Response: Coontz, a Marriage

“By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. 

If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.”

---Socrates

In her expansive undertaking to investigate the institution and transformation of marriage in the modern era, Stephanie Coontz takes us on quite a journey through the past, looking at various social changes and pressures in which marriage has existed and through which marriage has changed. She undertook the work to debunk the notion that there was a stable notion of marriage that has persisted throughout history, to address the notion “that there had been a Golden Age of Marriage in the past.” She was surprised to find that modern marriage is, in fact, unique, that “the relations between men and women have changed more in the last thirty yeard than they did in the previous 3000,” “the culmination of a new marriage system that had been evolving for 150 years.”

She’s right to identify the role of marriage as an economic and political institution, one with power to grant an individual a defined role in society. As the economic and political systems changed in the West, marriage had to adapt as well. For mypart, I think she misses a huge piece by not understanding marriage’s role in the feudal system: in the feudal system, political and economic power came through land ownership, and the post-Reformation Enlightenment revolution combined with the burgeoning urbanization to create a working class separate and distinct from the feudal structure of landlord and peasant-tenant. The creation of a cash-based transactional economy was itself revolutionary, and all systems of Western society were forced to shift. Marriage served to provide a structure by which legitimate heirs were identified for the inheritance of the power of land ownership, a power conveyed through primogeniture; much of the stricutures around sexual purity came from the need to verify paternity for the conveyance of landed titles. The period of time in which Coontz investigates is the whole of the modern era itself, with the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Constitutional Congress of 1789 blasting through the fabric of centuries of feudalistic structures to jettison the landless (white, male) individual on equal footing with the gentry. The whole notion of voting was radical, personal, and deeply individualistic; it’s no wonder that marriage should be put into a crucible for transformation as well.

Coontz identifies four factors that shaped the transformation, yet she never quite comes out and says that equality itself was the death knell for marriage as it had been known throughout human history to date. She cites assumptions of innate differences between the sexes; lack of reliable birth control and consequences for illegitimacy; women’s economic dependence on men and men’s domestic dependence on women; and the social and legal pressures to maintain conformity as the prime factors in transforming marriage into its modern form, one she finds to be a victory of romantic love. The first three factors are all direct consequences of economic and political power coming from the feudal land-based structure; as for the fourth, I think she misses the mark: our society today still retains the “ability of relatives, neighbors, employers, and government officials to regulate people’s personal behavior and penalize non-conformity.”  With the emergence of individual liberty of the Enlightenment era, the idea of an institutionalized union between adults became personally and philosophically repugnant, a point that Coontz seems to overlook in her conclusion that love won out over rules. Yes, personal preferences mattered, but that’s because the notion of the person separate from the state came into being; the state was held as responsible to the citizens, sometimes at the edge of the guillotine blade. One thinks that there might be a more nuanced understanding of the shift in personal associations than merely the “radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage.” Love was certainly heralded, make no mistake; but this centralization of affection and personal choice was made possible through the rampant shift in urbanization and the creation of a middle class economy based on transactional currency arrangements and, most importantly, divested from the role of inheritance of title. 

“Only in the mid-twentieth century,” Conntz writes, “could a majority of families in Western Europe survive on the earnings of a single breadwinner.” This statement boggled me. At no point until the twentieth century was there any such notion as a breadwinner. From the age of Venerable Bede in merry old England to the close of the frontier in the United States, the notion of a breadwinner was unknown. The West of which Coontz writes was founded on cashless feudalism, a system by which nobles managed land with tenants; land was the source of income, not labor, and the power and economic privilege of the landlord held sway both socially and legally in the twenty-first century.

I think I’m bothered most, though, by Coontz’s identification with “marriage” as “the highest expression of commitment in our culture.” She is blatantly dismissive of relationships beyond the legal bond of marriage, finding “arrangements other than marriage are still treated as makeshift or temporary, however long they might last.” She finds marriage “gives people a positive vocabulary and public image that set a high standard for the couple’s behavior and for the respect that outsiders ought to give their relationship.” This is a powerful statement, one that clearly elevates Coontz to a gatekeeper for legitimacy of what constitutes a legitimate relationship and what members of a formal usion are owed by society. Her analysis of the benefits of marriage assumes that benefits are not available to a couple without the legal bond, a devaluing of commitment I find troubling not only at the implications for individuals, but a misstep that has ramifications for the discipline and its analysis. 

