VI (or as you would know him: James I). It turns out that they were sufficient to pay for a pint, though, which was all I really cared about at the time.
“What Pixar movie are you referring?”
Up through Toy Story 3 or so. Entertainment depicting real people and traditional morality is always more easily enjoyed than barking cats with subversive messages. Hollywood focuses on blockbuster-sized movies because selling this tripe has become a billion-dollar effort. If Rogue One hadn’t been labeled “Star Wars” then it would’ve been direct-to-SyFy Channel.
But then Disney came along and… its own employees don’t call it the Evil Empire for nothing.
“But for damn sure, they aren’t going to overspend on it in the wake of Ghostbusters.”
They will. They have to. Social Justice demands it. The frog and the scorpion.
@ Gunner
I suppose I will go see Rogue One just to satisfy my morbid curiosity.
I certainly expect more of the same tripe that made Star Wars The Force Awakens such a feminist crap-fest. (and a total story script shoplift of Episode IV: A New Hope)
Re: overspending on the Barbie movie.
If they do spend a shitload on such a predictable FAIL; then the institutions that enable feminism
are destined for bankruptcy at this rate. That would be OK in my book.
You would think that the 9 figure in-the-red Ghostbusters FAIL would cause pause for concern. But you are probably right, Social Justice must push ahead, costs be damned.
When it comes to making money, the trend is your friend.
And the trend is fat, miserable, unaccountable, feminist women.
I swear, if they put a bikini on Schumer in that Barbie movie, there are gonna be little girls who are gonna walk out of the theater scarred for life …
@Lyn87
Thankyou for your kind words, but I have to confess that within a short time of posting any comment I always regret having done so and rue the fact that I have neither the observational powers, intellectual ability or powers of prediction of probably all others who comment here.
I have never been to Scotland, nor have I ever seen one of their bank notes (of which I have heard). They hate us, and so far as I can see they are merely Haggis eating, skirt wearing bastardisers of English pronunciation – far worse than any American – whose sole purpose in life is to pick fights with us ‘sassenachs’ – at least that it is how it is in Glasgow and as you walked Hadrians Wall you will be aware that wisely the Romans built that wall to keep the Scots out of their Empire. Would we had repaired and reinforced it but you see how it is; we got the Stuarts who proved disastrous, such that not repeating that experiment we then chose the Dutch and then Germans but never our own people. How would you feel if all American Presidents (after the inevitable disaster of electing Canadians) had been Mexicans followed by Guatemalans? That is a rhetorical question.
Definitely not ‘Hiya’: there are more attractive though not necessarily flatter parts of England than Heathrow.
http://www.thelocal.it/20161215/married-italians-might-no-longer-have-to-promise-to-be-faithful
Enjoy!
@ Feminist Hater
From the link you posted:
“The promise not to cheat is a ‘cultural legacy from an outdated and obsolete vision of marriage, family, and the rights and duties of spouses’, according to the senators who have signed the bill.
“They cited a previous ruling from Italy’s top court, which declared that judges could not legally place the blame for a marriage separation ‘on the mere failure to observe the duty of fidelity’.”
“Instead, the other party has to prove that their spouse’s infidelity led to the irreconcilable breakdown of the marriage.”
Enter the family law lawyers. CHA-CHING!
Just another death blow to the institution of marriage. By all means keep watering it down until no one dare bother to sign up.
It’s the equivalent of reverse point-rewards card. The longer you are in the institution of marriage the more air miles are taken from you.
Opus,
The missus and I first vacationed in the English-speaking archipelago in the summer of 2007 when we took a bus tour of southern Ireland. The reason we went there is that was the ancestral home of the anglophile branch of her family… or so everyone thought. Our previous overseas vacation two years prior was to Greece, as I wanted to see the battlefields of the Greco-Persians wars, specifically Thermopylae and the Straits of Salamis, so she got to pick the next destination: hence Ireland.
(Subsequent genealogical research revealed that they were actually from the Exeter area in south-western England, and my wife is a direct descendant of Sir John Harington, famous for developing the very first flushing toilet in 1596. She’s not Irish at all.)
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and I even won the limerick-writing contest on the tour bus by acclamation. In fact, I was afraid the driver would veer off the road, as everyone else aboard erupted in uncontrollable laughter when the tour guide read my poem over the PA system. (See below.)
We’ve since been back once, that time on our own, and more recently went to Scotland as it was my turn to choose and I wanted to see the battlefields of the First Scottish War of Independence, specifically Stirling and Bannockburn. (The Scots did a marvelous job of commemorating the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn by building a very impressive visitor’s center, complete with a room in which one wears 3-D glasses, leaving visitors with the impression of cavalry thundering by and arrows flying by one’s head.) While we were there my wife suggested we go to see Hadrian’s Wall, but we just didn’t have the time.
