From Chateau Heartiste: The cunning woman knows that a man’s Achilles’ heel is his sense of honor and stoic duty, virtues that, by nature of their sacrosanct inviolability in the male psyche, are ripe for subversion and mobilization to malevolent causes of the woman’s choosing. A woman who can appeal to male honor is a woman with an army at her disposal. And none are more self-righteously believing of their strict adherence to a code of honor than the wannabe white knights.
A well-known example of a woman using the “Appeal to Male Honor” ruse is the single mom imploring a beta boyfriend to marry her and take on her bastard spawn as his own. With wet eyes and craned neck, the woman manipulates the beta’s wellspring of duty-bound honor to her advantage. Marrying a single mom “for the children” is a form of white knighting to which many beta males will acquiesce and post-rationalize as favorable to their individual circumstance. Similarly, the single mom can marshal the power of a million honor-fueled white knights — the State — to shame, hunt down, and squeeze dry deadbeat dads, or, as is more the case recently, newly acquired live-in boyfriends. For what is more honorable (from the distressed woman’s point of view) than a man who is not the father of her bastard spawn taking up the duty to help raise them without complaint or recompense?
