Approach Week: Why Chivalry Is Dead

Comments are disabled on all posts published during Approach Week to encourage readers to limit their internet time and go outside to apply the lessons they have learned here. Approach Week celebrates the spirit of the approach, which is, in essence, a celebration of the spirit of assertive masculinity.

Patrick insightfully comments over at Liger of the Blogosphere, using the Elliot Rodger shooting spree as a backdrop to explain why chivalry no longer applies in the context of a modern, industrialized, female-empowered society where the state has a monopoly on punitive force.

Elliot [Rodger] feared, and eventually, hated women because he simply could not understand them. His ineptitude in this regard was almost cartoonish, e.g. sitting on a park bench waiting for a cute single girl to approach him.

“Nice guys finish last,” is a cliche because it’s a truism most people don’t want to believe.

Elliot, having never harmed anyone in his life, was a gallant gentleman in his own eyes. What he doesn’t understand is that the high-minded concept of chivalry originated in a time when the abject brutalization of women was commonplace and expected. It was a sort of counterculture set against the time-honored beat’em & rape’em de rigueur of the day. And it only mattered because those practicing it — knights — were those most capable of brutalizing women. An intimidating, armored and mounted professional killer acting in a genteel manner towards a maiden he could otherwise violently defile is the stuff of romantic legend, and it set them apart as a class above the brutish peasant infantrymen.

Because the context of constant fear of sexual subjugation no longer applies, “chivalry” is an anachronistic concept, and being a gentleman is in more looking the part and behaving otherwise, like the well-dressed and stately character of Christian Grey who enjoys whipping and inserting butt-plugs into women. [CH] would say this misdirection and unexpectedness is like crack to women. And it is.

None of this knowledge ever permeated Rodgers’ brain, because he refused to believe it.

As CH has said before, chivalry (or gentlemanliness) only works when it is accompanied by a cultural expectation of female deference to men. Since we are far FAR from the social conditions in the West where women are deferential to men (the opposite is more true), chivalry as a concept and a practice becomes a joke, akin to asking men to anoint the feet of haughty, entitled women in exchange for the masochistic delight of cultural contempt.

The point of mercy — which is what chivalry is, stripped to its core — is that it only means anything when there’s a credible threat serving as its justification. A mercy “granted” from a position of weakness is a fiction; an expedient that permits the continued operation of the fundamental premise without questioning. What the vast hordes of beta males fail to grasp is that their niceguy poses are only effective as a mate acquisition strategy when a jerk assumes them. Niceguys playing niceguys is a plushboy recursion matrix that repels tingles. If anything, niceguys should do the opposite and be *less* chivalrous, as a means of persuading women that they aren’t supplicating pushovers.

Men who think chivalry toward the modern woman will help their romantic prospects are worse than poetically deluded; they’re self-sabotaging.