As a Gentleman Walks By the Longhouse, Whistling

Introduction

In order to discuss the point I wish to make here, we must begin with the realization that feminism is a wasting disease. But to be more precise, it is a particular variant of the wasting disease—the foundational disease being egalitarianism. The virus that makes this disease and all its variants so virulent is the sin of crackling envy, a sin that has slain its millions.

When you take that leveling sin and apply it to the differences between the sexes, and the roles that God assigned to each of them, the first thing you discover is that you have not created that mythical and ever-receding level playing field, but rather you have merely built a sexual teeter-totter.

Not Whether, But Which

There is no way to demote men from the place that God has assigned to them without raising women to the vacancy you just created. There is nothing equitable about it. The world is inescapably hierarchical. This also means there was nothing equitable about it back when men were in the dominant position. But in a hierarchical framework, to flatten everything is not a virtue, and is therefore not desired or attempted.

In an open patriarchy, those who ought to be in the dominant position are. In a matriarchy, constant energy must be devoted to keeping everything in that unnatural position because the natural order is so deeply embedded in us that the world keeps wanting to right itself.

But in the meantime, because this is yet one more inescapable concept—not whether, but which—it means that if one sex is dominant, the other is not. In a patriarchy, the dominance of men is a natural part of the creation order. In a matriarchy, the dominance of women is artificial and contrived, and needs to be enforced by men behind the scenes.

Because our culture has bought into the feminist lie, the result has been the creation of what has come to be known as the longhouse. We are in the longhouse now—when society has become officially matriarchal and all the public social ethics are feminine-coded. There is a pronounced hostility to individual excellence, which is seen as arrogance, risk, which is seen as recklessness, masculinity, which is seen as toxic, and hierarchy, which is seen as oppressive and exploitative. In contrast, the longhouse is communal, obsessed with safety, and eager to enforce conformity.

Revolt Was Of Course Inevitable

Because I believe that rule by men is actually inevitable, this means that the longhouse is actually ruled by men—wicked men, behind the scenes, but men nevertheless. What has feminist liberation gotten us so far? What are the gains for women? Easy access to abortion, which has liberated men from any qualms they might have about using a girl. Pornography everywhere. Christian marriage, one of the greatest historical protections for women ever devised, has been degraded into a joke. All that egalitarianism is a corrosive acid, and has completely eaten out the jar of feminism we tried to keep it in. Now men are right in there with the women, showing them how to be champion woman athletes. “Step aside, little lady. This is how you do it.” It turns out that all you need in order to be a world class female athlete is a set of XY chromosomes. Isn’t science wonderful?

This whole scam that has wrecked womankind was the doing of men—wicked men, evil men, but men. But the scam required the pretense of the longhouse, which was used to flatter stupid women and browbeat all the rank and file men, those men who were not involved in the great EgaliCon. After a few decades of that, such men got tired of being kicked in head at such regular intervals, and went off in various directions—MGTOW (men going their own way), overt misogyny, manosphere stuff, bonding with the king bros down at the gym, popping red pills, dark red pills, and black pills, and don’t forget tough guy talk online.

I would like to propose a genuine alternative. For want of a better phrase, let us call this approach the return of the Christian gentleman.

More Times Than I Can Count

As I have done marriage counseling over the years, quite a bit of it, there is one pattern that I have seen over and over again. Here it is. There are many husbands who do not stand up to their wives, and if they do eventually stand up to them, they can only do it by getting into sin.

Most of the time he is a quivering capon, kept in place by bad marriage books, held under water by lousy teaching from the beta-male evangelical subculture, suffocated by the external feminist zeitgeist, and constantly harassed by his own sensitive conscience. But deep down inside that quivering mass is a guy who doesn’t like it, not at all, and so he periodically explodes. When he does that, his sin gets all over the living room, where he kicks it around for a little bit, catches himself, apologizes profusely, and then crawls into the doghouse which will be his home for the next three days.

In short, he cannot disassociate standing up to a woman from sinning against a woman, because that is the only way he has ever seen it done. The standing up and the sinning are, as far as he is concerned, synonyms. Everything is jumbled.

But he who would stand up to a woman must deny himself. You have to stand up to your own carnal flesh first.