But… last year I was living and working in the Middle East and had some use-it-or-lose-it vacation time, and I couldn’t return to the US without losing my tax-exempt status for the year, so I decided to do the “Wall Walk” instead. I thought of you down near Londonistan, and would have dropped you a line, but my schedule didn’t leave me time to go so far out of my way. I realize “Tam the Bam” lives somewhere over there, too, but I can’t even understand half of what he writes… I can’t imagine we’d be able to communicate verbally at all, although I suspect he can up-end a pint with the best of them.
Nonetheless, while I like to visit, and intend to eventually get to the site of the Battle of Hastings, the UK is far too misandrist for my liking as a place to live – plus they would look askance at my collection of firearms, despite the fact that one of my prize possessions is a Lee-Enfield No I, Mark III from 1906 (that may strike you as odd, since everyone knows that the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield wasn’t manufactured until 1907… but I eventually managed to solve the mystery of the anomalous date-stamp).
____________________
When the tour bus went through Limerick, we had a contest for “best limerick.” I based mine on a story the tour guide had told us about a rich American girl whose family sent her to Ireland so that her uncle (a Catholic priest) could set her on the straight-and-narrow away from the temptations of the “big city.” Apparently there’s a name for what happened next: kinship affinity, because the girl was soon-enough pregnant with her own cousin. In order to avoid an even-worse scandal the family persuaded some poor local lad to claim to be the father, and the couple married. Everybody “won” in a sense: the pregnant girl got a husband, the priest wasn’t defrocked and humiliated, and the local kid married into a very wealthy family at the cost of being pre-cucked. Anyway, here’s my prize-winning poem:
An American lassie came over,
To walk with her priest through the clover.
That she was his niece
Mattered not in the least.
Now the uncle’s a father twice over!
GunnerQ
Casting Amy Schumer is solid proof they aren’t even trying for mass appeal
It is trivial to test. Find any teenaged girl 15 or over. Old enough to remember playing with Barbies but not actively doing so. Talk about the plot of the upcoming Barbie movie. Especially the “believe in yourself” message. Ask her who she things is cast in it. After several names, tell her, “No, it’s Amy Schumer”. Watch her face for the reaction. Odds are “confusion”, “disgust” and others, but no “light up for joy”.
It’s feminist territory marking, just like Ballbusters, and has nothing to do with actually making money.
OT — Saw the new SW thing today. Yeah, I should have just did the boycott thing, but I guess I’m not really a joiner.
No spoilers, but mostly the movie was just … drawn out and boring. The characters were flat and forgettable, and the film needed to be about 20-30 minutes shorter. I didn’t find myself as irritated about the obviously feminist lead, because she wasn’t a terribly sympathetic character, she wasn’t treated as superhuman (unlike the protagonist of the main storyline, who I am sure will turn out to school Luke Skywalker in the force, and so on), and she just wasn’t that impressive.
In addition to being drawn out and often dull, the film was obviously cast in a deliberately PC way — the good guys are a white girl, a latino, a couple of asian guys and a middle eastern type guy, while all of the bad guys, literally every single one of them, is a male white anglo. There’s also a black character who could have been written out of the movie with no loss whatsoever, and therefore appears to have been included in an already long film precisely because they wanted a black character. There were obvious political statements throughout the film as well, most of which were heavy-handed and trite. Overall, these aspects detracted from the film, but mostly were so obvious as to be saddening more than irritating.
In general, my impression is that Disney is going to run this thing into the ground. Not that Lucas himself was much better, but at this rate, things are going to be very mediocre going forward, I think, and more focused on PC nonsense and racial/gender quotas than on anything really intrinsic to the SW universe. Tsk tsk, but to be expected with an outfit like Disney, which specializes in PC programming in its films.
I thought I had posted this a couple days ago, but I don’t see it now so commenting again…
I’m about halfway through a book by Leon J. Podles called The Church Impotent – the Feminization of Christianity and it tackles the historical roots of the feminization of the Catholic Church (but is very applicable to Protestantism as well). It addresses questions like…
“What caused this?”
“When did it start?”
“Does it affect all religions everywhere, or is it specific to a particular faith and region?”
Much of what he writes corroborates this latest series by Dalrock and traces the feminization to about the twelfth century AD.
He is quite a layman scholar and it is not an easy read, but is highly recommended. The book is no longer in print but can be accessed as a free PDF download at the link posted above.
Novaseeker – thanks for your sacrifice and review. With regard to your review, I’m looking for my surprised face emoticon but can’t seem to find it. Oh, well.
It amazes me that adults can treat seriously an ever lengthening series of movies which are a recreation of (before-my-time) Saturday Morning Serials aimed at ten-year-olds. I have never seen any of them, but who am I to argue with success for the weekend take in America alone is projected at around $150,000,000 and my fellow countrymen had by Friday already provided an extra $5,000,000 so everyone must like it. I see that it was, yesterday, exactly fifty years to the day that I took Diana Rigg look-alike ******* ***** to see The Sound of Music. Now that was a film: Nazis and Nuns, not that on that occasion I or she got to see much of the movie.
