{"id":32071,"date":"2017-04-10T01:00:54","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T05:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32071"},"modified":"2018-02-12T09:37:19","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T14:37:19","slug":"qotd-noblesse-oblige-pre-teens-and-teenagers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/10\/qotd-noblesse-oblige-pre-teens-and-teenagers\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Noblesse Oblige<\/em>, pre-teens, and teenagers"},"content":{"rendered":"

This \u2013 ah \u2013 female privilege of course established \u201cthe way girls fight\u201d usually underhanded, and without the adult noticing. Pinches, kicks to the ankle (my poor male friends in middle school) and also gossip and character destruction and other, less physical means of retaliation.<\/p>\n

Because women are still human and will still fight.<\/p>\n

But by middle school, we had it well established. A boy understood he would take whatever the girl dished out physically, if a girl were so uncouth as to hit him, and treat it as a joke. (And by that time they were that much stronger \u2013 thanks to testosterone \u2013 that they could do that, in most cases.) The girl in turn knew if she\u2019d hit a boy, short of self-defense in a dark classroom, where he ambushed her, thereby putting himself beyond the protection of social rules, she\u2019d committed a social sin and broken a major unspoken rule.<\/p>\n

This kept fist fights between the sexes from happening. And most girls, though they might character assassinate one another, had learned to keep the boys out of it, because they weren\u2019t adroit in the art and therefore were as vulnerable to that type of war as women to punches.<\/p>\n

Or to put it another way, as the good professor says, \u201cChivalry imposed obligations upon both sexes.\u201d And it can\u2019t continue when one breaks the compact. The same way that other imbalances of power in society can\u2019t continue unless both parts play by the rules.<\/p>\n

When one part forgets the rules, they don\u2019t leave the peasants enough to live on, and the peasants chop their necks off.<\/p>\n

Look, I\u2019m a libertarian and in the US. I believe all men and women should be equal under the law. But you can\u2019t eliminate imbalances of power unless you stop being human. Communism fails, in large measure, because it wants to eliminate imbalances of power completely by making humans into something different. They believe they can shape a social ape into something more like ants or bees (don\u2019t argue. Yeah, they do want to have rulers. One ruler over faceless millions. Because someone has to enforce equality. Yes, I know about the myth of the vanishing state.) Hence the myth of the homo Sovieticus<\/em>, the selfless, perfectly acting man who would emerge once the distortions of capitalism were removed from the \u201cnatural\u201d man who was of course a Rousseaunian noble savage. No, I don\u2019t believe it. No one should believe it. The rejects of that culling program have filled a hundred million graves and bid fair to fill more. Because Rousseau was wrong and the mythology of communism is a hot and sticky repulsive mess.<\/p>\n

Some people will always be taller, larger, stronger. Some will be smarter. Some will, for whatever reason like \u201cmy ancestors got here earlier\u201d have the advantage of a better adaption to the society they live in.<\/p>\n

I, for instance, got both sides of the noblesse oblige<\/em> speech because I was taller than most of my male teachers by 13, and probably stronger too. It took. Sort of. I knew how to subdue a badly acting male without hitting him by the time I was 20, and only psychopaths did not respond. (And for those there was hitting, hence the weaponized umbrella.)<\/p>\n

Because I WAS a walking imbalance of power, frankly.<\/p>\n

Noblesse oblige<\/em> is needed to keep things from coming to extremes.<\/p>\n

Sarah Hoyt, “Noblesse Oblige and Mare\u2019s Nests”, According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2015-05-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This \u2013 ah \u2013 female privilege of course established \u201cthe way girls fight\u201d usually underhanded, and without the adult noticing. Pinches, kicks to the ankle (my poor male friends in middle school) and also gossip and character destruction and other, less physical means of retaliation. Because women are still human and will still fight. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,10,41],"tags":[374,780,262,1182,504,43],"class_list":["post-32071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-liberty","category-quotations","tag-children","tag-communism","tag-culture","tag-rousseau","tag-teenagers","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8lh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32072,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32071\/revisions\/32072"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}