Rescuing Us Right Back: Further Reflections On The Roastbusters Scandal

Rescuing Each Other: Between them, the early medieval troubadours and their aristocratic patronesses of Southern France created a new and enduring cultural style: the Ideal of Courtly Love. For a thousand years in the West it has been possible to like and respect women, seek out and enjoy their company, heed their advice – and still be considered a man.

 

THEY CAME FROM THE SOUTH, wandering the rough roads and sweeping beaches of Aquitaine. Bringing with them all the news and scandal of the day and singing long strange tales to the rhythm of a tabor and the ripples of a harp. They were the troubadours: half journalists, half rock-stars; and wholly welcome in the castle-based culture of Southern France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

 

As often as not those castles were ruled by women. With their lords far away, settling old feudal scores; or even further afield, crusading in the Holy Land; these ladies found themselves temporary matriarchs. They may have been ruling over men in their husband’s name, but they were ruling nonetheless.

 

Out of these two – the troubadours and the matriarchs – emerged a new cultural style that was to influence the relationship between the sexes for centuries to come: the ideal of courtly love; chivalry; romanticism.

 

Powerfully influenced by the sparkling cultures of Islamic Spain and Sicily, this new cultural style was aimed directly at the uncouth brutality of the fiercely patriarchal societies of Northern Europe. From across the Pyrenees the troubadours brought glimpses of a world where manhood was not defined entirely by the violent assertion of power and control, but by how completely he was able to enter the life of the mind. To read, to write, to make music, to patronise beauty and knowledge: these were accomplishments of which men could also be proud. Yes, and women, too.

 

Women were the key, the means by which a feudal brute could be transformed into a courteous knight. The Ideal of Courtly Love challenged men to seek out and savour all the qualities that a warrior culture despises: tenderness, vulnerability, longing, patience, generosity and sacrifice.

 

Patriarchy rejects these emotions precisely because they are the qualities it associates most closely with the world of women. Were men to open themselves to these experiences, then interaction between the sexes would at once become both more intelligible and more equal, and the rigid barriers of patriarchy would crumble.

 

It was this, the revolutionary potential of courtly love, that inspired Eleanor of Aquitaine (Queen to both the King of France and of England) and her daughter, Marie, the Countess of Champagne, to champion courtly love throughout the courts of Europe. Aristocratic feminists they may have been (did serfs even have feelings?) but the cultural style which they and their troubadour propagandists promoted has, over the intervening millennium, become a defining motif of Western culture.

 

For a thousand years in the West it has been possible to like and respect women, seek out and enjoy their company, heed their advice – and still be considered a man.

 

Modern feminists tend to give the Ideal of Courtly Love short shrift. Queen Eleanor and her troubadours have largely been denounced for “putting women on a pedestal” which, according to their latter-day sisters, confers upon women an entirely spurious superiority, rather than the equality that is theirs by right. “Benevolent” sexism chivalrous behaviour may be, but it’s still sexism.

 

In a week during which New Zealand women have become acquainted with all the gut-wrenching details of malevolent sexism, feminism’s swift dismissal of chivalry’s benevolence surely warrants reconsideration? The narrative of courtly love may have been a literary, historical and sociological fiction, but it provided men with a model of “the perfect knight” they could become. By the rules of chivalry, honour and virtue were the consequence of neither a man’s genealogy, nor his wealth, but of his character. A man attained honour by the virtue of his choices.

 

Where was honour and virtue among the Roastbusters? In a room full of young men made brutes by the fictions of pornography, isn’t it tragic that not even one boy was raised on the fictions of chivalry? Not one young man who, perceiving the evil intent of his companions, recognised damsels in distress and chose to become their perfect knight? Not one 17-year-old boy who chose to, in Matthew Hooton’s anguished father’s appeal to shock-jocks Willie Jackson and John Tamihere: “look after them and get them home safely”?

 

For all stories have power. As the Canadian producers of a documentary looking into the sexualisation of young women revealed, a huge number of girls are still raised on the fictions of the Disney Corporation. Encouraged to see themselves as little princesses, they grow up expecting their very own Prince Charming.

 

Sadly, their brothers grow up with very different expectations. Rather than draw inspiration from the chivalrous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights, they revel in the murders and rapes depicted in Game of Thrones.

 

Perhaps Queen Eleanor and the troubadours were right: in a world of brutal exploitation and violence, men must be encouraged to rescue women. So that women, in their turn, can rescue us right back.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, November 12, 2013.

