When researching my recent posts I came across a 2013 blog post by “Word Warrior” Barry Jacobsen titled CHIVALRY IS DEAD, LADIES: AND IT’S (PARTIALLY) YOUR FAULT!
Jacobsen took the sinking of the Concordia as an opportunity to position himself as the only real man in the room (emphasis mine):
…I have led what most would consider an enviably active and adventurous life; leading some of my friends to call me the “REAL most interesting man in the world” (forget that aging Latin lothario!). So it is with some degree of authority and an even greater degree of disgust that I say: I am sickened by my fellow men today.
As a man raised by a WWII veteran with a strong sense of chivalry (particularly toward women), I am disgusted with what passes today for manhood. So many men are mere shadows of what their gender represented in generations past. Military service members excepted (which include an amazing collection of very fine young men) most men today aren’t fit to carry the water of the “Greatest Generation”, my father’s generation; much less the dauntless knights who originally defined “chivalry”.
Like Lowry, Jacobsen was deeply troubled that men evacuated alongside of women and children in Costa Concordia (emphasis mine):
But I was strongly reminded that by modern standards I am a veritable John Wayne compared to most men today; by what happen on 13 January 2012; when the cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground off the coast of Tuscany.
When this occurred we were treated to the sickening sight of men elbowing women and children aside in their frantic, rat-like scurry for the life-rafts. When the first of these life boats arrived on shore, aid workers were expecting to see them filled with women and children. Right? Instead, they saw lots of burly Tony Soprano-wannabes accompanied by their well-dressed wives and “goomahs”!
After a few paragraphs explaining what a proper shipwreck should look like (the Titanic), Jacobsen gets back to how much better he is than other men:
When I look at today’s young men I see a bunch of pierced, tattooed, slovenly louts. These are not men: they are “manlings”. Boys that never grow beyond their toys.
A beautiful 29 year old acquaintance of mine complains that her husband spends much of his time at work (in his parents Real Estate business) playing online poker. He then comes home, eats the dinner she has prepared for him, and then flops down on his Lazy Boy and plays X-Box most of the night! Never mind that his very sexy wife has needs of her own. When he is too tired to continue playing, he goes to bed and passes out.
Not a man: a manling.
While Jacobsen desperately wants the ladies reading (including perhaps one very sexy married lady) to know that he is a real man unlike the man-lings they are wasting their time with, the point of the post is that women are partially to blame for the fact that other men aren’t as amazing as Jacobsen is:
But women must accept at least some of the blame for the current deplorable, degraded state of modern manhood.
Not to blame the victim here, but consider: Its women, after all, that raise men (all too often without a man in the house). It’s mostly young female teachers that teach our boys in their most formative years. And, ultimately, its women who accept and give themselves to “manlings”; rewarding thuggish, uncouth behavior by going out with and marrying such cretins.
Were women to choose wisely in their mates, picking the “nice guy” over the “bad boy”; then the old adage that “nice guys finish last” wouldn’t be so sadly true. Were women to demand that the men in their lives not treat them like slutty sex objects; but instead commit to them and family before mating, than many more boys would have involved fathers providing male role models in their lives.
Were mothers to raise boys to be gentleman with a sense of honor, they would grow up into men those mothers could be proud of.
Feminist politics, political correctness, and (most importantly) lack of male role models has left this generation of men with no clue how to behave as MEN!
The obvious part he leaves out is that women aren’t just making babies with sexy badboys who then don’t stick around. Very large numbers of women are marrying honest (but boring) men, having children with these men, and then kicking the men out of the home. How is it that Jacobsen hasn’t noticed this? Has he lived a sheltered life, away from the dysfunction of our modern family structure? How can he not see the anguish of good fathers having their children ripped away from them?
This brings me to Jacobsen’s bio page. According to his bio he is ex Special Forces, and likes to Live Action Role Play (LARP) as a medieval knight:
I’ve been a medieval combat reenactor for 35 years; and a Knight and Count within the Society for Creative Anachronisms since 1978 and 1980 respectively. It was within the Society that I formed the Spartan Warband in 2004, a national combat group that recreates the warrior culture of ancient Sparta.
While some men merely daydream about being a white knight, Jacobsen walks the walk and dresses up as one.
But this doesn’t explain how he hasn’t noticed that women are kicking good fathers out of the home. This is after all an epidemic. At the end of the bio we learn:
On a personal note, I have 3 amazing children (with two amazing ex-wives).
This of course leaves us with two options. Either Jacobsen is one of the man-lings who impregnate women and then either abandon them or are kicked out due to abuse, adultery, etc, or he has been cast out of his children’s lives for no good reason by not one but two “amazing” women.
My guess is the latter, since this would be most in line with his LARPing Sir Lancelot. Lancelot’s corrupted sense of honor lead him to cover for the crimes of an adulterous woman. The legacy of this corrupted sense of honor is all around us. Calling women to account is difficult, and feels terrible. While changing the focus to men allows a white knight to avoid what he fears while positioning himself as heroic. In this sense chivalry really is about protecting the weak, in the form of weak men protecting themselves. However, this self protection comes at the expense of both women (who are suffering due to a lack of moral leadership by men) and the truly weak and innocent, the children.
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