Chances are you’ve heard of a concept called “Game”, and if you are like most people you suspect this concept poses a dire threat to our most cherished values. These suspicions are correct; Game is fundamentally incompatible with our values and is eroding the very foundation of our society. Even the proponents of Game would agree that this is true!

Chivalry and the virtuous man.

Feminists may object to the concept of chivalry, but it is closely related to how we measure the virtue of a man. Moreover, without chivalry feminism would be ineffectual, as feminism is the belief that men are evil and naturally want to harm women, followed by pleas to men to solve all of women’s problems*.

But while chivalry is closely related to how we measure the virtue of a man, a man’s chivalry (in itself) is not what we use to determine a man’s virtue. In our society a man proves his virtue by his ability to seduce women. I don’t mean this merely in the sense of locker room boasting or the values of a small group of “pickup artists”. I mean this in a much more fundamental sense.

As a society we are obsessed with generating sexual attraction in women. We see this ability as the most pure test of goodness in a man. A woman’s feelings of sexual attraction are a mystical force, godlike for non-Christians, and God’s message for Christians. We can’t see how incredibly crass this is because we call it romantic love, but romantic love is far more intertwined with sexual desire than we are willing to admit**. To truly seduce a woman is to make her fall in love with you.

Generating the tingle (attraction) is an obsession with our society, and you can see it in our popular films. The Fifth Element is over the top in this regard on the secular side, as is Fireproof on the Christian side.

We believe that good things should happen to men who can generate the tingle. This is why we reserve our daughters’ most sexually attractive years as a reward for such men. Our greatest fear in doing this is that our daughters might become confused and bestow their gift of sex on the wrong (unsexy) men. Luckily there’s an app for that.

This is also why we need no fault divorce and child support. Yes it is important that we encourage men to settle down and become fathers, and yes it is important that children have the immense benefit of growing up with their fathers. These are good things, but when these objectives interfere with our core values, it is our core values that must prevail. What court in the land could overrule the woman’s holy vagina? If she no longer tingles for the father of her children, he deserves to be ejected from his children’s lives and have a more sexy man take his place. Think of the vitriol we heap on such men who dare to complain when this happens to them. They are the lowest of the low in our society, except perhaps for those most detestable men of all, the omegas who can’t attract a woman at all.

All of our sexual morality is directly anchored to the tingle. The #metoo movement doesn’t object to women trading sex to get ahead, it objects to the fact that in doing so such women are enticed into having sex with unsexy men!

What about virtue in women?

While the ability to generate sexual attraction is how we measure virtue in a man, we measure virtue in a woman by her ability to be strong and independent. Bad women are doormats with low self esteem who commit the cardinal sin of being untrue to themselves. Good women are strong and independent, and most of all, true to themselves. All of our moral messaging to young girls is designed to spur them to fight against the temptation to conform to someone else’s idea of what is good. In the UK the Girl Guide vow has changed over time from obeying God to be true to myself and develop my beliefs. And every girl in the west can sing along with the moral message from Disney’s Frozen. Elsa’s moment of triumph comes when she learns she must stop trying to be a good girl and instead be true to herself:

Be the good girl you always have to be

Conceal, don’t feel,

don’t let them know

Well now they know … And the fears that once controlled me

Can’t get to me at all

It’s time to see what I can do

To test the limits and break through

No right, no wrong, no rules for me,

I’m free!

This is because we strongly believe that women deep down have a mystical gift for understanding what is truly good, which is why a woman falling in love with a man is the purest sign of his virtue.

Chivalry keeps our concepts of male and female virtue in harmony.

As I already noted, chivalry is what converts feminist demands into concrete action. But chivalry is also the way we reconcile the concepts of male and female virtue. Our unstated assumption is that being chivalrous is sexy. This is why Game is such a corrosive concept in our society. Game teaches that chivalry is an attraction killer, and that women are instead attracted to a host of traits that are neutral at best.

The problem we have is that young men now are able to see for themselves that Game works. This is true even though most men are not able to master Game in practice. The men who fail at seduction are able to observe the men who succeed, and it is painfully obvious that chivalry really is an attraction killer. All of this is made worse by the fact that not only are young men highly motivated to have sex, but our society is ordered around the sacred belief that being able to seduce women is the mark of virtue in a man. Even if a man rejects Game on the grounds that premarital sex is immoral, he still has to grapple with the fact that sexiness is the mark of male virtue in our society– and this includes the view of nearly all Christians. As Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. (President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) explains:

Put most bluntly, I believe that God means for a man to be civilized, directed, and stimulated toward marital faithfulness by the fact that his wife will freely give herself to him sexually only when he presents himself as worthy of her attention and desire.

The threat that Game poses is not that large groups of men will learn how to put it into effective practice (although many have and will). The threat comes from its assault on young men’s belief that chivalry is sexy and therefore chivalry is virtuous. Even worse, a young man doesn’t even have to ever hear the word “Game” or directly study its theories to be at risk of concluding that chivalry isn’t sexy. This is a message that is slowly making its way through the culture.

Game is so corrosive to our moral order because the normal methods to return to course only make the corrosion worse. Lectures on the importance of chivalry will be met with ridicule, since chivalry is unsexy. Lecturing men to be unsexy for the sake of virtue will likewise fail because our very definition of male virtue is sexiness.

It gets worse from here, because as Game dissolves the moral case for chivalry it is dissolving the foundation for sustaining feminism (in practice). This in turn jeopardizes the virtue of women by making it harder for women to be true to themselves. Without chivalry converting feminist theory into practice, millions of women will find it harder and harder to stop trying to be good girls and adopt a “No right, no wrong, no rules for me” attitude.

Game is destroying our most cherished values, our very concept of virtue! As a Christian all I can say is this destruction can’t happen quickly enough.

*I hereby dub this Dalrock’s Law of Feminism.

**Our very concept of romantic love connoting virtue itself comes from the same 11th century poetry that brought us the idea of chivalry.