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Saturday, August 18, 2012

The Death of Chivalry

Some woman was lamenting the death of chivalry.
She thought women had a right to chivalry, a right to be treated well.
She lamented the fact that she couldn't find a chivalrous man anymore.

And so many articles say the same thing today, articles pushed by righteous Catholics who think that if men would just MAN UP and treat women right, all the problems will go away.

So men get blamed for playing video games, watching porn, refusing responsibility, walking away from the women they have sex with, using women, objectifying them, yada, yada, yada.

Yes, men do all those mean nasty things - no question of it.
But why do you think they do it?

Maybe they have their reasons too, eh?
Maybe after being told for 40 or 50 years that their opinions don't matter, some of those men decide to take society at its word. We are always so careful never to insult the pregnant mother who is walking towards the abortion clinic, "she's a victim, too!"

Yes, I'm sure she is.
But before us friendly neighborhood Catholics start passing around articles about the skunks that men are, how about we consider what might turn a man into a skunk? If a woman may not realize that she is really carrying a child, and not just a bag of cells, might it not be the case that a man may not realize that he actually might have a purpose in life bigger than World of Warcraft? Society tells men the same lies it tells women, yet men are attacked, and women are cosseted, when both believe the same lies, take them to heart, and try to live them out.

So, this was my thoughts on the matter:
You want chivalry?Fine - give up abortion.
If you are willing to abort your own child, what the heck will you be willing to do to ME when the chips are down? Chivalrous men consider pro-choice women complete jerks. 
Maybe that's why you can't find a chivalrous man - if he doesn't care about his child, he's probably not going to care a lot about you either.


And a gentleman unknown to me added his two cents:
Arenotamso  parent   You want to f#%k a guy up? Have him hold the door of the abortion clinic for his girlfriend when she's getting an abortion he doesn’t want and has no say in for the supposedly bombproof reason that it is her body (“it” with no antecedant). That destroyed me for years. No one forced me to hold that door. I was trying to be chivalrous in my own confused and misguided way. Could I let her face it by herself? Was I sending a mixed message to her? No. She knew I hated what she was doing. But she was a southern lady who, like the author of this article, appreciated being treated like a lady. She lives with her decision. That she underwent it physically had to have been worse for her, but on the other hand she was able to comfort herself with lies, whereas I knew better. Abortion is a twisted business and you've really hit the nail on the head here by bringing it up in connection with chivalry because chivalry is the child of Christian culture, and Christian culture is born of Christian theology, and at the heart of Christian theology is the doctrine of the trinity, the triune nature of very God. The secular humanists and others who don’t identify themselves that way but also believe in "choice" cannot have chivalry AND abortion anymore than they can have, in the words of Flannery O'Connor's Hazel Motes, "the church of Jesus Christ Crucified without Jesus Christ."
    What relationship that countenances the murder of a baby can survive, or what state or kingdom survive that sanctions such murder? In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the murders Macbeth commits also destroy his relationship with his wife and drive them both mad. But what doomed image does Shakespeare present to us twice just before the murders to presage the shattering of this love and of an entire kingdom; what image symbolic of the triune love that represents the heart of every love but more obviously the heart of the erotic, if chaste, love of Chivalry? Both Macbeth and his Lady speak of it explicitly and in detail, and it is the image of a baby! This child is an aspect of every love as flesh, as possibility, and/or as spirit, but in all three cases is utterly real - if love itself be real; and if love not be real, then neither is the God of Christians.
   Though the Holy Spirit, unlike a baby, cannot be killed, it can be grieved, and if one has ever grieved the Holy Spirit, he or she knows that he or she would rather be dead, and be better off dead, than do it again.
   In conclusion, you are right: if chivalry is to live, so must the child unseen at the very heart of it, and to the heart of the discussion at hand goes your challenge: “Ladies, so you want chivalry? Give up abortion.”
On a related note, another commentator, obviously not Christian, played a few of the points I've been harping on for quite some time - as science advances, lives lengthen and societies become richer, women become increasingly unnecessary to society. From a population reduction perspective, none of the zero-growth people want women. Women tend to free-lance too many kids. Chivalry - respect for women - is precisely the thing the zero-growther wants to kill with a stake through the heart:

Nathan 
Women don't seem to realize that they have lost an enormous amount of social value to men over the past century.  The need for many women to reproduce has drastically declined because agricultural and medical technologies have extended and enabled life far exceed previous possibilities.  In addition, the sexual revolution and subsequent legal enactments have placed virtually all of the power over reproduction in the hands of women, thereby devaluing those functions in the eyes of many men.  Women are no longer expected to fulfill any role that involves supporting a man or spending much of her time making him happy; you can certainly argue about the merits of that shift, but it causes women to have less value to men for the same reasons that a foreign-language translator is worth less to an employer if they do not speak Chinese. Women's (and men's) attractiveness has suffered a dramatic decline because of rampant obesity.  The advent of pornography has nearly eliminated the necessity of a woman in order for a man to experience sexual gratification.
So women aren't needed very much from a reproductive standpoint.  They aren't desirable from a relationship standpoint.  They aren't as desirable from an attractiveness standpoint.  And they aren't needed from a sexual standpoint.
Setting aside all of the issues related to the breaking of the social contract and the unfairness of placing expectations on men and not women, the simple question remains: what on earth makes you women think you're worth it anymore?  Why would you think that we care about what you think you deserve?



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