Respect has its origins in fear

On Respect Between the Sexes

We live in an age when ordinary standards of civility have collapsed yet somehow there is universal agreement that even morons and criminals deserve to be treated with “respect.” We are urged to extend respect even to other species and the planet as a whole. Sometimes self-respect is enjoined upon us. Within my experience, the most common such injunction is addressed to men, who exhorted ad nauseam to respect women. It would be a bold fellow indeed who presumed to disagree. When was the last time you heard anyone suggest that men ought to hold women in contempt?

In fact, it took me several decades of living in this world before I realized that I had never once heard anyone speak of the desirability of having respect flow in the opposite direction as well. But shouldn’t we want to see mutual respect between the sexes? And is it reasonable to expect male respect for women never to falter in the absence of any reciprocity?

Talk of the respect men owe to women is not exactly new, either. In Victorian Britain, land of old-fashioned gallantry, one sometimes heard references to “the respect due to a lady.” But a closer look reveals that respect was not always their due. For example, I recall reading an anecdote from that era concerning a woman who was successfully prosecuted for cruelty to animals. In reporting on the case, a newspaper remarked that the defendant had “forfeited the respect due to her sex.” In other words, she was rightly punished for her actions as any man would have been.

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Strictly speaking, “the respect due to a lady” is an inaccurate figure of speech. The merely biological fact of having been born female clearly does not entitle anyone to respect. What the Victorians really meant was that every woman should enjoy a presumption of respectability—i.e., should be treated with respect “on credit,” as it were—unless and until her behavior proved her unworthy. A sexual indiscretion was one important way in which a woman could lose respectability, of course, but there were others. Savagely flogging a defenseless horse is not ladylike, as that Victorian newspaper reporter correctly perceived.

In other words, respect in the proper sense must be earned by one’s behavior. A presumption of respectability is a mere point of courtesy, and may apply to men as well. Demands for universal respect are in part symptomatic of a decline in conceptual clarity, specifically, a growing inability to distinguish between genuine respect and mere civility.

Perhaps the advocates of “respecting women” assume any fellow deserving the slightest regard from the ladies can be certain of getting it in full. But I am not so sure. Women have participated in the general decline in civility characteristic of our time. They swear and tell dirty jokes as only sailors used to do, and even saying “please” and “thank you” may be too much to expect from some of them. I have on occasion been simply shocked at the rudeness I have observed women practice both toward myself and to other men, and I have heard other men make similar observations. This is less likely to be a response to male unworthiness than a failure to socialize our daughters properly. They might have benefitted from being taught early in life by some authority figure such as their parents that women should treat men with some minimal degree of civility. This ought to be possible, for women have clearly internalized the message that men owe them unlimited respect with marvelous success.

If we want to consider the matter of respect between the sexes thoroughly, we must start our inquiry from the beginning, and that means asking where the phenomenon we call respect comes from. This question comes under the heading of what the philosopher Nietzsche called the “genealogy of morals.” For respect is a moral idea and found in many forms, from the crudest to the most refined. Yet its origins are best grasped not in the highly civilized and ceremonious forms of etiquette which might be found (for example) at a royal court, but precisely at the very lowest and crudest levels of human existence.

If the reader wishes to go where he may hear respect discussed most frequently and with the greatest possible sense of practical urgency, I recommend he visit a maximum-security prison. Inmates obsess over the “respect” they believe themselves owed by others, and are beside themselves with rage when they do not get it. Wardens must run a tight ship to prevent mutual demands for respect from boiling over into deadly riots.

It does not take an intelligent observer very long to realize that what jailbirds mean by respect is simply that other people should be afraid of them. At its most basic and primitive level, respect is fear, specifically the fear of physical violence or death. At the dawn of human history, and even earlier in primate bands, life was harsh and unpredictable. A victim of aggression could not simply call up the police to enforce laws or attorneys and judges to regulate disputes. To avoid being victimized by others, it was useful to respond as aggressively as possible to any threat. Even today, after many centuries of civilization, social environments like this can still be found. Think of playgrounds with insufficient adult supervision, or urban slums—and most especially in the prisons where so many slum-dwelling “badasses” end up. Such men will be happy to regale you with plenty of talk about respect, but they never mean by it anything much going beyond the sheer physical fear they wish to arouse in others so as not to be victimized by them.

