Following the discussion about the three men who died protecting their girlfriends in the Aurora, Colorado massacre, and all the talk from people like William Bennett about how it's a man's duty and honor to die for women, I realized something. The most obviously objectionable thing about that sort of mentality is, of course, the way it treats men's lives as inherently less valuable than women's and reduces men to things who exist for women's benefit. But I think there's another layer of dehumanization if you look a bit deeper.

I have the utmost respect for those men's willingness to risk and lose their lives for a person they loved. Emphasis on person- a specific human being they cared strongly about. So it rankles me when Bennett writes something like this:

Why? Why would a young man with his entire life ahead of him risk everything for a woman he has no legal, financial or marital obligations to? As Hanna Rosin so eloquently pointed out in a recent article, calling it chivalry would be a tremendous understatement. By all appearances, these men believed that a man has a responsibility to protect a woman, even to the point of death. They believed that there are things in life worth dying for and the innocent woman sitting next to them was one....They believed, to put it simply, in a code of honor. They put the lives of the women before their own....

Bennett intends this as praise, of course. But why simply assume- since that is all Bennett is going on here- that these men must have been driven by a “code of honor” based on the principle that a man's proper role in the world is sacrificing himself for women? Couldn't these men have acted as they did out of love for the particular person each of them protected?

Here's where the dehumanization comes in: If one accepts some of the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle assumptions about men and women pervading American culture, the answer is no. Love and affection are female traits. Men build, support, protect, control, destroy, damage, or debase. (The particular ratio in which they are thought to do these things is probably the biggest substantive- rather than rhetorical- difference between the average conservative and the average feminist.) What they do not and can not do is care about other people as much or as profoundly as women do. It's just not in their nature.

So people like Bennett attribute the actions of the three men to a “code of honor” that requires protecting wome,n because following an abstract code of behavior is something men can do. The traditionalist misandrist worldview can grasp the idea of a man dying for a woman because he values the abstract concept “Woman” as something worth protecting even at the cost of his own life far more easily than the idea of a man dying for a woman because of his feelings for that particular woman, because men supposedly don't love other people that much. Women are the caring, loving, emotionally devoted sex; men are unfeeling brutes by nature, albeit unfeeling brutes that can be trained to behave usefully. By dying for strangers whose lives are considered more valuable, for example.