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?

• −

We Have Met The Enemy

A lot of Catholic parents detest dating. According to these parents, dating encourages the participants to get used to frequent breakups, emotional roller coasters and psychologically prepares them for divorce.

Perhaps it does all of those things.
But the problem isn't with the dating.
The problem is with the Catholic parents.

Is Kellmeyer Crazy?

As I've pointed out in other posts, parents in post-industrial societies like our own infantilize their children. In pre-industrial society, 12-18 year olds were treated as adults. For centuries, canon law allowed 12-year old women and 14-year old men to marry (today, canon law has raised the age... to 14 and 16, respectively). Pagan Rome, where the average age of marriage for women was 14, had allowed the same thing, ages before Christ founded the Church. In fact, nearly every pre-industrial society on the face of the earth allowed what the Church allowed. Indeed, a recent survey of hunter-gatherer societies show the average age of marriage was 14 for girls and 21 for boys.  

Twelve-year old men were apprenticed and learned a trade - they were expected to be masters at their craft and able to support a family by age 18. For centuries, that's exactly what at least half the population did - women were married by age 16, men were married by age 18. 

Now, I know your first rebuttal, and it is wrong. Medievals weren't all mostly dead by the age of thirty.  Early marriage was not permitted because everyone died at age 30. Everyone thinks nobody made it to fifty because no one understands what "median age" means.

Any medieval who made it to age 10 was likely to live to be 50. The median age of death was in the low 20s and 30s for medievals because a lot of medieval children died in their first few years. This high early childhood death rate dragged the median death age artificially down.

In point of fact, if a person was able to survive the nutrition and health problems of medieval childhood, s/he was as likely to make it to 50 then as anyone born in modern-day Russia is today.

What changed?

Well, with industrialization, we decided to use a different kind of educational system. We pretty much scrapped apprenticeships and went for mass public schools. This new method warehouses children through age 18, keeps them out of the workforce and out of job competition with older adults. It also infantilizes them.

But it didn't used to be that way. In colonial Mexico, for instance, "More than half the Indias are married by the time they turn 16....using Nahua censuses for some Morelos villages around 1540, McCaa has built a strong case for child marriage. There were girls married before ten; mean age could stand between 12 and 14.(9) In all likelihood, the introduction of Christian marriage, with its threshold of 12 years for wedding girls, brought about a small rise in mean age at marriage for Indias.... At the age when half the girls (16) and the boys (18) were already married, both parents were alive in three cases out of four.(12) Adult mortality did not explain precocity of marriage." A Nahua source with very complete lineage and demographic information concludes, "Here, we find no unmarried individuals above fifteen years of age."

St. Rita married at age 12. The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14 when she got pregnant with Jesus. Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. They had 14 children. St. Elizabeth of Hungary married at age 13 and had her first child at age 15. Chrysostom said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters.

Why were saints marrying and having children at what we would consider a very young age? As I point out in my book:

[Did not St. John Chrystosom say] “What greater work is there than training the mind and forming the habits of the young?” Indeed he did. But the Latin reads “Ouid maius quam animis moderari, quam adolescentulorum fi ngere mores?” (emphasis added). That is, Chrysostom was referring to the education of teenagers. This is quite clear from the context of the homily in which the sentence appears, a homily in which the saint is at pains to point out:

The fathers are to blame. They require their horse-breakers to discipline their horses, they do not permit the colt to remain untamed. Instead, they put a rein and all the rest upon it from the beginnings. But their children? These they overlook. They allow their children to go about for a long season unbridled, and without temperance, disgracing themselves by fornications and gamings and attending the wicked theaters. Before the fornication began, they should have given their son to a wife, to a wife chaste, and highly endowed with wisdom. Such a wife will bring her husband away from this disorderly course of life, and will be instead a rein to the colt…. Do you not know that you can do no greater kindness to a youth than to keep him pure from whorish uncleanness? (Homily #59 on Matthew 18).

Chrysostom knew something we have forgotten.

We all remember that marriage is meant for the procreation of children and the unity of the couple. But we rarely recall - because no one ever teaches it - that marriage also serves a third and critically important purpose. Holy Marriage is the salve for concupiscence, the remedy for our tendency towards the sin of lust.

