Alpha Mail: to white knight or not?

MT has a question about his sister:

I have a White Knight concept that I would like you address or clarify at AlphaGame.

In regards to women in physically abusive, or controlling relationships, there will be men who will want to "rescue" them or bring them to the knowledge of their errors by speech or force.  This is a continuum.  On one end is the sycophantic pedestalizer (we will generously call him Suitor) who may or may not seek justification for romance in his, uhh...noble and selfless efforts.  On the other end is the concerned father who wants to protect his daughter from those who would use her.  The goal of the men for the woman to be out of the situation is the same, but there are non-trivial differences between Suitor and Father.

1) Suitor comes from a position of relative weakness; Father from relative Strength
2) Suitor approaches for possible personal gain, but may view his actions as dutiful; Father from Duty and Responsibility
3) Suitor has a romantic interest; Father has none*
*2 and 3 may be the same

Possibly you could chart three axes:
1) relative strength (pedestal or parent)
2) romantic interest (present or platonic)
3) responsibility for girl (none/self-imposted or absolute)

If it is true that that the preexisting nature of the relationship between a man and another person (wife, daughter, sister, son, stranger...) has bearing on his responsibility to that person, then by charting the case on the axes, you could guess the necessity of action and tactics.

The Suitor cannot ground the woman. The Father can DHSMV, but more as a way to make a fool of the romantic interest, than to set himself up as an alternative mate.  Either could attempt violence, ill-advised as it may be, but the perception would change as a function of relative strength and responsibility.     

Maybe I hit something here, but certainly, a man's true duty to the safety of another is according to the nature of the relationship. Can you give insight on this situation?  My sister-in-law (19, out of state) is sweet, naive and shacked up with a guy with tight game who is controlling and physically abusing her.  She isn't under the parents' roof any longer.  I'll probably see the happy couple at Christmas.  I'd like to see them apart, but I have no binding responsibility to her, or even a great relationship with her.  Are there any tactics to address this or is this something to leave lie?

This is a good question. My feeling is that one's involvement in such situations totally depends upon the nature of the relationship. Fathers should speak out forthrightly about what they see. They should not hesitate to use their daughters' reliance upon them, particularly financially, as a counterweight, even in the knowledge that it may cause his daughter to turn against him in the short term. He should, of course, make it clear that he will be there for her when - not if - the unworthy love interest eventually shows his colors.

A brother has no similar leverage. However, he has social power that the father does not. He should relentlessly mock and belittle the unworthy man around his sister, planting the seeds of doubt that will one day blossom once the suitor fertilizes them with his inevitably bad behavior. And he should also make it clear that he will be there for her when the time comes.

A brother-in-law, on the other hand, should stay completely out of it. To be honest, in this sort of situation, I see a brother-in-law who is probably rather attracted to his sister-in-law and is likely to see unsuitability where none exists, and to exaggerate it where it does. In any case, there is no responsibility to intervene here, and indeed, to do so would rightly raise a few eyebrows, especially with the man's wife.

I'm also very suspicious when I hear about a "sweet, naive" girl who is nevertheless "shacked up". This indicates that she is almost certainly neither as naive or sweet as she portrays herself to be to her brother-in-law, in fact, this raises the question as to precisely who is the player in her relationship with the supposedly "controlling and physically abusive" gentleman in question. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if she had a convincing "rape" story she could produce on demand with a catch in her voice and a tear in her eye.

MT is correct. There is a continuum of sorts. But nevertheless, there is a hard and bright line between "family business" and "not family business" that should always be respected, and that line falls somewhere in between "cousin" and "brother-in-law". In most cases, if you find yourself asking "should I polish my armor and mount my steed", the mere fact that you need to ask the question is sufficient reason to say "no". Women have free will, agency, and they are legal adults in the eyes of the law. If they insist on swimming in the deep end despite not being equipped to do so, you have a solemn duty to civilization and the rule of law to let them drown.

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White knights on Twitter

The worst White Knights are always the feminized gamma fathers:

Vox Day ‏@voxday Jul 9
Darwin + Title IX = Idiocracy. The more women are educated, the less intelligent society becomes.

Paul Mikelson ‏@pablo79raider
@voxday my daughters will be educated so they don't have to rely on some asshole for their next meal.

Vox Day ‏@voxday now
@pablo79raider In that case, you should probably buy them their starter cats now.

