Women Preserved King Arthur

In the Arthurian Legends, after the Battle of Camlann where King Arthur and his bastard son Sir Mordred gave each other mortal wounds, nine ladies bore Arthur's body to the island of Avalon. There are several classic paintings of the scene. This one by James Archer is one of my favorites.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was in middle school, I lived in Oklahoma City. During the summer vacation, our library had a reading contest for kids where the librarians kept a sheet of paper for each participant showing the books we'd read that summer. The kid who read the most books got a prize. Being a bookish sort, I read voraciously in addition to running around in the streets and fields with the lads.

Every year, I got smoked by the girls in that contest. If I read 40 books over the summer, they were reading 80-100. It was never even close.

Because it wasn't protected by copyright laws, every major publisher had a version of the Arthurian Legends aimed at middle schoolers. Every library carried at least one version, some carried two or three. Back in the day, you could see who else had checked out the book because the checkout card had to be filled out with your name, deposited with the librarians when you took the book and then returned to the book when you brought it back.

I loved the Arthurian Legends even then. The checkout cards for those books were always filled with the names of girls. The books were guaranteed to be in the children's section of every library because girls liked to read them.

Brace yourselves, we're coming about to a new course! Mind the boom!

Brad Wilcox is an excellent social scientist who focuses on marriage and family issues. His work is solid, backed up by mountains of repeatable raw data and sound statistical analysis. His book, Get Married, is his most recent summary of his findings. The blog for the Institute for Family Studies has a new post on how Professor Wilcox's research shows that young men need encouragement to become marriageable. For the purposes of this series on sex, Sex, SEX!, here's a snippet from that post.

What Women Want

In fact, women today still find three things attractive in the kind of man they want to marry, according to Wilcox. These three traits are surprisingly traditional and masculine:

1. A man who provides. This doesn’t mean that women no longer want careers, but they are not necessarily longing to be the sole or even the main breadwinners of their family: 74% of mothers are “very happy” in marriage if their husband works full-time compared to 56% of mothers whose husbands work part-time or are unemployed.
2. A man who protects. Men are, on average, bigger and stronger than women. Women are drawn to men who put their superior strength in the service of others, especially to protect their wives and children from danger.
3. A man who pays attention. Another finding is that “wives who are married to men rated high in masculinity are happier and less divorce prone.” Is it surprising that a man who provides for and protects his wife and children is more desirable? But even these traits are insufficient without a third: emotional engagement. Wives are happier if their husbands are loving, affectionate, understanding, communicative, and attentive to her needs. In fact, 95% of wives with men who were rated high on providership and emotional engagement” were very happy in their marriage and sexual relationship.

Professor Wilcox's data and analysis supports what I've been fumbling with in this series. In yesterday's post, I put it this way.

The women want a knight from Mallory, a man who will protect, provide and cherish. They want it to be second nature to him, not something they have to coerce out of him. They don't realize that their needs are themselves second nature to women. Their ignorance about their own needs exists because the culture that shaped them has lost its way and lives in a fantasy world of feminist twaddle...

Women and men need each other in different, complimentary ways. We each have deep-seated needs that can only be filled by the other. You can deny that all day long, but it's still true.

As Andrew Klavan likes to say, art expresses truths about life. Mallory's stories of knights and ladies are enduring classics because they express truths about romantic relationships. The fact that AI cannot write such stories shows how our modern culture has lost the bubble when it comes to sexual dynamics. The raw data showing that this is true is all around us.

Women of all ages have always been drawn to the image of the knight in shining armor. That is born out by the reading habits of the girls in Oklahoma, the cries of despairing young women on TikTok and the hard data from Professor Wilcox's extensive research.

I was at a Halloween party a few years back when a guy who did medieval reenactment combat came in wearing his full suit of plate armor. One of the women at the party who didn't even know him walked over to him like she was magnetically drawn to him. I watched her smile warmly at him and then her hand slowly and gently caressed his steel breastplate like he was her lover. She was practically drooling. She was also married and a good 15 years older than the guy. It was all innocent, as innocent as could be expected when he appeared out of her secret fantasies.

In the legends, women preserved King Arthur by taking him to Avalon. Back in the days of printed books and reading, girls preserved the stories of knights and ladies. Today, women despair that those relationships are fading away, not understanding why they crave what they do or even that it is natural and common to crave them.

And our culture? It is hopelessly lost in a haze of angry, feminist bitterness.

(AI which is) the ultimate avatar of our culture is incapable of writing the archetypal stories that are the fountainhead of the things the despairing women want and need. It is fundamentally wrong about our natures as men and women, so it constructs a model of romance-reality that is doomed to failure.

Other Posts in this Series

Recapping recent blog posts, here's where we are so far:

• Classically beautiful and feminine women are a rarity these days.
• Romance is founded upon the biological differences between women and men. The more you deny and minimize those, the less romance you will have.
• Whatever cultural changes we've been making, they are in opposition to evolution and are not driven by natural, Darwinian forces.
• Our younger generations are less happy, more lonely and deeper in debt.
• We are told to believe that ugly is beautiful.
• We aren't just denying sexual reality, we are fighting against it.
• Young women are being deeply injured by this.
• Many of our institutions have become incompetent because of this.
• There isn't a government solution for it.
• Angry, bitter women are sabotaging the lives of other women.
• The effort to spread the acceptance of sexual degeneracy is harming romance.
• We are all being harmed by the cultural shift away from romance.
• The changes in our culture are not hypersexual, they are hyposexual.
• There are plenty of parasites feeding on our unhappiness and dysfunction.
• Women's boxing in the 2024 Olympics is blowing up feminist delusions.
• AI is the avatar of our modern culture and it cannot write Arthurian, romantic fiction.
• The need for chivalrous men is innate to women.