Why do you think our society is so steeped in sexuality? It is due in part to the fact that our society does not allow teenagers to get married. Teens want what they are made for - marriage and the procreation of children - but they can't have it. So society tantalizes them with what they can't have: a stable family, a good sex life, with themselves as the heads of that family, loving their spouses.

Conclusion
You see, when your 12 or 14-year old dates, they really do expect that they are finding a mate. If society, including their Catholic parents, left them alone, and didn't push post-industrial expectations of higher education, better jobs, etc., upon them, these teens really would get married at 14 or 15, as men and women that age have for thousands of years.

They would get married as the Church permitted them to for thousands of years.
They would get married as St. John Chrysostom recommended they should over 1500 years ago.

But as a modern, responsible Catholic parent, you won't allow them to marry at age 12, 14 or 16. They cannot imitate St. Rita of Cascia, or St. Elizabeth or the Blessed Virgin. You won't allow it.

If they start getting "too serious", you will actively step in and forbid them seeing that young man or woman so often, or perhaps, even forbid them meeting at all. You will break them up. It doesn't matter if they have a true vocation to marriage to that person. You will make sure it is delayed or destroyed. Catholic parents don't want early marriage and dozens of grandchildren from their only daughter or only son. Rather than allow the marriage, or encourage the couple to stay together to get married at age 14 or 15, the parents will either provide no support or actively encourage the couple to breakup.

And so the young men and women will be emotionally overwrought, they will go through innumerable breakups, they will spend the next ten or twenty years preparing themselves for the divorce that comes from marrying the wrong person. This will not result because of dating, but precisely because we will not allow them to marry.

Now, I'm not saying that you necessarily should allow your children to marry at age 14. I'm just pointing out that the problem with dating is not dating - it is the parents. Parents don't have the same expectations for their children they had prior to the industrial revolution.

So don't go blaming the culture for corrupting our children.

If anything, we are the ones who actively contribute to our children's corruption, because we go along with society's expectations for our children. We helped set up today's currently highly sexualized culture, we keep our children from marrying young so that they have to endure the tantalization for years, even decades, and we expect them to live as celibates without a community to support them or a vow of celibacy to give backbone to their lifestyle.

Yeah, the people corrupting our children?
That would be us.

PS
An excellent article, recommended in the comments, and worth reading.

Additional references:
Treating Teens like Toddlers
Does Society Infantilize Teens
Driving Teens Crazy
The Case Against Adolescence

PPS.

Interesting stats here. According to this article, the divorce rate among teen couples has dropped to match that of adults. It's almost as if the Internet and smart phones makes teens mature faster.

2021 divorce rate for 15-25 was 19.7

2021 divorce rate for 25-34 was 19.4 

2021 divorce rate for 35-44 was 18.1

Women are now LESS LIKELY to get divorced between 15 and 24 then they are between 25 and 44.

The divorce rate for teenagers is now indistinguishable from that between 30-year olds. Either teenagers are maturing faster, are adults are becoming less mature.

Given that divorce rates dropped, it seems that smart phones and the Internet might be making teens MORE MATURE FASTER. 

That is counter-intuitive.

 

Immaturity, Thy Name Is Woman

Recently, a news story about men, video games and porn has been making the rounds.

Every time it is posted somewhere, everyone clucks with concern over the absolute fools that men are making of themselves.

Women, especially Catholic Women (tm), write despairing blogs about the immature male, especially the immature Catholic male. You know the one - he refuses to commit, to settle down, to pop the question, even to date whichever unhappy Catholic woman happens to be writing the blog that day.

It's all his fault. He's using porn, playing World of Warcraft, going to work, instead of paying attention to her. Damnably beastly of him.

The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as the world-wide concern about the welfare of Catholic children.

You know the drill - sexual abuse by public school teachers, rabbis, atheists, fast food managers, swimming coaches, football coaches is largely ignored or considered one-off events: odd and unusual. But sexual abuse of Catholic children by priests!!! That's a consistent, continuing abuse that all people are always concerned about.

So, everyone is deeply concerned about immature men, immature Catholic men.
But why don't we get concerned about the way CATHOLIC WOMEN are harming themselves and society?

