Featured Image “Pavilion VIII at the Lawn UVa 2010” by Rosenzweig on Wikimedia Commons, used under license (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic/CC BY-SA).
I wish to share a story based on true events, for which we need to travel back a bit in time, to the month of December 1140, to be correct.
The fortress of Weinsberg was probably built in the early 11th century; it lay and still does lie on top of a hill in Germany. In the weeks leading up to the event I wish to share, the fortress ended besieged due to a power struggle between the royal houses of Welfen and Staufern. The Weinsberg castle belonged to the Welfen, and King Konrad III was eager to carry away a victory and claim the fortress.
On the 21st of December that year, this victory finally arrived after an open field battle was won by King Konrad’s army against the troops of Welf VI, who had arrived to help the desperate folk in the castle. Alas, his defeat doomed all hope for those within the fortress walls, and capitulation was decided to be the last option.
King Konrad accepted and graciously granted that the women were to be given free passage to escape from further harm, yet he also made it clear that all the men remaining in the fortress would face execution. The women were given the right to carry with them whatever possessions they could fit on their backs, and so it came to be that King Konrad and his men were to witness a highly unusual sight.
The gates of the fortress of Weinsberg on that cold winter’s day 1140 swung open to let the womenfolk begin their march down the hill, burdened so heavily that they could hardly put one foot in front of the other. Weighed down by their most prized possessions, they began their march down the hill. Their most prized possessions being their men.
A touching true story without a doubt but why did I choose to retell it? Did I choose it to show how amazing women are, how daring and caring? Or did I choose it for its sentimental value, to depict a time where the relationship between men and women seems to have still been one of worth and love?
Certainly both questions I can answer with a bit of a yes, for women can be amazing when they put their heart and soul into it, as do I feel sentimental while revisiting this event, which appears to show there has been a better time once, without gender warfare, yet the true answer is still a very different one.
In fact, I chose this story to in a rather graphic way depict what it looks like when one sex carries the other on its back, as we indeed have seen one sex doing for most of human history, even if not in such a graphic manner. One sex, which assured the survival of the other sex, as the other by nature had most of the odds stacked against it. In opposition to the events of that cold day in December 1140 however, most of human history have seen men carrying this burden to assure women’s survival, women usually being the physically weaker. This reaches from throwing themselves in front of women and children to fend off dangerous animals, working under health consuming conditions, and to sacrificing themselves on battlefields. Still today this is what men are expected to do, and many are willing to do, as their superior physical strength has created them to be the carrier of this burden.
Same time though, we are being told that men’s physical strength is responsible for some of the greatest terrors womenfolk have had to endure through out the ages. We are being made afraid of this strength and those who have carried us to safety over and over again, and we came to swallow lies as well as to accept injustices done to men, without question and hesitation. Where the women of Weinsberg became known for their loyalty and devotion, men of past and present have come to be labelled oppressors and rapists; a danger to us, which we have to keep tight control over to remain safe.
Surely no one would expect that the men of Weinsberg turned on their women after having been carried by them out of harm’s way (for the King stood true to his word that the women were allowed to take with them their most prized possession, and it is recorded he smiled at what he had witnessed). It would drive us to a righteous outcry if history would tell us these men showed no gratitude to their wives but instead came to mistreat them for it.
Yet, is this not exactly what many women of today are doing, by buying into the lies of the feminist movement, spreading those lies further, and supporting and exploiting laws of great injustice to men? I personally do not know one single woman who has been driven into poverty through a divorce, while still having to pay for her husband, but I do know plenty of men personally who are facing this now or have had to start all over after being bled dry. I can not recall having read about one single woman accused of raping a man while he was drunk and unable to give his consent to sex, but accounts to the opposite I see plastered on the walls everywhere…
If the men of Weinsberg would have shown such contempt and cruel ignorance to their wives, I doubt their womenfolk would have picked them as their most prized possession to carry down that hill, and we need to ask ourselves – why then should the men of today choose women as their burden, to drag out of harm’s way?
