Just as women are trapped by the stereotypes of the virgin/whore dichotomy, so do good guy/bad guy stereotypes trap men. Ozy Frantz breaks down how these cultural images work.
This article was originally posted at No Seriously, What About Teh Menz? and is a response to Prehistoric Rape Machines and Protectors, by Bridget Welch.
A fascinating article at Sociology in Focus describes the male equivalent of the virgin/whore dichotomy: the protector/rapist dichotomy. Women in our society get classified as either virgins or whores– that is, as pure and perfect wife-and-mother-material Good Girls in sweaters, or slutty and “crazy” drinking-and-screwing-and-breaking-hearts Bad Girls in microminis. Similarly, men get to be white-knighting Good Guys in shining armor and ready to save women from their suffering, or slavering-beast Bad Guys who will rape and abuse at the slightest provocation.
I think that protector/rapist is badly named, however: more properly, it is the knight/beast dichotomy.
Every one of those idiotic Facebook statuses and Tumblr posts about the perfect guy who’ll put her on a pedestal and hold her while she cries and tell her she’s beautiful every day and on and on and on… That’s pretty much the Knight. He’s Prince Charming! He’s sweet and romantic and a protector and he will take care of his girlfriend.
The Beast, on the other hand, is every rapist and abuser and cheating bastard and slutty dude who leads women on and miscellaneous douchebag. The interesting thing is that Beasts are generally considered to be their own variety of humanity that are very different from actual men. You can’t go out in public wearing a short skirt lest you turn a Beast on and then he will have to rape you. The straight men you actually ask– who are generally perfectly nice people who would not respond to a short skirt with more than an appreciative glance– are not Beasts, and therefore do not count. Of course, it is not just rapists who are Beasts: the dude who leeches off his girlfriend or cheats on her constantly is equally Beastly, although how you would provoke him is presumably different.
Here, I’m not talking about things that people actually are, but about jokes and memes and archetypes and the rest of the cultural miasma that floats through our brains. Just like no woman is purely Virgin or purely Whore, no man is purely Knight or purely Beast; it is simply not a meaningful way to divide up actual people. All of the examples I’m about to give? Not the way actual people work! Just cultural ideas about how people work! That said…
The Knight is the father, oiling his shotgun on the front porch in case his teenage daughter’s new boyfriend gets any ideas about not treating her like a perfect gentleman. Perfect gentlemen, for that matter, are usually Knights. The dude who listens to his female best friend sobbing on his shoulder about how her boyfriend is terrible and she just wants someone who can listen, like you, and all the while he has a crush on her? Knight who wants to save her from all the Beasts. The guys (usually boyfriends or fathers, but sometimes male friends) who get all dramatic about how if anyone tries to rape you they will never find the body? Knights. Wartime propaganda that suggests that the (male) soldier would be liberating the women of Country X? Knights. Anything that could possibly be referred to as chivalrous or “treating you like a princess”? Knight.
The Beast, on the other hand… well, it is rapists and abusers, of course, who are, of course, extremely obvious people who wear a sign on their foreheads that says Rapist. The “player” who has sex with tons of women and then never calls them back? Beast. Frat boys and bros as a whole are generally considered Beasts, for some reason, as is nearly anyone who could be reasonably referred to as a douchebag. Men who give you a candy bar the day after Valentine’s? Beasts. Wartime propaganda about how the evil soldiers of Country Y are raping nuns? Beasts. The stereotypical abuser punching out his wife for not doing the laundry right? Beast.
Beasts generally prey on whores while Knights worship their virgins. (In fact, the promise in a lot of abstinence-until-marriage programs is that if a woman is properly virginal she’ll eventually meet her white knight… which is interesting.) However, I am told that sex workers occasionally encounter Knights who want to pretty-woman them out of this horrible life that they’ve been oppressed into; at the same time, the idea of the Beast who harms an innocent virgin is one with a lot of emotional power.
Do I have to mention that this whole Knight/Beast dichotomy is bullshit? It’s bullshit. First of all, as I said above, no one can ever be purely Knight or purely Beast outside of the worst forms of melodramatic fiction. Second, neither Knight nor Beast is a healthy, non-objectifying way of relating to women: Knights treat women as interchangeable creatures whose opinions are more-or-less irrelevant regarding whether or not they need to be saved; Beasts, at best, treat women as interchangeable sex objects and at worst are rapist, abusive fuckheads.
The Knight/Beast dichotomy has a quite different solution from the Virgin/Whore dichotomy. For the Virgin/Whore dichotomy, the solution is that both virgin and whore are okay ways to be. You can not want sex or only want sex within committed relationships, and that’s fine. You can have hundreds of partners or do sex work or be poly or like casual sex, and that’s fine. The idea that one is better than the other and that what everyone ought to be is bullshit.
The Knight/Beast dichotomy, however, is flawed because neither Knight nor Beast is an okay way to be. You shouldn’t have to choose between degrading women and pedestalizing them: between is the sensible path of treating them like motherfucking human beings.
