Bill Bennett, Bill Bennett, Bill Bennett. What will I do with you?
The three men who sacrificed their lives for their girlfriends are not great men because they sacrificed their lives for women; they’re great people because they sacrificed their lives for people. When it came down to the line, they chose to give up their lives for the people they loved; that’s heroism, and it would still be heroism if it were a woman dying to save a man, a man dying to save a man, or any other possible gender combination. Men are not somehow magically less deserving of sacrifice than women are; women are not somehow magically less capable of sacrifice. To quote your own Bible, Mr. Bennett: “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”– whether those friends happen to be male or female.
Are men more likely to sacrifice their lives to save women than vice versa? Probably! For reasons both biological (men tend to have greater physical strength and bulk) and cultural (the pressure on men to protect women, the greater familiarity of men as a group with violence). But the second group of reasons are ones we should be working to eliminate or to make equal, and as for the former group one might with as much accuracy say that it is noble for large and physically strong people to sacrifice themselves to save the smaller and weaker. Actually, I’d say that one is a better rule, because it can be more generally applied, and because “compassion for the vulnerable” is valued in way more ethical systems than “thinking men should sacrifice themselves for women for no reason.”
And then Bennett goes into some End of Men bullcrap. Waa waa men aren’t employed or looking for jobs waa waaa they aren’t getting married waaa. I am not sure what possessed him to think this was an appropriate idea in an article that is supposed to honor the people who sacrificed their lives in the Aurora shooting, but whatever, if there’s nothing we’ve learned from years of shootings, it’s that they’re a wonderful opportunity for everyone to pull out their pet issues, however unrelated, and start waving them around. “The lesson we have learned from this tragedy is that everyone should be doing what I said we should be doing the whole time!”
But here’s a fun fact, Mr. Bennett. Whether you’re married has nothing to do with whether you’re a good person. Whether you have a job has nothing to do with whether you’re a good person. Whether you’re married, your employment status, and whether you walked out on your kids have nothing to do with whether you’d sacrifice your life to save your partner. These are all completely unrelated things.
A few months ago, my life was saved by my best friend. He also happens to be an unemployed man who has no intentions of marrying anyone, lives in his parents’ basement, and plays a lot of video games. These are not contradictory. He is generous, selfless, loving, and kind to the point that it humbles me– and “unsuccessful” in every sense of the word you believe in, Mr. Bennett. He’s one of those men you think are failures as men. You know what that says to me, Mr. Bennett? It says that your definition of success is wrong. It’s bullshit. It has nothing to do with whether you’re a good person, or even a good man (whatever that means). I don’t want a part of any idea of goodness or manhood that says my best friend is a failure, because he is not. He is a better man than you, Mr. Bennett. He’s a better man than you’ll ever be.
I suppose Mr. Bennett and I agree about a few things. We agree about the need for real heroes, and that the Aurora three are examples of those. We believe they should be honored. We believe in what I call ethics and what he calls honor. But he believes that their sacrifices should be honored as some kind of social-engineering experiment to create the men he desires, and I think they should be honored because it is a good thing to give your life for those you love– regardless of what gender you happen to be.
About ozyfrantz
FTR — and I believe this reinforces one of your fundamental points here, Ozy — there were four heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice in that theater, not three. As Rita Adams of Fathers and Families put it:
I’m not quite comfortable with the snark underlying Rita’s remarks in the last paragraph I quote here — I think we often praise the heroism of men who save the lives of other men in battle, for example — but I do think it’s positively bizarre of the media to basically forget about Childress, with the only discernible reason being that he sacrificed his life to save that of another man instead of a woman.
While I understand your point and agree with much of your overall post here, Ozy, I thought this wording was truly unfortunate. I wonder what your reaction would be to a blogger who might write, “Waa waa women aren’t employed or looking for jobs waa waaa …”
Depends. If, in context, they’re responding to someone complaining about how women are complete failures and horrible people because they’re not employed, I would consider that to be perfectly fine.
Obviously, unemployment is a problem. But it’s not a problem because Men are Failing as Men; it’s a problem because people don’t have money and that makes them unhappy.
” but I do think it’s positively bizarre of the media to basically forget about Childress, with the only discernible reason being that he sacrificed his life to save that of another man instead of a woman.”
Well…its not just that these four selflessly sacrificed themselves for someone else, its that three of them happen to reaffirm a broadly appealing, romantic narrative we find quieting. In the face of such an unsettling tragedy, people have gravitated to a comfortable and familiar re-telling of damsels in distress and the self-sacrifice of honor-bound, tragically disposable, knights’ in shining armor. By contrast, our need for reassurance is left less fulfilled with a story of a man rescued by another man’s sacrifice; and even potentially upended if a women were to sacrifice herself for a man.
Its bullsh*t, but at this time, people will find reaffirming social norms a comfortable return to order and a stark contrast to the chaos that was unleashed in that theater.
This comes close to calling out women for not showing up in the dead-by-jumping-in-front-of-whatever category.