Since the 1970s, Sweden has done away with the legal institution of marriage; doing so had immediate and lasting effects on the possibilities for gender equality. Those places that cling to the legal trappings of relationship unions are showing their reluctance to let go of control measures, legitimizing persistent inequality of enfranchisement among adult citizenry. Decoupling inheritance and economic and political advantage from the personal unions is a requisite step for egalitarian enfranchisement.

Addendum on Diversity and Inclusion

As a final note, I’d like to point out Coontz’s deeply colonial point of view. This is not to take pot shots at her work, which is valuable as is, but to contextualize it in a framework that acknowledges and illuminates the difference in experiences and social structures beyond the colonized Western experience Coontz uses for her analysis. In India, for example, arranged marriages are still the norm, and what’s different in the West is that we value cash. The economic revolution of the West, fueled in no small part by the plague that destroyed the labor force in the fourteenth century and then cholera, which swept through the West in the mid-nineteenth century. These social conditions created the notion of social mobility that allowed for a sense of libertine individualism not seen in the East; the rise of the urban working class from the rural peasantry made individual preferences possible as a topic of discussion in new and democratizing ways. When Coontz writes “Oly in Western Europe and North American did the notion of free choice and marriage for love triumph as an ideal,” she seems to make matters worse, not better, leaving out all the disenfranchised and displaced persons that were caught in the web of Wetern colonial expansion.

Feminism Doesn't Need Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris Needs Feminism

When we think of men’s health issues, we frequently put mental health issues as an afterthought or overlook them altogether. We think of prostate health, gym and muscle issues, track-and-field issues, and, predominantly, American football injuries. We are more likely to associate concussions with men’s health than therapy.

The modern American myth of masculinity doesn’t allow for the kind of soft, fungible weakness that mental health conveys, and to say that one’s feelings are hurt or that one’s sense of belonging is damaged is tantamount to emasculation. In America, men aren’t supposed to have tender feelings or belongingness needs. I’m reminded of the Chuck Norris NRA ad that reads, “Chuck Norris doesn’t join associations; associations join Chuck Norris.” I have even joined in the fun, making up my own Chuck Norris joke and playing along.[1] It’s lighthearted and amusing until we unpack it just the tiniest bit and see that all these Chuck Norris jokes [2] are one of the many ways in which we bring out the cult and code of masculinity.

Think of any of the Chuck Norris memes you have heard. One of my favorites in this vein is Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer; it’s a pity he never cries, but there’s also the tried-and-true statement that Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas, and that the universe is expanding because everything is trying to get away from Chuck Norris. The code of masculinity appears at the core of these ideas: No Sissy Stuff,  Be a Big Wheel, Be a Sturdy Oak, Give ‘em Hell: [3]none of these elements includes asking for help because all of these elements deny that a real man would ever need help.

But how isolating and sad is that?

All of us, as humans, are built as social creatures. We have belongingness needs at the core of who and what we are, and to act contrary to those is to inflict harm on ourselves and on others. We are all complicit in this, not only the men who deny themselves help or the needs that they are ignoring, but also the women who uphold this strong-but-silent-oak measure of masculinity, who impart it to their sons and brothers, their husbands and friends.

This is everyone’s problem to fix. Thankfully we don’t have to fix it alone, because it simply cannot be done in isolation. We need to fix this at the community level, with therapy and men’s resource groups, with voices and essays and posters. We need to have every man woman and child be aware of the problem, and it needs to be highlighted in every profession.

And we need to do it now, because there isn’t a moment to waste. Every day 117 Americans die by suicide; the overwhelming number are white men (seventy percent), with the largest group being middle aged white men (45-64). And for every successful suicide, there are twenty-five attempts. Silence about this matter is active violence for everyone, especially the men who are too ashamed and afraid to ask for help, or, worse, who think they don’t deserve it or that help is something for women and children, but never for them. We must bring mental health access to those who deny the need the most. Chuck Norris is counting on us.