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This origin in the fear aroused by others’ power to harm us explains why we still teach children respect, as well as good behavior more generally, through punishment. It is what first teaches the child to respect its parents, then gradually to respect their wishes, and finally (in the most successful cases) to internalize the principles the parents mean to inculcate through the punishment. A whole history of human moral development, whether in the individual or the race, might be written as the narration of such a process of increasingly refined and internalized discipline. But the beginning of moral education lies in fear; and since the world in a sense begins anew every time a child is born, fear can never be dispensed with entirely.

Just as human coexistence and religious worship took a cruder form in primitive societies from what can be observed today, so relations between the sexes were probably not originally marked by any very ennobling conception of male gallantry or female decorum, nor by any very demanding sense of honor in either sex. Many still-observable sex differences are traceable to the sheer fact that men are on average a good deal bigger and stronger than women, so much so that the average man is physically capable of killing the average woman with his bare hands. In a state of savagery, a man can get sex or anything else he happens to want from a woman (e.g., foodstuffs) simply by using force. He can also seriously harm or kill her out of mere anger.

Such male behavior is, of course, sternly punished by law in all civilized societies. But the danger of rape or other violence from uncivilized men must have had at least one positive consequence: primitive women probably respected men in the original sense of the term, viz., by being afraid of them. If they pressed a man too far, they might find themselves in serious danger. This set some limits upon how bad their behavior could get. In a shameless feminist girlboss society of “liberated” females, there really are not many such limits.

And it is not as if women had no means of countering male violence, real or merely threatened. Most of female psychology comes from their evolved ability to get what they want without using force. Women attain their ends using lies, deceit, scheming, manipulation, backbiting, innuendo, and a whole arsenal of ugly tricks whose only common denominator is an avoidance of direct confrontation and force such as would correctly be described as “unmanly” if practiced by a male. The battle of the sexes, in other words, is a battle between force and cunning, and as in other contexts, cunning usually proves more effective.

Even in civilized societies, men continue to oppose force to cunning in dealing with women, but the force is generally that of law rather than their fists. Traditional European marriage law, for example, granted primary custody of children to their father. As Hobbes saw, there was nothing natural or necessary about this:

If there be no contract, the dominion is in the mother. For in the condition of mere nature, where there are no matrimonial laws, it cannot be known who is the father unless it be declared by the mother. And therefore the right of dominion over the child dependeth upon her will, and is consequently hers. (Leviathan I:20)

Paternal investment in offspring is very rare even in the great apes which are our closest evolutionary cousins, probably because apes do not grasp the causal connection between mating and reproduction. Fatherhood in more than the bare biological sense is not a fact of nature but created by the laws of matrimony, established once primitive men discovered their own contribution to reproduction. It was quickly found that men would invest heavily in children if they could be certain the children were theirs. Marriage began as a male invention designed to give them paternity confidence.

We may be sure women objected to the idea of lifelong marriage when it was first introduced, for it meant they could not longer mate as they pleased. In practice, this meant mating exclusively with high-status men: in primitive hunter-gatherer bands, sixty percent of men fail to reproduce. Marriage allows more men to become fathers, but also means that some girls get stuck with low-status “losers.” Men were stronger, however, and carried their point, creating the patriarchal, male-headed family.

Eventually women themselves became the biggest champions of the institution of marriage—they have always been the more impressionable sex—whereas men more frequently sought to expand their reproductive potential with extramarital escapades. But we must not be deceived into thinking this familiar situation is how things began. As Nietzsche understood, the origins of moral institutions often bear little resemblance to the behavior observed in more civilized eras and societies. Marriage was almost certainly invented by men in response to their discovery of fatherhood. Its advantages over instinctive Darwinian mating must have quickly become apparent. Perhaps the best testament to the institution’s success is the ease with which later generations of men were brought to believe their women “naturally monogamous.”