Two ways to even up. Fewer men, more women.
Pick one.
Thing is, as a person becomes more competent in the world, he or she become more likely to be successful in the next endeavor. Sort of a cascade or something.
Or, to look at it another way, people who aren’t going to be successful aren’t. If the first is the case, being employed will help with self-esteem, and this is the self-esteem century, so further adventures may be successful. So worrying about not being employed is, in effect, worrying about other issues as well.
I wouldn’t judge anyone who chose to save themselves rather than protect a loved one.
That’s interesting about Jesse Childress.
What I find troubling is the expectation that a man sacrifice himself. Of course I would protect those who I was with – I would hope they would do the same for me.
In 1989, a disturbed man shot several people in a university in Montreal. He injured people of both genders but was actively targetting (and indeed killed) only women. At one point he removed the men from a class at gunpoint and locked them in another room.
In the aftermath the men (who were of course unarmed) were shamed by many for not defending the women. I think this was unfortunate – essentially their survivor’s guilt was legitimized.
@Monkey: I, too, have a problem with the ways in which masculinity is celebrated in America. For some reason, we are ecstatic about heroism, but are not interested in discussing the psychological fallout.
Agreed. I’ve only heard the fallout from male disposability discussed in one forum ever, and that happened to be here – the GMP. I haven’t seen any studies from a sociological, psychological, anthropological, you-name-it-ological perspective ever, and that’s not from lack of trying.
A huge amount of effort is put into the feminist “pedestal” theories and the history of psychological damage, but not a bit is put into the other end.
That’s because if the psychological fallout were highlighted it might get people to see that men don’t exist for the sole purpose of being useful to others. Can’t have people actually valuing themselves based on more than that can we?
Hmmm… I just had a thought. Let’s assume that there is an objective measure of who is “strong” or “weak”. There probably isn’t, but let’s assume that there is for the sake of an argument.
Let us also assume that “protect” under a particular situation doesn’t significantly increase the chance of more survivors, and basically just changes “the weak probably dies and the strong probably lives” into “the strong probably dies and the weak probably lives”. Or possibly “whoever dies has gotten a lot more random”. Now it’s not reasonable to expect that there would always be time to make the judgement call that such a situation has come about. Nor would it be reasonable to assume that everyone could make such a judgement given enough time to clearly think about it, especially if friends or family are involved. But again for the sake of an argument let’s pretend that this is so.
Would it be better for “the strong” to always protect “the weak” out of principle, or for them to be more pragmatic and choose their “battles” carefully? On one hand, there’s something to be said for sticking to one’s principles even under extreme circumstances and inspiring others to do the same. On the other hand, sacrificing one’s life now means one cannot protect others under less extreme circumstances in the future, ones where it’s easier to change who dies from “somebody” to “nobody”.
It seems to me that people acting as body shields changes the circumstances from “more targets” to “easier-to-hit targets” which, if the goal is merely to reduce the death toll, isn’t usually an improvement.
I don’t agree that “we need heroes”.
Also, while I absolutely understand what the men did… why is it so worthwhile? Why is sacrificing your life to save another human being such a great thing to do? Presuming that all human beings are of equal worth, it seems like the scenario where one sacrifices themselves to save another and the scenario where zhe doesn’t are both as bad as the other – somebody dies who shouldn’t have. Both people are of equal worth, therefore both deaths are equally tragic and harmful to society as a whole.
Don’t get me wrong, I get why a person would want to sacrifice themselves to save a loved one, and I don’t think it’s wrong to do so, I just don’t see why we need more people like that.
Something about this comment bothers me but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
There’s a great book about disaster called “The Unthinkable’ and there’s a chapter on heroism and the sort of people who tend to risk their lives for others. It’s interesting reading.
I don’t think altruistic sacrifice has anything to do about society as a whole or the idea that humans have equal worth. Maybe that’s objectively true, but I’m not sure if the person making the sacrifice is really concerned with what’s objectively true.
Personally, I think it can be the ultimate in compassion…putting others ahead of yourself.
That said, by most accounts, it isn’t really a choice in that in the theater scenario people don’t have time to make a reasoned decision. Many people who help others in a crisis situation describe it as ‘not having a choice’ or finding themselves doing what they are doing before they are conscious of it.How you react is how you react based on your temperament, experience, genetics, and–if you have it–training. So one’s reaction (or lack of it) isn’t a reflection of one’s goodness as a human being.
The reason that masculinity is declining in Bennett’s point of view is that he’s constructed a model of masculinity that can only really be affirmed in life-threateningly violent situations, which are thankfully rare (and were not much less rare in the past which he doesn’t care to examine so closely because, fuck it, that’s hard). If your model of true masculinity requires heroic sacrifice in the face of lethal violence then, yea, it’s going to be a pretty rare to see it confirmed just due to lack of opportunity.
The -hopefully- inadvertent implication is that we should have more violence, so we can have more conspicuous masculinity.