A Servant Lord

In a recent podcast, I was talking about all these things—making the same kind of point I have been urging for decades. It was along the lines of “authority flows to those who take responsibility.” And my definition of masculinity has been the “glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility.” And in the aftermath of making that point, one day I noticed a negative comment online that reacted strongly to what I had said, and it was along the lines of “here we go with that servant leadership again!”

And that, mon frere, is a photo negative of the truth. Servant leadership—the way it has been enjoined upon the evangelical world for the last generation or so—teaches that you lead by serving. Find out what the woman of the house wants and then do it. The biblical alternative would be something like servant lordship, where you serve by leading.

I have just used the word leading, but I do so with hesitation because I don’t really like the word. Leadership is a modern idea, and is a workaround that enables us to function in an egalitarian world. A good leader is someone who knows how to get “buy in” from everybody so that we never have to resort to old-fashioned concepts like orders and obedience.

So the servant’s heart is preeminently biblical, and really was modeled perfectly by Jesus. But notice how He talks about it. He doesn’t call it anything like servant leadership. Servant lordship would be more like it.

If the Lord of the cosmos got down and washed His disciples feet, how much more should those disciples take that example of His on board and into their own lives? How far did Christ have to stoop in order to wash those feet—including the feet of Judas? The distance was far greater than a husband has to stoop in order to wash his wife with the water of the word (Eph. 5:26). And if a husband stoops in their right way, he is not abandoning his authority—he is establishing it.

A Gentleman Who Understands

When men see weakness, one of their natural tendencies is to exploit it. And there are many realms where this is right and appropriate. A good football coach identifies the weaknesses of the other team, and runs his plays accordingly. A good general sees the mistakes being made by the enemy, and he exploits those mistakes, those weaknesses. A good businessman identifies what his competitors are doing wrong, and he counters with a shrewd wisdom.

But then he, good Christian man that he is, reads in his Bible that women are the “weaker vessel.” The apostle Peter himself said that it was so. And so he approaches his domestic life as though he were trying to rearrange the china hutch with a pair of hedge clippers. The tea cups are, after all, weaker than the clippers.

Notice the counter-intuitive command that Peter gives to husbands. Yes, your wives are the weaker vessel. What are you to do with that truth? You must honor it. You must honor her. The end result of generations of Christian men seeking to obey that command is what created the Christian gentleman.

The Christian gentleman is hard as nails on the battlefield. The same thing goes in athletic competition. He refuses to be walkover in the world of business. But he knows when to be tough and when to be tender. He knows how to be courteous to his wife.

Back Up to Our Meme

The informal fallacy demonstrated by our meme is what is called the false alternative. You respond to your woman’s displeasure by becoming a craven and supine jelly (the gent on the left) OR you prove your masculinity by becoming a jerkface (the one on the right). Which will it be, oh Western man?

Those aren’t the only two options.

The behavior in the left panel really is bad, and it really does happen a lot. And it is also quite true that if a man has been behaving that way for years, and if he starts to stand up to his wife (without sinning), she might quite possibly feel like he is being like the guy on the right. But he isn’t. Being a jerk and not being a jelly are not the same thing. What matters is what God thinks, and not how she feels. How he feels is also irrelevant. So if he is being courteous but firm, he is learning to be a gentleman.

So she is not happy with him. Why? Was it because they went to somebody’s house for dinner and he punched the host? So maybe there was a legitimate point to the unhappiness. Or was it because he put his dish into the dishwasher facing the wrong way? If he listens to her complaint about the wrong-way dish, hears her out, but then says, “well, very sorry you took it as a personal insult, but that was not the intention and I really think I was fine,” and he doesn’t apologize, he just might be walking into a whole new world.

Now remember that I said that the world is hierarchical. This means that there are superiors and inferiors in it, but this is true throughout the whole created order. The male sex is the dominant sex, sorry, but there it is. But hierarchy doesn’t go away after we are done with our discussion of life between the sexes. There are superior women and inferior women. There are superior men and inferior men. So when we look at the ranks of all the males, there are, according to the book of Proverbs, men of understanding, simpletons, and fools. And the men who applaud that meme, or anything like it, thinking that it communicates some sort of truth about “biblical marriage” are simpletons and fools.

And I know that they will not be happy with me for saying that. I know. But I don’t care.