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1. Chuck Norris knows who John Gault is.

2. Both of them. Only two are jokes; all the other sayings are simply fact.

3. Robert Brannon & Deborah S. David, The Forty Nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role, (Random House: 1976).

From Inmates to Democratic Sweethearts of the World

In order to break down the distinctions between home and the world and women’s place as of the home and decidedly not of the world, Floyd Dell finds “it will be necessary to break down all the codes and restrictions and prejudices that keep women out of the great world.” Notice that Dell writes all. Not some, not even most will suffice to accomplish our goals. All. This is not merely a suggestion or even an action plan; it is an indictment. Every single scrap and iota of the previously held dichotomy must go. It must be eradicated so that women can cease to be inmates of the home and be transformed, liberated to be the democratic sweethearts of the world with whom men initially fell in love and with whom they will craft lives of partnership and promise.

But as much as men might say they want it, Dell warns, they have to face that underneath it all they really fear women’s liberation from the home. They prefer to keep masculinity a mystery, a space outside mundane concerns, to make a haven of all things male and, by extension, to relegate all things not delightful to the realm of pedestrian household concerns.

In the end, feminism assures us, we will revel in having sweetheart partners, but yes, they will come at the cost of making profane everything masculine. We all deserve this, but men stand to lose much in it all. There are those among us who would make this transition as easy as possible, and I count myself among them. But I will not, nor do I think any among us should, allow men’s discomfort at shrinking privilege allow anyone to be an inmate.

If we are all free, then we will likely disagree more, and more loudly, and life might be messier and less comfortable overall. I am reasonably certain that all this will be our future. We will all of us see the mundane as more personally ours as well as the whole of the world’s stage. This is the price for being a fully inducted member of society, for being a citizen, for being an adult.

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Floyd Dell, “ Feminism for Men . . . in 1914,” in Okun, Rob, Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p. 215.

Green Monkeys, All

“Men’s acceptance of the cultural association of manhood with control makes them complicit in its consequences, including the use of violence. Acceptance need not be conscious or intentional. Individual men need not be violent themselves. Mere silence -- the voice of complicity -- is enough to accomplish the effect and to connect them to the violence that other men do.”

This needs to be said over and over and over again. Rephrase it, repeat it, reprint it, restate it until we all know it in our cells. Because the patriarchy has only one tool, only one punishment for failure: Men won’t like you if you don’t conform. Yep, that’s it. People won’t like you, specifically middle class white men, the standard to whom all beings are held, the measure by which we are all found to fall short. We are willing to beat each other into submission, to kill each other, to cage each other, to hurt each other, to use tools ranging from violence to shame, to avoid being ostracized.

The code begins in the school yard if we didn’t get the message at home: point and laugh at anything different; set the new kid apart and be actively cruel; define your inclusion to the group by standing together against the outsider; show your position of strength by how forcefully you can act in to perpetuate the idea of the norm.

Back in the Seventies, before there were rules governing such experimentation, a bunch of social scientists studying group inclusion and identity behavior had a collective of monkeys in an observation area. One day they decided to take a middling member of the community and dye his fur green, reintroduce him to the collective, and see what sorts of behavior was used to assimilate or address this surface change. The researchers expected actual behaviors by the collective, elements that they could study and from which they could draw conclusions and possibly write papers for the coming decades about skin color and its effect on the collective subconscious.

They certainly were not expecting what they got: The whole group came together as one body to shred the green monkey. Nothing was left of it other than small bits of fur. It was not merely killed; it was annihilated, evaporated, removed, violently and with one explosive, collective act.

In their confusion, these researchers concluded that there was nothing of value to be learned from the experiment.

Instead of dismissing the unexpected results, we should see what is really before us, presented in undeniable context and and written in blood: xenophobia is a survival issue. Love and belonging are the real currency of the group, and no health and wellness program, from gym memberships to soup kitchens, can hope to be effective if these elements are met as well.