It's probably small loss to society. One tends to doubt anyone would have been terribly inclined to enwife the guy's little orcs anyhow.

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Fathers are the civilizing force

If you read through the lessons these successful men say they learned from their fathers, a few common themes rapidly become apparent:

1. Caring and protection
2. Personal accountability and hard work
3. Courage and a willingness to fight
4. Commitment and self-control

Mothers are necessary for the continued existence of society. Marriage, families, and fathers are necessary for transforming a human society into a civilized human society. And anything that weakens the institutions of marriage, family, and fatherhood is an intrinsically anti-civilizational force.

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Better off out

This is not good news for civilization:

Men who entered into fatherhood at around age 25 saw a 68% increase of depressive symptoms over their first five years of being dads—if they lived at the same home as their children.

The study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, looked at 10,623 young men who were participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The study tracked the fathers for about 20 years, and kept score of their depression symptoms.

While fathers who didn’t share a home with their children didn’t experience the same high increase in depressive symptoms in early fatherhood, most of the fathers in the study did live with their children. Those men had lower depression symptoms before they became dads and experienced a spike in symptoms when their child was born and through the first few years.

Translation: fathers who live at home with their children and provide for them have less sex and more responsibility than fathers who abandon them and their mothers for sex with other women.

One of the biggest and most common mistakes a married woman can make is to put her children ahead of her husband. This is not only bad for the husband, it is also bad for the children due to the harm it does to the marital relationship.

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A feminist rationale for young motherhood

It's interesting to see how this woman's solipsism actually leads her to the correct conclusion for all the wrong reasons:

I couldn’t think of a dignified way to explain to the doctors that my boyfriend of three years had pulled out of the sessions we were about to start.

We had been for all the tests and I had psyched myself up to start injecting myself with a cocktail of hormones. I was just about to go to the pharmacy to pick up the drugs that would kick off our quest for a baby when my boyfriend, a successful broker, phoned me.

His voice was emotionless as he told me he didn’t want to go through with it. “It’s all too much,” he told me. “Maybe next year…”

Maybe next year? The sad truth was I didn’t have many years left. I was 37 and increasingly desperate to start a family. But despite my ticking clock, I had heard those three words many times before, from him and a previous partner to whom I had been engaged several years earlier.

Indeed, the truth is that I have experienced nothing but trouble whenever I have attempted to persuade a man to have children with me.

To suggest, as some experts do, that somehow the age at which women conceive is within their control, is naive and misleading.

There are still some stubborn taboos about conception, and one of them involves the myth that deciding to have children is something women and men do together in an open and honest manner.

For some lucky couples it may be like that. But that is not my experience, nor the experience of many of my girlfriends.

I’m sorry if I offend any male readers by suggesting that they do not always play fair in matters of fertility. But in my experience men increasingly behave with terrible selfishness when it comes to giving up their bachelor lifestyles.

Yes, perhaps women should try to have babies early — but not because that is the best time to have children, but because it might be the only time to have them. For if, like me, you have spent your thirties being involved with a series of men who enjoy their freedom, you will know it is simply a statement of fact that today’s young males really aren’t keen to become fathers.

She is still blaming men for her own failure to start trying to have children sooner, of course, but at least she is telling young women to learn from the consequences of her mistakes. It probably hasn't occurred to most women who are putting off child-bearing until the deadline to realize that if men do the exact same thing, they will be waiting until they are in their fifties or sixties to have children.

Why should men not spend their 30s and 40s having fun, after all. They have plenty of time in which they can still have children, right?

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Dude, she's still a princess

Charles Blow fails to realize that he's admitted to a failure of fatherhood:

One day when my twins, a boy and a girl, were about 7 years old, we were out running errands.

We left one store and headed for the car. I entered the driver’s door, my son got in the front passenger door, but I noticed that I didn’t hear a rear door open and close.

I looked around to see that my daughter was still outside the car — her arms crossed, one hand clutching a little green purse made of stiff paper — staring disapprovingly at the door.

I rolled down the back window and asked, “What are you doing?”

She responded, “I’m a princess, and princesses don’t touch doorknobs.”

Having no idea where she had gotten such a notion, I was equal parts amused and irritated by it. I said, “Get in the car, sweetheart.” She repeated her refusal.

This was now a standoff.

So, I started to inch the car forward as if I was going to leave without her. She jumped in the car in a huff: “Why didn’t you open that door for me, Williams?”

