Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Every man’s a captain, men know how to drown
Man the lifeboats if there’s room, otherwise go down.
Loudon Wainwright III
Thursday, the 15th of April will mark ninety eight years since the majestic ship Titanic sank somewhere south of Newfoundland, Canada. All but 705 of 2,228 passengers and crew were entombed in the icy waters.
It is an epic story of life and death that has captured the attention of generations since, and continues to be a subject of interest for historians and the fascinated masses. Exactly what happened on the decks of the ill fated ship in its final hours remains the subject of a century old debate.
Many differ on whether that night saw a grand display of chivalry, or simply an lethal round of class warfare, though it seems only plausible that both factors were in play. Either way, the rarely, perhaps never spoken reality is that whatever drove the actions aboard that ship in its waning moments, it was not a valiant rush to preserve life. It was, in all certainty, a grim and depraved battle to sort out the entitled from the doomed.
And despite the ideological struggle to control our historical interpretation of events, the unblinking truth is that the night the Titanic went down was a night of great shame.
Determining whether it was the poor banned from lifeboats for being poor, or the men for being men, does not give us a distinction between classism and something else more noble. Chivalry, like classism and feminism, is just another form of fatal bigotry. It gives privilege, even life, to one person by taking it from another, and it does so by force. We just don’t notice it because chivalry demands we ignore the death of men.
To understand this is to reveal the evil that lies hidden behind the false honor of the chivalrous code, and strip away the thick and antiquated façade of feigned nobility to expose the architecture of a great falsehood.
To whatever extent chivalry played a role in who lived and who died that night, it sent the mammoth liner to its watery grave in disgrace.
We can’t turn back time and relive what happened. We can study the accounts of those who survived, but we have to understand the bias of those chosen not to drown with the others. The best way, the only way to understand it, is by allowing the dead to speak, provided we are able to still the voice of bias in our own minds.
Of the people who met their end in the Atlantic depths that night, the following facts are indisputable.
- The overall death ratio by sex was 9 men to 1 woman.
- By percentage, third class women did far better than first class men.
- The male to female death ration of crew members was 233 to 1.
While there is convincing evidence that men traveling first class received preference over men traveling in second or third class, by and large the dead wore pants, no matter how fine the cut of cloth.
It is symbolic of a time when such sacrifices were the stuff of manhood, and supposedly worthy of our lasting praise. And though the time for that praise has passed, it is a tradition we still embrace as we watch our young men fall in obscenely disproportionate numbers on battlefields overseas. Those that submit we call hero’s, and those that resist we call cowards. Ridicule, for them, can be the least of consequences. There were several reports of men being gunned down by officers on the Titanic as they tried to force their way into life boats.
Those gunshots emanated from the same forces that are alive and well and at play today. They have written laws that provide multiple national offices for women’s health, but not a single one for men, even though it is men on the short end of the gender death gap, and men who suffer more often from fatal disease and suicide than women. It is the driving force behind VAWA, where male victims and female perpetrators of violence simply do not exist.
It is the systematic utilization of men as expendable fodder; the standard of man as an appliance. Tom Golden, LCSW, a psychotherapist who has worked closely with men, put it this way. “People often assume that men’s roles are about power, but really it’s about death and emotional pain.â€Â
And rather than honestly address that role as a culture, we seek through social and legal pressure to enslave men to it. We have institutionalized it, glorified it, wrapped it in false dignity and in doing so have painted targets on the backs of men from the day they are born.
Today we simplify the code into two synonymous words. The first is chivalry, and the other is feminism, which is code speak for a social classism far more pernicious than one rooted in economic status. In the west, you can still choose and earn your economic future. When it comes to sex, you can’t choose how you were born.
Is it really any wonder why an effective response to modern misandry is still the stuff of dreams?
One can only hope that the wisdom we might gain from this particular bit of history is not that men once made honorable sacrifices and that we have simply lost touch with glorifying them for it, but rather we need to learn something else.  The false honor of chivalry is of far less value than a life wasted in its name.
We must come to terms with the fact that no coerced sacrifice is even remotely honorable. It is, quite simply suicide at best, murder at worst.
I do not honor the men who robbed their own wives of a husband and their own children of a father so that the wife or mother of a stranger, or indeed a childless and single woman, could live. And I certainly don’t honor the pathetic, brainwashed enforcers who shot men down for simply trying to survive.
I say look back on April 15th as a day of solemn reflection; a day that fathers will share with their sons, and teach them that their lives are of value; that it is not their role in life to die for the sake of others just because those others are women.  And I hope our sons are taught that this is really much more about how we choose to live than how we choose to die.
It should be an easy enough day to remember. Tax day. The same day the government officially confiscates the income of hard working men and passes on a good piece of it to entitlement scams for women, at the behest of crooked politicians.
If you want to know who Joe Biden is, picture him on the deck of a sinking ship, gun in hand and bloody corpses at his feet.
April 15th, the day that men drowned like rats, should be a reminder of what is happening in family courts, where state functionaries are trampling on whole families, but their first footprints are on the backs of fathers.
April 15th should be a reminder to men of the indisputable wisdom residing on the home page of Angry Harry’s website:
“I don’t know who you are sir, but I can tell you what you are worth. If your partner was to cut off your penis tonight, the world would laugh. What a piece of sh*t man is.â€Â
April 15th should be a day for a new breed of man unashamed to value his own life and his own worth. A day for recognition of the zeta male, or whatever else you choose to call him. He is the man who says no, and who says no more. No more chivalry, no more disposability, no living life as a machine for the benefit of ingrates, leeches and the malignant elites that feed off the sweat and blood of the powerless in the name of caring about women.
I have started a petition, simply for use within the MRM, to support the idea of April 15th being designated as Titanic Day; not in honor of the men who died on that night, but as a pledge to stop that sort of thing from happening in our own lives and the lives of our sons.
The petition won’t go to Washington, or any government agency, but is simply there for the use of men to make the commitment to themselves, their sons, and each other.
Paul Elam is Editor-in-Chief for Men’s News Daily and publisher of A Voice for Men.
