Chivalry may not be dead, but it says quite a
bit about the status of its health when a public example of it draws such
attention and inspires such polarized responses as one instance did last week.
Alt rock band 3 Doors Down was playing to a
full house in Broomfield, Colorado, when something caught frontman Brad Arnold’s
eye that incensed him. He abruptly stopped his bandmates in mid-song before addressing someone in the
audience near the stage.
“Hey, hey, homie, you don’t hit a woman,” he said
angrily as the stunned audience listened. “You just pushed a woman out of the way
to get in a fight, you d*ck.” (Arnold later apologized to the crowd for his
uncharacteristic profanity.)
When concertgoers realized he was calling out
a man for abusing a woman, they erupted in cheers. But Arnold wasn’t done: “Get
him the hell out of here,” he ordered security. He then said something else
that was lost in the concert noise, before forcefully reminding the man in the
audience: “You don't hit a woman, dude.”
The band’s guitarist Chris Henderson shared a
video clip of the incident online
– it’s been viewed well over 2.5 million times – and later released a statement to E! News, which read,
You see people fight in the crowd all the
time. In the past Brad has said for people to calm down and love each other but
this was ultra aggressive in our eyes. It was so aggressive that he stopped the
show for the first time in 15 years to address it head on with the guy.
The reaction to Brad Arnold’s very public
scolding was generally supportive, and rightfully so. After all, he had not
only interrupted his own show to come to the defense of a woman who was being
roughed up, but he had sent a loud and clear message to everyone in his
audience – and to anyone who saw the video clip online or read about it – that
it is simply wrong for men, who are generally bigger and stronger, to hit women.
“That's why I posted [the video],” Henderson said. “I thought it was chivalry
at its best."
But not everyone was impressed by Arnold’s
honorable gesture. The commenters beneath online articles about the incident
fall into three categories, as they always do when chivalry is the topic: those
who cheered the fact that the rumors of chivalry’s death are greatly
exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain; egalitarians, both male and female, who assert
that no one should hit anyone, man or woman; and those who angrily reject
the notion that a man should ever
come to the defense of a woman.
That final category includes radical
feminists but more often a subset of men’s rights activists who call themselves
Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW). It’s impossible to know how large a community
they are, but the more disturbingly angry and misogynistic members are becoming
increasingly vocal on the internet, and their opposition to chivalry is
positively rabid.
For example, one such commenter at Breitbart.com snarled about Brad Arnold, “What a pathetic
white knight. Such woman protectors like him are the feminist filth that turned
the country into the misandrist mess it is now.”
(In MGTOW terminology, the formerly heroic
symbol of the “white knight” is now a contemptuous label for “beta males” who
treat women with deference and respect. MGTOW blame white knights for aiding
and abetting the feminism they so despise for ruining their world.)
That same commenter linked to an internet placard
called Hurt Feminism by Doing Nothing, which is not an official MGTOW motto but pretty adequately sums up their
attitude toward chivalry:
Don’t Help Women
Don’t Fix Things for Women
Don’t Support Women’s Issues
Don’t Come to Women’s Defense
Don’t Speak for Women
Don’t Value Women’s Feelings
Don’t Portray Women as Victims
Don’t Protect Women.
“Without White Knights,” it concludes,
“Feminism Would End Today.”
To give you even more explicit evidence of
the attitude of such self-proclaimed “alpha males”: on a Reddit thread about the 3 Doors Down incident, one
commenter was even more obscenely incensed by Arnold’s actions than Arnold
himself was about the guy he scolded:
Does no one realize sometimes a b*tch
deserves it? F*ck these white knight pr*cks. I'm going to go [here he inserts a
very colorful expression that describes using a woman for selfish sexual
gratification and then dumping her] some slut at a bar this weekend just to
balance the karma.
It would be easy to dismiss such viciousness
as the bitter ravings of a few internet bullies who can’t get a date, except
that these (admittedly extreme) examples are indicative of a broader male
frustration, confusion, and resentment about what manhood means today and the
role men should play in a world radically changed by feminism. The attitude that
“chivalry is nothing but male stupidity,” as one MGTOW commenter asserted, has
become tragically all-too-common.
In a culture that has bred such an attitude
among too many men, the chivalry that Brad Arnold expressed instinctively is in
diminishing supply. It is a quality of character that needs not just
celebrating, but cultivating.
From Acculturated, 7/23/15