I am always amused at how often when I do watch recent American movies that the villain has an English accent indeed as soon as I hear an English accent I know that man must be the villain which rather defeats any intended surprise in the plot. Even more bizarre is listening to English actors assuming an American accent – Hugh Lawrie as House – for instance. Why is it that some American actors such as say Vincent Price or Clifton Webb sound so natural and English even without changing their accent when portraying Englishmen?
@Lyn87
As you will surely one day make it to the site of The Battle of Hastings I feel compelled to draw to your attention that the Battle – 950 years ago last 14th October – took place not in Hastings but in the appropriately naked Battle, which is two or three stops before Hastings on the Railway line from London. Should you tire of the rolling hills of Sussex and its green pasture and make it to Hastings you may care to attend the local museum which has displays to celebrate the fact that the first displays of Television and Coiour Television were there presented by John Logie Baird and likewise the life of that charlatan and cultural appropriator Grey Owl* who hails from there, too. Should you as you probably will and as a good Christian then require religious sustenance you may retire to Holy Trinity Church – near the seafront – where my maternal Grandparents married but before either Logie Baird or Grey Owl achieved their respective Fame. It’s a pebble beach so bring your flip-flops
* See the eponymous movie with Pierce Brosnan
Flip-flops?
Surely that would immediately identify me as a Yank tourist to even the most casual observer. Of course, I would be a Yank tourist, as everyone I encounter on all my adventures realizes as soon as I open my mouth, but I prefer to not make it any more obvious than I have to. In fact, my luggage looks a lot like this, as I was living in the Middle East and thought that if some ardent follower of the “Religion of Peace” saw me with that he would be less likely to want to blow me to bits.
As for the actual site of the famous battle, it was awfully nice of you Brits to name the place “Battle,” so that William knew precisely where in the Hastings vicinity to take his French army.
Novaseeker @ December 17, 2016 at 6:09 pm:
“No spoilers, but mostly the movie was just … drawn out and boring.”
I read a movie critique that attributed this to the script being adjusted for the Chinese market. Their culture prefers a sense of fate and destiny, not to say doom, over a faster-paced story with a climactic highs and lows. That sort of thing. I don’t get an opinion of my own because my butt isn’t going in the theater but I’m curious if you can see any Asian influence in the script/pacing?
Rollo quoted “At the time, chivalry was a mans’ club, and unless she was a widow, women were more or less insignificant in the scope of chivalry. A nobleman might take a wife, but rarely were these marriages romantic in nature. Rather they served as political alliances between states (and often consolidating church control) and a man’s romantic and sexual interests were served by mistresses or the spoils of his conquests. In fidelity was expected in noble marriages.”
This calls to mind a criticism I’d make of probably my, otherwise, favourite essay: How and How Not to Love Mankind by Theodore Dalrymple.
To quote “Turgenev does not suggest that the landowning widow’s quasi-absolute power is in any way enviable. Although religious in a superficial and sententious way, she regards God as a servant, not a master, and she acknowledges no limits, either God’s or the law’s, to the exercise of her will. The result for her is misery, a permanent state of irritation, dissatisfaction, and hypochondria. The satisfaction of her whims brings no pleasure, precisely because they are whims rather than true desires; and—used as she is to obedience, and deserving of it as she believes herself to be—she experiences all resistance, even that of time, as intolerable.”
The somewhat tyrannical ‘landowning widow’ was allegedly based on Turgenev’s mother; if I’m not wrong her tyrannic predisposition was reinforced by Turgenev’s father’s ‘love’ of serf women. So much misery may have been avoided had he been more circumspect.
Kiljoy
The somewhat tyrannical ‘landowning widow’ was allegedly based on Turgenev’s mother; if I’m not wrong her tyrannic predisposition was reinforced by Turgenev’s father’s ‘love’ of serf women. So much misery may have been avoided had he been more circumspect.
Or if she’d been able to submit. Could it be that her attitude was one reason for her husband’s desire for serf women?
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When you finish with Lewis, you should pick up <a href=https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Marriage-Twelfth-Century-Symposia-Comparative/dp/0801843197/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8<some <a href=https://www.amazon.com/Knight-Lady-Priest-Marriage-Medieval/dp/0226167682/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482646278&sr=1-1&keywords=Duby+Knight+Lady+Priest<Georges Duby.
Reblogged this on Afro Futurism.
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@ ConantheContrarian,
I realize this is an old post, but the key word may be passion and it’s difference in modern day meaning to what it may have meant back then. Passion could be seen as akin lustful obsession. Losing your head over some one. I would think with a large basis of what was seen as the danger of the husband, in the position of ruler of family and home, making himself susceptible to manipulation from the wife.
And since life was so much harder and riskier then, (child birth was dangerous. Too much passion leading to unnecessary deaths to have sex outside of purpose to have kids. Maybe that was part of it), it was seen as bad behavior and foolish to have passion for the wife with the connotation passion had in the king arthur days.