---

Allan Johnson, “Fatal Distraction: Manhood, Guns, and Violence,” in Okun, Rob, ed. Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p.377, emphasis added.

Men & Feminism

Salon recently ran an article on Sam Polk, a noted insider of Wall Street, who is decrying the greed as wealth addiction and laying a fair chunk of the cause at toxic masculinity. This intrigues me. I can completely see how toxic masculinity would express itself through extreme wealth, and especially on Wall Street. What if other highly competitive, high-powered positions? I'm thinking of attorneys in particular, who make a high-dollar sporting arena of people's legal issues. For a fine example of a woman playing this role, see Annalise Keating's (played masterfully by Viola Davis) character in How to Get Away With Murder, or Patty Hews (gloriously brought to the small screen by Glenn Close) character in Damages. Attorneys, like the  stock broker Polk paints, are high octane power dealers, making the rules conform to them, leveraging the playing field at every turn in the pursuit of more.

Does feminism have a role in looking at the types of career paths we consider as individuals and that we value as a society? I think it absolutely does. Careers are the vehicles for success in our society, and we cannot begin to change society until we recraft the ideas of success and the tools by which such success is achieved.

For the past century, we have been defined as what we do, to the point that we are seen as human doings as opposed to human beings. This in itself is toxic, and since it is part of the dominant culture, it is part of toxic masculinity. We need to look at the definitions our culture gives men and realize that these are the standards for us all, men, women, children, black, white, rich, poor, educated or drop-outs. We need to change the definition of success if we are to change the toxicity level of humanity as well as masculinity, femininity or any other overarching group identifier. Perhaps we want to change the success matrix to one of how much we gave away during our lives, or how much success and empowerment we fostered in others. This philanthropic narrative can go far in helping reprogram the narrative while still honoring our needs to feel connected, helpful, and worthwhile.

A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway

Let’s start this rant with a reminder that Hemingway, a man’s man in the expat days at the freewheeling turn of the twentieth century, was a mosaic of the masculinity narrative: a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, gun-wielding, suit-wearing, elephant-killing, womanizing force on safari and rolling through the salons of Paris, casting his personality into all the nooks and crannies around him, filling the space and sucking out the air. But for all his seeming success, prowess and power, he was a deeply unsatisfied man, one who would eventually face a firing squad of his own making as he shot himself, ending a life that had become too painful to continue.

If not even white men with enough privilege to leave home, live off the income of their families while carousing in foreign lands can stand the message we are all of us supposed to live and uphold, what chance does anyone of the rest of us ever have?

The contemporary art and literature are rife with discontent and disgust at the modern, pre-crash era, from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to any number of works decrying corporate man, to the newly crafted voice of fear and uncertainty that is science fiction and all the mistrust of the dehumanizing elements and aspects of technology that the genre allows us to explore. The twenties wasn’t just fast and loose in the dance hall or on Wall Street; in Chicago and New York, the Italian mob was fighting tooth and nail for power over turf and transit and taxes, the usual purview of governments from time immemorial.

After the crash, those in power, most notably the FDR’s brain trust, the advisors who helped craft the New Deal, saw that traditional American adherence to the hands-off capitalist model, more narrative and rhetoric than actual policy or procedure, had taken the whole of the country from bad beginnings to worse ends by leaving too many holes and not providing any safety nets. The frontier was closed by the department of the interior in 1890 and the era of Industrialization was officially king, but within a generation, policies that favored the factory and its owner were decried as downright un-American, a callous framework for abuse and neglect that were actively sought to be ferreted out by the New Deal.

Today, we have again been seduced by the narrative and rhetoric of self-sufficiency and every man for himself, only now our society provides even less support for the corporate man or the manufacturing Joe. If we do not quickly reverse our course, it will again take us from bad beginnings to disastrous endings, and the writing is on the wall in the blood of black men, police officers and elementary school children of how destructive a path this is.

