Vox Day has created a bit of a stir with his post Low morale men. If you read the post, you will notice that there are two groups of men Vox doesn’t respect:
- Men who do not marry and have children.
- Men who marry and have children.
There is however a third category of men to whom Vox is holding out an implied promise of future respect. These are men who aspire to marry and have children, but haven’t yet done so. This is quite obviously a false promise, as once these men do as Vox instructs they will merely have moved from one category of men Vox doesn’t respect to another category of men he doesn’t respect.
This is of course a very common pattern in our age, as it is the same false promise of respect W. Bradford Wilcox, Jim Geraghty, Dennis Prager, and other men at National Review offer men if they marry.
The reality is that our current anti married father policies are merely the formal legal expression of our societal disrespect of married fathers. The men of National Review, and now sadly Vox, are searching for a way to motivate men to marry without offering married fathers respect. Though the details of their arguments differ, the form is the same; married fathers deserve the contempt the system has for them. If you disagree, your are either lazy or a coward.
The fact that men are concerned about the disrespect of married fathers only shows that they don’t deserve respect. Wilcox frames it this way in Hey Guys, Put a Ring on It:
There is no doubt that marriage requires sacrifices, and lots of them. Successful marriages require men to work harder, avoid cheating, spend less time with friends, and make a good-faith effort, day in and day out, to be emotionally present with their spouses. Many men find these sacrifices hard.
Vox makes a similar argument, but instead of saying that married fathers don’t deserve respect because they don’t work hard enough and aren’t emotionally available, he tells us we shouldn’t respect the modern married father due to his lack of commitment to murder-suicide (emphasis mine):
The truth is that men often suffer the legal order they deserve, because they tolerate it. Would any Roman patrician have meekly submitted to being made an indentured servant at the whim of his wife and the word of a judge?
No. He would have killed the judge, the wife, and everyone who assisted either of them, then calmly gone home and opened his veins in the bath. That’s why Roman law permitted patriarchs to kill those under their authority who crossed them in any way – because they were going to do it anyway and the maintenance of legal order in their society relied upon acknowledging that reality.
But the modern man values his toys more than his honor. That’s why no one, including the legal system, respects his possession of either.
Feminism is a disease of envy. It spreads via women due to the temptation to envy the position of men. For men, it spreads via the temptation to declare oneself the only real man, as other men aren’t worthy of respect.