In Praise Of Romance (On St Valentine's Day)

Kissing Cousins: Lady Mary Crawley embraces Matthew Crawley at the conclusion of the immensely popular television series Downton Abbey's Christmas Special. But, while millions still thrill to the fantasy of romantic love, does it continue to fulfil its original purpose of transforming men into beings fit for feminine company?

IT WAS ONE of those television moments when millions of viewers across the world exhaled a heartfelt sigh of satisfaction. There, in the portico of Downton Abbey, the two, star-crossed lovers: Lady Mary Crawley, and her father’s third cousin (once removed) Mr Matthew Crawley, finally plighted their troth. She standing, he on one knee, as the pure white snow-flakes swirled about them.

The immense audience for Julian Fellowes high-rating Downton Abbey is proof of the enduring power of romantic love. Whether it be the upstairs romance of Mary and Matthew; the downstairs romance of Anna and Mr Bates; or the combination of both in the romance between Lady Sybil and the Earl’s chauffer, the age-old tale of bliss attained through trial and peril continues to move us – even in the Twenty-First Century.

It is fitting then, on this day dedicated to romantic love, to interrogate the tradition. What does romance look like in the Twenty-First Century? Does it still possess the power to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary? To turn prose into poetry? And, most importantly, does romance still perform its original and most significant function: that of imbuing the relationship between the sexes with something more than lust and greed?

Venturing forth into the streets of our largest cities on a Friday or Saturday night one finds scant evidence that romantic love still has any devotees. The behaviour taking place in pubs and clubs at the end of the working week more closely resembles the bacchanalia of ancient Rome. These are unabashed festivals of the flesh, where intoxication fuels passion – and vice versa. Not so much a case of two souls intermingling, as two bodies – for versatile vice.

Is romance anywhere present among these drunken midnight games of musical beds?

In the case of far too many young (and not-so-young) men I fear the answer is ‘no’. After all, how many young men today have even the slightest acquaintance with the romantic tradition? I grew up on Malory’s medieval tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and Tennyson’s rendition of them into romantic Victorian verse:

He rode between the barley sheaves,

The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves

And flamed upon the brazen greaves

Of bold Sir Lancelot.

A redcross knight for ever kneel’d

To a lady in his shield.

That sparkled on the yellow field,

Beside remote Shalott.

The callow swain of 2012, if he is acquainted with King Arthur at all, knows him not via Tennyson and Malory, but via the HBO television-series Camelot in which swords, sorcery and sex are intertwined in ways that would make Tennyson blush. Suffice to say that these ‘New Arthurians’ all evince decidedly Twenty-First Century morals, and viewer discretion is advised.

And what of today’s young woman? Has ‘Mr Right’ really been replaced by ‘Mr Right-Now’? When the sun’s come up, the last-man-standing has departed, and the hangover’s at full strength, is she still in need of a “redcross knight” – or just the Red Cross?

The man she’s waiting for is surely the same man that the whole idyll of courtly love, and the tradition of romantic courtship, was intended to create: a good man.

Romance is a conspiracy: a fascinating combination of sensuality and spirituality originally woven together by itinerant medieval troubadours and their aristocratic patronesses for the purposes of transforming the feudal brutes that were their husbands into someone they could talk to when the sex was over. From Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to Aretha Franklin; all women have ever wanted from men is a little “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”.

Romance is about changing men. About teaching them to listen to that part of themselves that rejects the never-ending battle of “all against all”; that ceaseless struggle for ‘honour’ and precedence to which masculinity, unmediated by feminine power, inevitably descends. The thwarted, stunted version of masculinity that spawns the horror of “honour killings” in those parts of the world where the traditions of feudal patriarchy still hold sway.

And surely, it was a world free of such murderous patriarchs that even the staunchly un-romantic feminists were seeking? Their argument was that by climbing down from the pedestal upon which chivalrous men had placed them, and mixing-it with their brothers as equals, the revolutionary social changes they were seeking would be hastened. Has the strategy worked? Which sex do you think has become more like the other? Male, or female?

Romance, chivalry, courtly love: these have always been revolutionary ideals. Their power to transform our ordinary, workaday world is undeniable – and overwhelming. Lust is transient and greed’s disfiguring, but romantic love can turn the humblest suburban doorstep into Downton’s stately portico; every man into a redcross knight; and every woman into a lady – at whose feet a changed man at last surrenders the power he no longer needs.

This essay was originally published in The Press on St Valentine’s Day (Tuesday, 14 February) 2012.