“Healthy masculinity means hope for the world in places where we have long felt only hopelessness.” One wonders if Hemingway would have liked more options. For all that he succeeded in a society where Wilde was condemned and imprisoned, it seems that Hemingway was the least happy and satisfied of his gang, the most interesting people in the world, while Wilde was vaguely bemused by everyone else’s confusion. While he may well have lost sleep and worried privately, Wilde certainly managed to hold the public veneer of one who was far removed and likely above the fray of common concerns such as adherence to the social code that others crafted long before he was born and to which he had never subscribed.

Oliver Wilde’s weapons remained, as ever, his words and his kind, unflappable demeanor in the face of hostility, confusion, fear, accusation and incarceration. Ernest Hemingway, steeped in the masculinity narrative that expressed itself through guns, wars, knives, domination had little in his toolbox to deal with his life off the page. Failed marriages, lost friends, rejection of family and country doesn’t disappear with a pulitzer, and he ultimately turned to the only tool that made any sense to him.

We absolutely must stop shooting. Ourselves, as well as each other. We need to stop the war on men, the war on women, the war on the poor, the war on the weak, the war on the old, the war on children. We need to stop. One century is long enough.

#StopShooting.

Labels are for clothes

I have always seen myself in partnership with my peer group, and all of us suffering from the definitions and strictures placed upon us by the patriarchy. Granted, I found that details varied by context - race and creed and class were more obvious to me than differences of gender - but I believed we were all in the muck together. I still do. I believe that men can be feminists,and that they must be feminists if there is to be lasting change. Middle class white men, being the standard by which we all are measured, must call for a different scale if there is truly to be something new. The good news is that by changing the definitions together, we can strive for a better, more supportive society for us all, one which is less rigid and more loving.

Athlete Culture and the Media

A Washington Post article highlights that Mississippi State has decided to continue valuing and promoting a toxic masculinity - the coach is dismissing physically aggressive video footage of an athlete against a woman and when the coach was asked about it, he mentioned that he was "thrilled" to have the young man joining the team. At first this might seem like the same old thing, but it's a little different: the tone of the article is quietly condemning, both of the coach's attitude and of the athlete's violent behavior. Is this how new definitions of masculinity will enter the mainstream? Will the new standard come quietly instead of by storm?

If so, I would be glad to welcome it in this way. What I know of personal growth has shown me that every time I try to fight for change, I get nowhere, or worse, and fast. From quitting smoking to working with depression and mental health, I have found that only through loving acceptance have I begun to have traction. Quiet, calm reflection works for this piece in the Post as it often does for us as individuals: as much as and only if we are willing to be honest about what we are doing and how it helps us, or separates us, from where we want to be.

The Color of Destruction and Power

It must be uniquely difficult to be a Black Man in America. He is not seen as having a family, but as being a threat, a walking, breathing cornucopia of violence, lust and theft. Everything you have, we are told, will be taken away by the Black man if he comes near. He will take burn your home, steal you money and screw your women as he passes by. We are so threatened by adult Black men as a culture that we feel justified in shooting them, caging them, rejecting them.  When a Black man comes into the office, we subconsciously clutch our wallets or purses a little tighter, pull our children a little closer, find a reason to have him leave or to leave ourselves. For those of us in the dominant culture, we might only feel that way once or twice, if ever, but for Black men, they feel it everywhere they go -- it is in the air they breathe, and it smells of mistrust and ostracization.

And Black communities don’t provide much solace. Even at home they are suspect, given the label of ne’re-do-wells, junkies, baby-daddies. The American Black family in the twentieth century and thus far into the twenty-first, has formed around the absence of the Black man, coming into its own as best it could with their adult men behind bars or dead when they weren’t running around with the gangs that would seal their fate.

Is it any wonder that Black men, and the adolescents who look up to them, adopt the cool pose? Stripped of economic and educational opportunities, unable to secure housing for themselves let alone for a family, they are seen as parasites on the women-run Black community. How attractive it must be to take the accusations and condemnations and make them claims, reveling in the destructive power that every Black man carries with him, no matter where he goes, even when he sleeps. I imagine a hurricane reveling in the destructive power and glory of itself, sweeping all before it, laying waste to the little people with their little buildings and crops and schools and cars and laundry on the line as though life is normal, ever, anywhere, as if it ever could be, laughing in pure joy of unleashed power, never apologizing.