Photo— El Bibliomata/Flickr
About ozyfrantz
This is an awful lot of words to say essentially nothing at all. This is also, essentially, blaming men for the virgin/whore dichotomy and blaming men for the positions we’re put into. Basically, you say, “Everything here is the fault of men.”
You’ve really done a lot to contribute to the discourse!
Moderator’s note-please avoid anything resembling personal attacks on the author. Critique of the piece is welcomed, but we ask that in order to keep discourse civil, personal remarks at the author’s expense are kept limited.
Basically, you say, “Everything here is the fault of men.”
Where did he say that?
Read the last three paragraphs.
He doesn’t blame anything on men.
Part of the problem is that everyone assumes we define manhood in relation to women of sexual interest. There are many more relationships men form: with parents, with children, with our community, with female friends, with male friends, and, yes, with our lovers. Protecting people you care about is a human instinct, and does not require infantilizing them, or putting them on a pedestal, or being a doormat. You can just protect them because you love them. If it’s a woman you’re protecting, and you’re a man, this is also fairly reasonable because you’ll probably be more useful trying to defend her than she would be in defending herself (not that there aren’t weak men or strong women, of course, but generally the balance of physical power is weighted in favor of men).
So these versions of the Knight/Beast dichotomy are extremely problematic for the reasons you specified (non-universal applicability, doormats, objectification, etc). But I happen to like your imagery, and thus I’ll appropriate it to describe archetypes rather than to categorize people.
ehhh… I disagree that this is the “male version” of the madonna/whore dynamic. Men pretty much have the same dynamic, call it the “loser/stud” dynamic if you like. The only difference is society is flipped on which side it considers the “good” pole.
That’s a much more accurate analysis.
Yeah I think perhaps where the author went wrong was in creating parallels between virgin/whore and knight/beast. As 8ball says, there is a virgin/whore dynamic for men…it’s just loser/stud. I’d also argue that there’s a knight/beast dynamic for women…something along the lines of b!tch/angel.
I think that’s why her solution at the bottom there doesn’t quite work….or why it comes across as blaming men. The solution to both the loser/stud and virgin/whore dynamic is to understand that both (and everything in between) is actually fine. The solution to the b!tch/angel and knight/beast dynamic is to take both polemic labels away and realize that people are just individuals and that neither option is okay.
Exactly. I don’t have a problem with the knight/beast dynamic by itself. I just disagree that it’s comparable to the virgin/whore dynamic. Two separate things.
I like your dymanic better, although for the sake of not having to remember to do the ! thing to keep from getting modded, I’d call it the angel/siren dynamic
(well, that and I’m a sucker for mythology)
As I recall, the comments in the original post made this exact same point! So why was it ignored in favor of yet another male-defining dichotomy that’s defined solely in terms of women?
Some of us Good Men don’t see the need to define ourselves in terms of women at all.
If there is a Knight/Beast dichotomy, it’s flawed for another reason: they are not really opposites when you look at reality. In many ways the two categories are interchangeable or have a lot of overlap. That guy oiling the shotgun to protect his daughter could be both a knight and a beast. Someone willing to use a shotgun to protect his daughter’s innocence may also be abusive to the exact same daughter. Think about how many abusive husbands start off as incredibly polite, apparently gentle, sensitive men, before their true colors come out.
If we take the metaphor at face value, think historically about what exactly a knight did for a living. His primary job was to be prepared to hack people to death or trample them under his horse. Historically, heavy cavalry units could be quite beastly….
Isn’t that kind of the point of the article though? The k/b dynamic is one that’s posited by society in general, not by the author hirself. It’s society that says men must be one or the other, whereas real people can slide from one side to the next and back, or not even be on the continuum entirely. Same with the angel/siren continuum.
I agree that we can see it as a spectrum or a sliding scale in some cases. My point is that in some cases a man can be actually *both* at the same time, or one can disguise the other, not that there’s a slide back and forth. It’s not just that you can be one or the other at different points, but you could be both at the same time. That’s a little different than seeing it as a spectrum.
I totally agree that the dichotomy is bogus. I’m not disagreeing with the author so much as adding another reason why the knight/best split is unsustainable.
Two things missing from this article, which otherwise makes some good points. First, is that there is no either/or, only a spectrum of behavior in people; as wellokaythen pointed out the Knight/Beast dynamic can appear in the same man toward the same person.
Second, and a more glaring omission in my opinion, is how the Beast is also an object of desire and even veneration, not just the dirty awful person this article makes him out to be. The “bad boy” is cool and tough and often desired by women. We can see something similar to the Virgin/Whore dynamic where “nice” men are supposed to want a Virgin but secretly want a Whore and of course when “Beasting” with other men congratulate each other for scoring a Whore. “Nice” women are supposed to want a Knight but secretly want a “bad boy” Beast. Men may want to be a Knight in public, but men with each other try to out-Beast each other and brag about Beastly behavior. It is cool to be a “player.” Our society glorifies the Beast and Whore at the same time it reviles the people who are those It is problematic on both sides of the gender divide.
I am ) – a grandfather … and I’m still trying to be a better human – and thus – (by default) a better man – but – dont stop – till you are Buddha? Some many give ups in the world huh?