We may hope that the force of law and social shaming were used more frequently than husbands’ fists in inculcating marital fidelity upon those first wives, but as we have already pointed out, force of some kind cannot be dispensed with. It is how respect first arises, and is the original instrument of moral training, whether of the child or of the human race as a whole.

And in primitive societies that do not enforce monogamy, men as a group do not enjoy a great deal of respect from women. I once attended a lecture by the late anthropologist Henry Harpending, who spent much time with the bushmen of the Kalahari. He reported that women in bushman society commonly regard the men as silly creatures. Most of the time they seem to wish the men would just go away and leave them alone.

It struck me upon hearing this that Dr. Harpending need not have travelled all the way to the deserts of Namibia to observe such a society. We Americans have been instructed for several decades now that women can do everything men can do. Their professional careers can be just as successful and lucrative provided only they are not “discriminated against”—and any failure of work to be lucrative and “fulfilling” for them is proof of such discrimination. Lesbianism is a perfectly legitimate alternative to marriage, and it is a moral outrage if such women are not allowed to adopt or conceive through artificial insemination. Women have a right to divorce their husbands for any reason or for no reason at all, and are not to be criticized for separating their children from their father, who is merely an optional add-on and not a necessary part of the family. In short, as we’ve been told, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. And the thanks men get for stoically putting up with all of this—they have not, after all, had much choice—is to be portrayed as “abusers” by feminists with masochistic fantasies!

Declining phases of civilization are marked by a recrudescence of the primitive. The “women’s liberation” movement has in effect made the ways of some of the most backward peoples known to anthropology into an ideal which our own society is condemned for failing to match. But our failure has not been for any lack of trying. Radical changes in marital and employment law over the past several decades have been motivated by a determination to render men superfluous (although this has often been done by increasing women’s dependence upon the state, i.e., upon men as a faceless collective). The result is a society in which women regard men as a kind of optional economic resource and occasional sperm donor. Why depend upon a husband to provide for you when a “family” court can simply extract resources from him by force? It is impossible that women should continue to respect men under such circumstances.

Samuel Johnson wrote: “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.” This is correct. The tendency of law in traditionally arranged Western societies has been to make up for the natural advantages women enjoy in the battle of the sexes. Reforming the laws to increase women’s natural power rather than mitigating it results in an unworkable imbalance. When we take from men the possibility of using the force of law and institutions against women, yet leave women their full powers of sexual attraction and cunning, we get not equality but female despotism. And there are no grounds for hoping that women will prove an exception to the rule that power corrupts. “Liberated” women simply run roughshod over their own families and society as a whole.

I cannot furnish the objective data I might which for in this matter, but I do catch wind of relevant anecdotes, such as the wife who starts filling out divorce papers any time her husband does not let her have her way. Knowing what would be in store for himself and his children, the unfortunate husband simply gives in every time.

It would be hard to exaggerate how unnatural and unhealthy such a relationship is. It is difficult to imagine likely that even the woman herself is happy with it. Normal women want to respect their husbands, but are unable to do so as long as they are permitted to wield arbitrary power over them. Most men also sincerely enjoy gratifying their wives’ wishes where possible, but this cannot mean submitting to their commands under threat of being hauled into divorce court.

As Johnson seems to have perceived, manhood relies on the force of law in a way that femininity does not (at least assuming men do not want to go back to simply using their fists). Respect between the sexes can be re-established, but not by mindlessly exhorting women to it, as is now done with men. The laws governing work and family must be restored to something like their former state, returning to men their ability to support a wife and children as well as the proper legal authority that goes with this role. In effect, men get respect from women by demanding it. It would, admittedly, be nice if women could learn to respect men out of sheer recognition of the goodness of our hearts, but this is simply not how respect works. Respect has its origins in fear, just as all authority relies ultimately upon force.

Women who accept the traditional conditions of marriage and fulfill their duties as wives and mothers to the best of their abilities will most often find themselves enjoying the respect of their men. If and when that happens, perhaps we will finally cease to be deafened by female demands for “respect.

F. Roger Devlin
https://counter-currents.com/2025/10/on-respect-between-the-sexes/