When we crafted this hostile narrative of destructive power, we left the Black man only one option for defining himself in relation to society and the world. America in the twenty-first century can do better, but only if we hold our eyes firmly on the truth and acknowledge our role in the violence that continues without much to hold it back, pervades every aspect of civilized interaction, from the manufacturing floor to the classroom to the boardroom, survives us all, generation after generation.

All of us have reparations to make to the Black man, those of us in the dominant culture and those in the Black communities as well. We owe Black men a safe space to release this image, to lay down the tools of destruction and relax out of the cool pose he has adopted for survival. We owe it to each other to change the narrative to one of inclusion, trust and the real possibility of being husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, instead of rapists, thugs, killers, junkies, and thieves.

White Folks Love Morgan Freeman

White folks love Morgan Freeman. He is soft-spoken, melodious, lean, and carries himself gently. One can relax in his presence; he is the antithesis of the angry black man.

But you have to know that, for all that he sees the weight of centuries of Black masculinity on his shoulders, he rages too. He has to have days where he seethes that the roles he takes are encompassed and circumscribed by larger obligations to reshaping the roles that all Black men take, participating in a new way of showing men of color. And then Driving Miss Daisy comes along and we’re right back where we started, feeling comfortable seeing the Black man as a kind and gentle servant.

I want to see Morgan Freeman playing a character where his kindly black servant, possibly as a librarian, is actually a cover for his absolute, no-holds-barred martial arts badassery. I want to see him ripping everyone off, regardless of color, caring only for the green of hundred dollar bills or the pristine icy sparkle of diamonds. Gold is too cliche for this vision. I want to see a flat-out dangerous character who just happens to be a Black man, a man who passes as the easy and gentle neighbor, kindly and helpful, the Ted Bundy of espionage, possibly corporate espionage with lots of technical elements that most white folks don’t understand in the first place but that is usually relegated to the Asian kid, sometimes fetishized as the Asian chick.

I want a society wherein everyone is safe and accepted enough that I’m not culture jamming by casting a Black man as this or a white man as that or an Asian as the other. I want a society that is a true meritocracy, but that has a minimum security guaranteed for all, not because we are weak and pathetic, but because it’s right thing to do, because all people deserve security.

What We Gain With Healthy Masculinity Is What We Need the Most

Michael Kaufman writes that there is “no such thing” as healthy masculinity. I get where he’s coming from; I really do. But there is healthy masculinity, and finding it will go far to giving us, as a society, what we need the most.

What is achieved in men’s resource groups around the country is the idea of a self that matters, of identifying privilege when we carry it with us into a room, of comporting ourselves as beings with responsibility and accountability in equal measure, deserving to be the role-models we have been deemed.

We need a masculinity that is seen as power and voice. In a world focused on force, this is a little mind-crackingly foreign, but hear me out. This voice can be had by anyone, man or woman, and it harkens more to the original greek idea of phallus, that of power as opposed to penis.

When we value power over force and ultimate come to see force as the enemy of power, the agent by which power is destroyed or shattered or given away, we can come to see ourselves as the truly powerful beings that we are. Once we recognize our own power, we can begin to cultivate power in others. This self-awareness of power and its employment in meaningful ways is itself a healthy masculinity, while I see the nurturing of that power in one’s self and in others as deeply feminine, and giving rise to a far healthier femininity than any we have seen lately.

These ideas of masculine and feminine are not rooted in biology but in spirit, and harken to eastern ideas of balance. Perhaps meditation and t’ai chi and yoga every day won’t save the world, but would it be so disastrous to try? What if we taught balance in schools alongside math, that the idea of personal choices and balance was no different than two trains leaving different stations, and possibly that solving the choices problems were more important than the trains one?

