Via Drudge, a tragic story from the local CBS station in Chicago: Family Attacked By Teens Who Cut In Line At Six Flags “Fright Fest”
The melee started about 8:45 p.m., when a group of young people cut in front of a 50-year-old woman in line with her 51-year-old husband and 12-year-old son in the park’s Southwest Territory, near the Raging Bull and Giant Drop rides, Smith said.
The woman asked the group to stop using foul language in front of her son…
The thugs retaliated not against her, but her son. Her husband was then obliged to get involved to protect their son, and this lead to all three of them getting a serious beat down:
…one of the teens “sucker-punched” the boy, Smith said.
The boy’s father stepped in, as did his mother, but the group overpowered them, continuing to kick, punch and stomp them as they went down to the ground, Smith said.
Almost certainly the wife thought she was protecting her son when she provoked the beat down, and she probably also thought she was doing the job her husband was failing to do.
The scenario above is strikingly similar to one I read about on a gun forum a number of years ago. In the gun forum scenario three families were walking back to their cars on a dark street and a group of thugs was walking behind them talking loudly and cursing amongst themselves. A woman in the group turned to the thugs and told them to stop cursing and learn some manners, since there were women and children (the gun owner’s son) present. I described the gun forum scenario in 2011 in my post Chivalry and protecting the weak*. In that post I pointed out that the woman who told the thugs to stop cursing was not protecting the group, but putting the group in danger. This observation provoked an outraged emotional response from a woman in the comment section:
The example the man used of punks cursing and using foul derogatory language around his family and him doing nothing was appalling. I mean if you are at a little wayne concert okay (no business bringing kids there). However if you are at a family friendly event you should expect your family to be treated with a certain level of respect. I call it a manitude. You should be able to exude enough manliness to make other men back down, especially if they know they are in the wrong. If you won’t protect your own family from punks what good are you? And it’s wrong to blame the woman for wanting to be able to walk back to her car IN THE COMPANY OF MEN, and not have her kids ears assaulted.
In both scenarios a group of thugs was cursing around a family, and a woman in the family group decided to put the thugs in their place since (to her mind) the men were failing to protect the group. Luckily in the gun forum scenario I shared in 2011 it didn’t escalate into violence.
This is an area where feminism, conservatism, and chivalry mix to create a prescription for disaster. Feminism tells women they are just as tough as men, and conservatives tell women they are kick ass gals who show more balls than men. Lastly chivalry promises that men will step in and solve the problem if a kick ass gal miscalculates how a group of thugs will respond to her tough talk. Most of the time the men are able to keep the kick ass gal’s actions from creating a catastrophe, but as the Chicago scenario demonstrates this isn’t guaranteed.
*See also my follow up post at the time, Lets you and him fight
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