Vox Popoli

If this woman’s lament doesn’t put an amused smile on your face today, well, you’re probably not a man under the age of fifty:

Let me tell you, dear ladies: the age of chivalry is dead.

Yesterday, I drove out of a car park in ­Kensington, London, to find the power-steering on my BMW had gone. The car wouldn’t move. Thankfully, I was in a cul de sac, not a motorway. I stopped and tried to pull over. My car was one foot from the kerb. I put my hazard lights on. Next to me was a building site full of men in fluoro ­jackets standing doing ­nothing. They could see my distress when I began ­peering under the bonnet. I got back in the car, and on my mobile phone to call the BMW breakdown ­service to get the vehicle recovered. I was in tears. Still no one ­bothered to help….

I had thought it was just my ex-husband who used to allow me to put petrol in the car while he sat warm in the passenger seat, but if my ­experience yesterday ­morning is anything to go by, it’s a generational phenomenon. As Top Gear’s James May said this week, young men have lost their masculinity, in that they can no longer fix things. And this loss of manners is far worse. Young working British men: you should be ashamed.

Be ashamed of what? The “f****** cow” is totally in the wrong here. And I wonder, were those nearby men really “doing nothing” or did she simply neither realize nor care how they were occupying themselves thanks to her female solipsism?

Women demanded legal and political equality and our great-grandfathers were foolish enough to grant it to them. So they used that equality to force the last three generations of men to spend between 12 and 16 years being drenched in feminist propaganda about how women were strong, independent, and equal to us, except of course for their intrinsic emotional and moral superiority. Once they had achieved sufficient political power, they then set about redefining the concept of equality in a successful effort to strip men of their legal rights and render them legally inferior in an extra-Constitutional court system where men are guilty until pronounced innocent. And then, after all this, they’re surprised when we don’t treat them like our great-grandfathers treated their great-grandmothers.

I am confident that I speak for many, if not most of the men of my generation in my instinctive response to this woman’s petulant demand that men be at her beck and call: F— you and fix it yourself, Ms Strong Independent Woman. It’s not my problem.

I suspect that these days, the average man is probably more likely to help a male stranger than to help women he doesn’t know. At least a man is likely to have the decency to be grateful and not take your assistance as some sort of rightful homage. As for chivalry being dead, I think it is pertinent to quote Isaac Asimov on the historical conventions of the concept.

“This is Helen as viewed through the eyes of courtly love. By the convention of the troubadours, a woman need not deserve love, she need merely be a woman.” And don’t forget, a woman’s chivalric champion was ideally supposed to be her adulterous lover. It is little wonder, then, that modern women lament chivalry’s death.
(HT: SB)

An example of how failing to keep your woman’s tongue under control can get you killed, even if you’re a Marine:

A 23-year-old Marine who lived in Metairie was fatally stabbed following an argument with a man who defamed the Marine’s wife. The suspect yelled derogatory comments at Ryan Lekosky’s wife as the couple walked about 3:30 a.m. near the intersection of Dauphine and Iberville streets in the French Quarter, police said. Lekosky tried to intervene in the altercation between his wife and the suspect. The suspect turned on Lekosky, stabbing him several times. The suspect then returned to his vehicle and drove away on Dauphine Street, toward Canal Street. Lekosky died from his wounds.

The root problem is that men haven’t really figured out what they can and cannot do in defense of women’s honor anymore. In the days of yore, the Marine could have simply killed the guy out of hand and few would have thought twice about it; back then, defaming a man’s wife was a killing offense. Now, most women would be horrified at a male companion who, at the first derogatory word directed her way, immediately pulled out a .357 and fired six shots into the offender’s face. At the same time, not considering themselves proper targets for physical violence, most women won’t hesitate to escalate a verbal situation and if a man shrugs off a verbal assault directed at a woman with him, he is often going to be attacked by her for not coming to her defense.

So, what to do? It’s hard to say and it’s somewhat of a catch-22. All we can really conclude from the limited amount of information here is that it is a very bad idea for the man to assume that because he is not party to the verbal altercation, he will not be attacked first in the escalation. Once the situation transforms into a violent altercation, an attacker can be expected to attack the potentially more dangerous opponent first, which means that interceding in a manner that leaves you open to the other guy is a bad idea. The two-fold challenge is a) how to prevent the situation from developing into a violent one without causing your wife or girlfriend to develop contempt for you simply because you’re not foolish enough to fall for the old “let’s you and him fight” game, and b) how to extricate the two of you from an escalating situation without either of you getting hurt.

All of this presumes, of course, that you’re not dumb enough to escalate a verbal situation to a violent one on the basis of your own emotional reaction.

The first thing to do is to encourage her to blow it off. What do the words of some drunk idiot with an 85 IQ have to do with her? Of course, this is probably much easier to pull off if you’re carrying; she’s unlikely to accuse you of being a coward who won’t stand up for her if you ask her how many times she would like you to shoot the guy in the skull with your .40. Faced with such an offer, she’ll likely do an immediate 180 and start trying to encourage you to move along. Women are excited by male posturing and fisticuffs, not blowback and brain matter.

However, if a woman is feisty and responds by getting in the idiot’s face, the best thing is probably to physically withdraw her while keeping her between you and the opponent and keeping your focus on him. You can explain later that you were concerned about the bad guy hurting her and so forth; it’s better that she be angry with you for forcibly extricating her from a potentially dangerous situation than be contemptuous of you for failing to act at all. And if she does get hurt, well, she’s an adult and she bears the responsibility for her decision to confront the idiot, not you. But the likelihood that she’ll be attacked in a lethal manner is quite small since she won’t be perceived as a serious threat so the worst that’s likely to happen is that she’ll get punched or slapped. Undesirable, but she’ll live.

Of course, the biggest problem is that men in general, and white knights in particular, usually respond in a pompous and unprepared manner, paying more attention to the woman than they do to the potential opponent. That’s understandable, since most of what they’re doing is a chivalrous show for the woman’s benefit anyhow, but it’s not the best strategy in the event that the other guy isn’t posturing.

Of course, it’s perhaps worth recalling that chivalry was the show knights put on for other men’s wives.