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Michael Kaufman, “Any Gender is a Drag,” in Okun, Rob, Voice Male (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p. 363

The Paladin, The Champion, and the Bro Code

The Bro Code has come a long way from the Code of Chivalry and its progenitor, the Prudhomme. In fact, it seems to be about as diametrically opposed to these earlier codes of behavior as can be, and yet the Bro Code and those who espouse its toxic, often militaristic dogma often harken to a mythopoetic Paladin or Knight for its justification and validity. In fact, I can think of no clearer illustration of how antithetic the modern day manifestation of the ideal is than Paladin Press.

Paladin Press is a book publishing firm founded in 1970 by Peder Lund and Robert K. Brown. The company publishes non-fiction books and videos covering a wide range of specialty topics, including personal and financial freedom, survivalism and preparedness, firearms and shooting, various martial arts and self-defense, military and police tactics, investigation techniques, spying, lockpicking, sabotage, revenge, knives and knife fighting, explosives, and other “action topics” (though the availability of books on topics like improvised explosives has been severely curtailed in recent years).

To read this list, one would think that Rambo is the ultimate Paladin. Yet the definition of a paladin couldn’t be farther from this twentieth-century incarnation. According to Merriam-Webster, paladin was first used in 1592; some synonyms include: “advocate, advocator, apostle, backer, booster, champion, expounder, espouser, friend,  gospeler (or gospeller), herald, hierophant, high priest, exponent, promoter, proponent, protagonist, supporter, true believer, tub-thumper, white knight” and is related to “loyalist, partisan (also partizan), stalwart; adherent, cohort, disciple, follower; interpreter; applauder, cheerleader, encourager, fellow traveler” while a paladin is actively not: “adversary, antagonist, opponent, or enemy, foe, rival; belittler, critic, faultfinder.”

One of my favorite definitions of paladin comes from the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Esydamus finds that “Paladins take their adventures seriously, and even a mundane mission is, in the heart of the paladin, a personal test: an opportunity to demonstrate bravery, to learn tactics, and to find ways to do good. Divine power protects these warriors of virtue, warding off harm, protecting from disease, healing, and guarding against fear. The paladin can also direct this power to help others, healing wounds or curing diseases, and also use it to destroy evil. Experienced paladins can smite evil foes and turn away undead. A paladin's Wisdom score should be high. .  . . Many of the paladin's special abilities also benefit from a high Charisma score.” While it would be easy to dismiss this definition as a bit of fantasy fluff, it actually recalls the twelfth century ideal far more accurately than the catalog of Paladin Press would indicate.

The chivalric code is a code of conduct associated with the medieval institution of knighthood which developed between 1170 and 1220. Over time, its meaning in Europe has been refined to emphasise social and moral virtues more generally. The Code of Chivalry, as it stood by the Late Middle Ages, was a moral system which combined a warrior ethos, knightly piety, and courtly manners, all conspiring to establish a notion of honour and nobility.

Léon Gautier, in his La Chevalerie, published for the first time in 1883, bemoaned the "invasion of Breton romans" which replaced the pure military ethos of the crusades with Arthurian fiction and courtly adventures. Gautier tries to give a "popular summary" of what he proposes was the "ancient code of chivalry" of the 11th and 12th centuries derived from the military ethos of the crusades which would evolve into the late medieval notion of chivalry. Gautier's Ten Commandments of chivalry are:

1. Thou shalt believe all that the Church teaches and thou shalt observe all its directions.
2. Thou shalt defend the Church.
3. Thou shalt respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them.
4. Thou shalt love the country in which thou wast born.
5. Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy.
6. Thou shalt make war against the infidel without cessation and without mercy.
7. Thou shalt perform scrupulously thy feudal duties, if they be not contrary to the laws of God.
8. Thou shalt never lie, and shalt remain faithful to thy pledged word.
9. Thou shalt be generous, and give largesse to everyone.
10. Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil.

In these “Ten Commandments,” the militaristic religious mandate is clear, but to walk away from this list seeing only the holy war aspects is simplistic, as invalid as seeing the Muslim code of behavior as only the jihad.

