Stephen Hawking and the burden of Western Chivalry

Shortly after I forwarded an article (search) on the persistent and
aggravated abuse directed at Stephen Hawking (cosmologist and author
of the best-selling A Brief History of Time who suffers from an
advanced case of A.L.S. that left him virtually paralyzed), I received
a response from a journalist who thought that Stephen Hawking had it
coming what he was being subjected to.  She is a great conservative
journalist who often writes in support of fathers and families.  Her
remark seemed out of character.

I tried to correct her on the point she had brought up, but in doing
so we seemed to move farther apart to polar opposites of the
discussion.  That puzzled me.  What I wrote next to her made matters
worse.  A simple example I used to illustrate a general social bias
against men got taken by her to be an ad-hominem attack against her as
a woman.  But that provided the clue that solved the puzzle.  I sent
back the following response to her.

How come I feel that I am being stereotyped? But I understand now
what puzzled me before about your reaction. It's all a
misunderstanding! I didn't make myself sufficiently clear.

What you thought was an ad-hominem attack, wasn't. It was
criticism (very mild, too) of what you had said. That is a critical
distinction. What you had said is far more typically said by men than
by women. I would not have dreamed in my wildest dreams that a remark
like, "Would you still say 'humph' if the sexes were reversed in such
a case?" would trigger your ire.

Men are being looked upon as cads, on average unjustly, and again,
far more often by men than by women. If anyone (woman or man) says
something that is in line with the general sentiment of society,
something that men are more likely to say than women do, and if I then
ask if he would say the same thing if the victim in that case would
have been a woman, how can that be construed as an ad-hominem attack
on account of his sex? I addressed the same question close to a
thousand times to specific individual men.

The issue was not whether you, as a woman, said the right thing or
not. The issue is that most of society, and men far more often than
women, see women as victims even if the perceived victims don't
deserve victim status, and that men, even if they are truly victims,
are being seen as people that deserved what they got. It is not only
feminists that put women on pedestals. Most of non-feminist men and
women do! That's the handicap that men are up against.

I remember that we once had a discussion about the code of western
chivalry. The chivalry code is a very serious burden on men. There was
never anything like it for women, other than that once upon a time
women were held responsible to be feminine women, wives, mothers and
willing objects of veneration, but the feminists successfully took
that away from women, except for the aspect that if women still want
to be feminine women, wives, mothers and objects of veneration, they
still have the right to do so - at the risk of being vilified,
ostracized, castigated and discriminated against as "enemies of the
race of women". (1)

Freedom of choice in such matters exists only for women, not for
men. Men are rigidly locked in the embrace by western chivalry.

That implies that men are still and always obligated to live by
the chivalry code, because women's status demands that.
What that obligation means is that a real man pleases his
woman, and if his woman turns on him because he failed in her eyes, he
deserves it and had it coming.  [That already at an early age puts
boys and men between a rock and a hard place.  The demands placed on
boys to prepare them for a life of servitude are tough ones, and there
is nothing comparable for girls.(2)]

Nobody holds men more strictly to living up to that obligation
than men themselves. With respect to the chivalry code, women's
liberation never happened, although some men are slowly waking up to
the fact that there is no longer any need to be enslaved by the
chivalry code and to venerate women, because women are just as human
as men are - in slightly different ways.

Women's liberation did nothing for men, other than to hold men to
the duty of remaining the ready and willing servants of women, without
men's former right to be compensated for their efforts in being so
willingly indentured to women. However, men are even being vilified
for their increasingly more prevalent refusal to be women's servants,
for their refusal to engage in relationships that can be equated to
playing Russian roulette with every second chamber loaded. Not all
that long ago the odds of a marriage failing were one in seventeen.
That was an acceptable risk, one out of every two is not.

However, although the institution whose maintenance is one of the
goals of western chivalry has been largely destroyed, for most men the
chivalry code is still very much in place.

Although striving in vain and valiantly against unacceptable odds,
for many a man there is nothing more devastating than to have failed
in living up to the demands of western chivalry to be the provider and
protector of the wife that now is so exceedingly unhappy with his
performance of his duty to make her happy that she begins to abuse
him. And remember, his wife doesn't have to live under any constraints
comparable to those that western chivalry places upon men. She is not
obligated to treat him with respect; and even visible injuries, often
fatal or potentially so, that are the evidence of her abusing him are
being glossed over.

That is a double jeopardy. By their very nature of being women,
women are held to be innocent - according to the demands of western
chivalry (we can't have a villain being a heroine now, can we?). Even
if no other conclusion is possible but that the man is suffering at
the hands of his abusive wife, we jump on him and say things like: he
had it coming; he deserves what he gets; he is not a real man; all men
are cads, and worse.

The one of all men that hold the victim responsible more than
anyone else is the man that is the victim on account of his failure to
be everything his wife ever wanted him to be for her, no matter how
much and how often she changed the performance requirements she
demanded he should live up to. I discussed that with a friend just
last night. He is a man that proudly bears the scars of his
sacrifices. He's got one going from his eyebrow well into his hairline
("See this? Seventeen stitches! Frying pan."), [and, pointing at a
puckered scar half-way between his left collar bone and the left
nipple on his chest,] "See this? Bullet hole! .306 rifle."). Yet, all
he said when I reminded him of that last night was: "That's
nothing!" (3)

The man caught in such circumstances will not very likely and at
best only reluctantly identify who his abuser is. To do so would smear
the image of the object of his chivalry. Worse, by doing so he would
advertise his failure as a man, all the more so if the man is a
prestigious millionaire like Stephen Hawking.

That may be a partial answer to your question of why Stephen
Hawking doesn't name his abuser. We will know better when or if
Stephen Hawking speaks up. Things may be out of his hands now. It
appears that the police are building a case against his possible
abuser, and apparently more than enough witnesses to her abuse of him
have come forth.

All the best,

Walter

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