“Who is Williams?” I asked.

“You,” she said. “On TV when people have servants they’re always called Williams or something like that.”

I had had enough. I turned in my seat and explained to her that, yes, I did call her my princess, and although I loved her dearly, I would not pamper her. I told her that her value and worth were not in what men would do for her, but in what she could do for herself. I told her that in our family, as in life, she would have to be self-sufficient and self-reliant, and that included deigning to touch doorknobs, or in this case, car door handles. And I told her that if she ever called me Williams again, she would be punished.

Williams disappeared into the ether.

Now my daughter is a high school junior, a great student who often makes the honor roll, and a championship fencer who is ranked No. 2 in the country in her age group and weapon. She wants to go to college and study to become a doctor.

She has blossomed into the self-assured, self-sufficient and self-reliant young woman I hoped she’d become, and she now rails against, and writes about, gender bias and gender stereotype. But she still likes to carry a nice purse. Some things never change.

When I think of my amazing young lady going off into a world where there is still a gender-pay gap, it makes me furious.

So, his daughter is about to go off to university, where women are coddled and men are punished for the crime of being male, and he's already preemptively outraged by the fact that she might get paid less if she decides to work fewer hours than her hypothetical male counterparts.

Then again, perhaps she'll get lucky and hook up with a lazy, unemployed guy with a prison record who is content to live off her salary. That's a model that is not exactly unheard of in the Black community, after all. Won't that be empowering!

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Why children need fathers

The feminists discovered that fish actually did need bicycles after all. And as the hordes of fatherless bastards leave women dismayed in their totally predictable failure to grow up into responsible, productive men, they're gradually learning that kids need men too:

Encouraging risk: In their approach to childrearing, fathers are more likely to encourage their children to take risks, embrace challenges, and be independent, whereas mothers are more likely to focus on their children's safety and emotional well-being. "[F]athers play a particularly important role in the development of children's openness to the world," writes psychologist Daniel Paquette. "[T]hey also tend to encourage children to take risks, while at the same time ensuring the latter's safety and security, thus permitting children to learn to be braver in unfamiliar situations, as well as to stand up for themselves." In his review of scholarly research on fatherhood, he notes that scholars generally find that dads are more likely to have their children talk to strangers, to overcome obstacles, and even to have their toddlers put out into the deep during swim lessons. The swim-lesson study, for instance, which focused on a small sample of parents teaching their kids to swim, found that "fathers tend to stand behind their children so the children face their social environment, whereas mothers tend to position themselves in front of their children, seeking to establish visual contact with the children."

Protecting his own: Fathers play an important role in protecting their children from threats in the larger environment. For instance, fathers who are engaged in their children's lives can better monitor their children's comings and goings, as well as the peers and adults in their children's lives, compared to disengaged or absent fathers. Of course, mothers can do this, to an extent. But fathers, by dint of their size, strength, or aggressive public presence, appear to be more successful in keeping predators and bad peer influences away from their sons and daughters. As psychologist Rob Palkovitz notes in our book, "paternal absence has been cited by multiple scholars as the single greatest risk factor in teen pregnancy for girls."

Dad's discipline: Although mothers typically discipline their children more often than do fathers, dads' disciplinary style is distinctive. In surveying the research on gender and parenthood for our book, Palkovitz observes that fathers tend to be firmer with their children, compared to mothers. Based on their extensive clinical experience, and a longitudinal study of 17 stay-at-home fathers, Kyle Pruett and psychologist Marsha Kline Pruett agree. In Partnership Parenting they write, "Fathers tend to be more willing than mothers to confront their children and enforce discipline, leaving their children with the impression that they in fact have more authority." By contrast, mothers are more likely to reason with their children, to be flexible in disciplinary situations, and to rely on their emotional ties to a child to encourage her to behave.

I saw the difference between male and female parental roles time and time again in a toddler gymnastics class. I was the only father there, and unsurprisingly, my child was the only one who didn't have anyone holding his hand as he crossed the balance beam or as leaped down onto the big padded map. A few days later, my child was practically running across the beam and leaping headlong from the platform. Most of the other kids, half of whom were older, were still edging fearfully across the beam, tightly clutching Mommy's hand.

Sure, you still want Mommy there to kiss the boo-boos when it all goes wrong, but children need Daddy to teach them the difference between acceptable and unacceptable risks.

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