According to David Crouch, prior to codified chivalry there was the uncodified code of noble conduct that focused on the preudomme. This uncodified code - referred to as the noble habitus - is a term for the environment of behavioural and material expectations generated by all societies and classes. As a modern idea, it was pioneered by the French philosopher/sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, even though a precedent exists for the concept as far back as the works of Aristotle. Crouch argues that the habitus on which “the superstructure of chivalry” was built and the preudomme was a part, had existed long before 1100, while the codified medieval noble conduct only began between 1170 and 1220.

The pre-chivalric noble habitus as discovered by Mills and Gautier are as follows:

1. Loyalty: It is a practical utility in a warrior nobility. Richard Kaeuper associates loyalty with prowess. The importance of reputation for loyalty in noble conduct is demonstrated in William Marshal biography.
2. Forbearance: knights' self-control towards other warriors and at the courts of their lords was a part of the early noble habitus as shown in the Conventum of Hugh de Lusignan in the 1020s. The nobility of mercy and forbearance was well established by the second half of the 12th century long before there was any code of chivalry.[26]
3. Hardihood: The quality of hardy aligns itself with forbearance and loyalty in being one of the military virtues of the preudomme. According to Philip de Navarra, a mature nobleman should have acquired hardiness as part of his moral virtues. Geoffrey de Charny also stressed on the masculine respectability of hardiness in the light of religious feeling of the contemptus mundi.
4. Largesse or Liberality: generosity was part of a noble quantity. According to Alan of Lille, largesse was not just a simple matter of giving away what he had, but "Largitas in a man caused him to set no store on greed or gifts, and to have nothing but contempt for bribes."
5. The davidic ethic: It is the strongest qualities of preudomme derived by clerics from Biblical tradition. Originally it was a set of expectations of good rulership articulated by the Frankish church which involved the rightful authority based on protection for the weak and helpless (in particular the Church), respect for widows and orphans, and opposition to the cruel and unjust. The core of Davidic ethic is benevolence of the strong toward the weak.
6. Honor: honor was what was achieved by living up to the ideal of the preudomme and pursuing the qualities and behavior listed above.[31] The loss of honor is an humiliation to a man's standing and is worse than death. Bertran de Born said: "For myself I prefer to hold a little piece of land in onor, than to hold a great empire with dishonor.”

Chivalry and especially its predecessor the noble hablis stand in sharp contrast to the cornerstones of masculinity identified by Brannon and David in 1976:

1. No Sissy Stuff: Never do anything that even remotely hints of femininity. “Real” men always steer clear of any behavior or characteristic associated with women.
2. Be a Big Wheel: Masculinity is measured by success, power, and the admiration of others. Consequently, men need wealth, renown, and prestige to be identified as “real” men.
3. Be a Sturdy Oak: Manliness requires rationality, toughness, and self-reliance. A man must remain calm in any situation, show no emotion, and admit no weakness.
4. Give ‘em Hell: Men must exude an aura of daring and aggression, must be willing to take risks and “go for it” even when reason and fear suggest otherwise.

At no point does this modern code of behavior identify compassion and caring to those who are weak or suffering; indeed, it seems to actively espouse a callous view. The details of this masculinity may have changed, updating to incorporate the Cool Pose of the black urban man who has nothing and so has to find a posture to assure us all that he does, indeed, meet all four rules, or the unwritten fifth rule of male social conduct that seems so prevalent in the 90s and beyond: Bros Before Hos, meaning that relationships with women -- no matter how significant -- are of lesser priority than relationships with men -- no matter how casual.

Especially as regards the Davidic ethic, it is difficult to square the Paladin Press’ focus on individual survival and separation from society. If anything, it would seem that a true Paladin Press would include lists of charities and inequalities to address, a guide to good manners and gentleness. I am reminded of the Leo Buscaglia quote, “Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.” This is the kind of strength and conduct we should all aspire to, men and women alike. Instead of seeing power and prowess as liberators from social obligation, they should tie us more closely to it.

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http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paladin
Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus at http://www.easydamus.com/character.html
Gautier, Léon (1891). Chivalry. translated by Henry Frith.
Crouch, David (2005). The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France 900–1300. Harlow, UK: Pearson. ISBN 0-582-36981-9.
Robert Brannon & Deborah S. David, The Forty Nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role, (Random House: 1976).