As I reflected over the previous post and readers’ comments on how men are expected to babysit and help women in the workplace, it got me thinking about how to deal with the expectations that men are there to white knight for women at work. White knighting, according to this article at AVFM.com, is as follows:
White knights are traditionalists, and heroes, and within western culture, they are a toxin. These are men who practice chivalry. White knights are males who defend women, but not because women are people — which might be noble. Rather, they defend women only because they are women. This almost always encompasses a willful blindness to the behavior and utterance of the women so defended.
So, if most men defend women at work or make your job more difficult there by acting as the male feminist in the office, it’s time to take action. Why let white knights and angry feminists at work ruin your day when you can ruin theirs instead?
Vox Day at the Alpha Game blog has a good post on black knights in which he says:
To counteract the deleterious influence of these white knights, black knights are needed. By which I mean men who are capable of mastering the bureaucratic force to which women readily resort in the dark art of corporate ninjitsu.
What does that mean? It means acting exactly like a woman would every single time a female coworker does something that would result in a complaint to the employment authority if a male coworker did it. The purpose is not to get the female coworker fired, but rather, work towards shutting down the abusive system by utilizing it to its full extent. When faced with absurdity, the correct response is to push the pedal to the metal and aucto ad absurdum….
Be sure to document every complaint and meeting. That way, if the women in HR try to turn things around on the black knight, he will have a case for going directly after HR lest the corporation find itself facing an obvious wrongful termination situation in which the victim has been blamed. Remember, the black knight doesn’t make the rules, he merely masters them and apply them to his maximal benefit in every situation.
The various white knights will attempt to belittle and minimize every female violation of company policy, of course, that is what white knights do. But it is the duty, to say nothing of the pleasure, of every black knight to subvert and defeat their best efforts.
There’s a guy on Twitter whose current handle is “Male Feminist” who seems to be doing some serious black knighting. He takes every feminist issue to its extreme — and not only is it funny, it’s absurd. Here, he calls out mistletoe as a rape vegetable:
U joke but men using mistletoe to force themselves on women is a serious problem RT @shortwave8669 Mistletoe is a rape vegetable. Look it up
— Male Feminist (@Warden_AoS) December 15, 2014
Black knighting on Twitter, at work and in society is another tactic that might work to combat the war against men. As Saul Alinsky, our country’s leading left-wing hell-raiser, once said in Rules for Radicals: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” If you have to live by these absurd rules, so should they.
If you have some other examples of black knighting, particularly in the workplace, drop it in the comments.
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