Let's take one example: divorce.

Women initiate divorce more often than men.
In fact, women initiate divorce over 60% of the time.
If both spouses are college-educated, women initiate divorce 90% of the time.

"The majority of midlife divorces are initiated by women. Don't believe it? In the AARP survey, 66 percent of women reported that they asked for the divorce, compared with 41 percent of men. And men more often than women were caught off-guard by their divorce.."

"The perceived benefits of divorce differ by gender. Women were far more likely than men to say that having their own self-identity was a top reward.... 43 percent of women said they emerged from the split against remarriage. Only 33 percent of men said they wouldn't remarry."

So, why are women ruining their own lives and the lives of their husbands and children? After all, women who divorce are much more likely to be single head of households, and single households are largely impoverished.

This is important.
Everyone knows that women and children are more likely to be poor.
No one knows that it is the women who deliberately impoverish their own children.

And why did women financially destroy their own lives and the lives of their children?
Well, these women wanted to find their identity!
It looks like that whole Teen Mom show could extend the age of female participants to about 50 without changing its emotional approach to life one whit.

You know, in ages past, we had a specific word to describe this approach to life: hysteria. "Hystera" is the Greek word for "uterus", the idea being that women are illogical because they let their wombs rule them rather than their rationality. Today, it is considered bad form to lodge such accusations against women. On the other hand, it is perfectly acceptable... nay... it is considered the height of hilarity to imply that a man was thinking with his little head instead of his big one.

Of course, putting it that way is considered crude.
The enlightened, educated way of reversing the stereotype is to ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so wrapped up in pornography and video games.

So, we ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so immature.
But we are no longer allowed to ask why women, especially Catholic women, are so immature.

But don't these questions deserve to be asked?
How can we stop the rampant immaturity, the hypergamic hysteria, among women that is on display in this divorce culture of ours? Why do we allow women to ruin modern society this way? How can we wean women off their mindless pursuit of "self expression" and "self-identity"?

Undoubtedly, men are avoiding commitment to these hordes of immature women for very good reason.

Maybe the problem isn't that men are immature, but that immature women flock around them, whining for a date, for a ring, for a husband ... and when they get it? They divorce the man, pick up the alimony paycheck, and go looking for their identity, which they apparently lost somewhere on the way to the altar.

Obviously, given these divorce statistics, we need to start a national conversation, a national movement to help women stop their narcissistic behaviours.

We have endless men's groups to wean men off of pornography.
Where are the women's groups that wean women off of divorce and their motivation for wanting a divorce?

Where is Narcissists Anonymous?


UPDATE:
I nearly forgot to add this little tidbit in.
Blood bank testing inadvertently shows that 28% of children don't have the Dad they think they do.
Gives you a whole new understanding of who is acting irresponsibly, doesn't it?

And that's just the children in families with serious family medical issues. The blood banks figured it out because the families had to go to a blood bank and test for a possible transfusion for a family member. What are the rates in other kinds of families?

You see, this was a blood bank study, and blood bank studies can be fooled.
Let's just take the most common markers - ABO and Rh.
A, B and Rh are all dominant.
O is regressive.
A, B and Rh+ all indicate that certain proteins exist on the red blood cell's surface.
O and Rh- means those proteins aren't there.

So, if Dad is O and Mom is O, but the kid is A, B or AB, then that child clearly came from a different dad.
He has proteins on his red blood cells that couldn't come from Mom or "Dad."

Same with Rh. If Dad is O- and Mom is O-, but the kid is O+, then daddy don't live at that house.
He's got proteins from somebody else.

But what if Dad is A, Mom is B or O, and the kid is O?
Well, we can't tell from just the blood test. Dad may actually be AO. And if Mom had a fling with a Type O man, you wouldn't be able to tell from the AB blood test.

Same with Rh  - if Mom is Rh+, Mom can have a fling with ANYONE and the Rh factor wouldn't tell.

So, using only the markers that blood banks can say, without shadow of a doubt, that Dad is a cuckold, 28% of fathers are being cuckolded.

But you won't see an article wringing it's hands about female flings based on these facts.
Well, except for this one.