And indeed, more and more men are beginning to ask themselves exactly this question, and the answer they arrive with is that they do not wish to carry this burden any longer. No more sacrificing, but instead, men are beginning to go their own way, and looking at what all their willingness of the past has brought them, I do not think anyone can possibly blame them. What men have come to endure in our modern times, unchallenged by women, or in many cases even supported by women, has awakened them to the fact that they throughout the ages have put women and children first, a choice they made to secure the survival of this species, but which gradually has ended with their being seen as not really worth much themselves. Taken for granted, used and even besmeared by hate campaigns, more and more men are deciding this is not worth their time, their strength, their dedication.
Feminism sought to emphasize the importance of women beyond the importance women held already, as the only ones who can bear offspring, and decided to fight for ‘rights’ to secure independence for women from their evil oppressors of the past.
Good for them, for women will have to work hard in the future to survive: no free turns anymore, and when the building burns, they will find themselves pushed out of the way, or left to find their own exit. No more being carried to safety, no more special treatment – women wished to be equal, and a time is rising where they will feel what it means to be an equal to a man, and will come to struggle hard to pull even remotely close to this, as quite frankly, they are not men…
The siege of Weinsberg and its following events are not taught to us in our history or social classes but instead, among many other heroic feats, have come to be forgotten. I guess women carrying men on their backs to safety does not quite fit in with the feminist climate and agenda, due to the ‘prized possession’ part and women actually showing a willingness to put men over goods. For those of us who still like to research and find truths among all the lies, this story, carried to us on the winds of times gone by, does not just prove that women can not have been as oppressed and enslaved by the evil brutes, as we have been told, but also shows us very graphically the meaning of struggling under a burden. While we imagine the unusual sight of women battling to make it down the hill with their husbands on their backs, undoubtedly most of us will feel that this picture is very odd, because we are only used to seeing the opposite. Men carrying women and the burden of their safety, that’s what we are used to and have come to take for granted.
But there is one more thing still the events of Weinsberg can teach us, and this is that in times where our menfolk are in danger, we have to come through for them. One can argue that the women of Weinsberg only carried their husbands past harm as they did not wish to lose their providers. This very well may have played a role, yet for us women today, and, after all our shouting and declaring of how important freedom is for us; we should find ourselves able also to understand that men have this right to freedom, too. They are not the toys of our whims, nor are they obliged to treat us well if we do not treat them well in return. They do not need to look after us just because we feel entitled to special treatment, a special treatment we feel entitled to claim, solely because men have given us so much for so long.
If you know of a woman who is divorcing and trying to press as much as she can out of her husband – speak to her and ask her why she feels she deserves any fruits of his future labor when feminism claims it fought so hard for our right to earn our own living. Or if you are a woman in such a situation, put forth this question to your own self, and try explain how it comes that, if you are that strongly empowered a woman, you still feel it is okay to ask a man to share his resources with you. His doing the giving – while you have stopped giving him anything in return.
And if you see yet another article posted about some rape accusation, go and research without blindly accepting it all to be true. Rape DOES happen, of course it does, but much what we are presented with today as evidence for a ‘rape culture’, is indeed based on false and twisted information, as even some in the feminist movement are beginning to admit.
King Konrad smiled when he saw those women rise to the task of helping their men but any woman rising today in defense of men will not be greeted with a smile from her opposition. Instead, she will face insults and even a risk to her well-being, but.. rise anyway… Ignorance and silence can be considered equal to if those women of Weinsberg would have just left the fortress with their dresses and knickknacks, leaving the men to their suffering. Men deserve a life free from fear and harm, just as women do, but in our climate no man is safe, and this includes even those men who choose to believe criticizing women is a sign of misogyny. I am a woman myself, and I most certainly do not hate my own gender. I love being a woman, but I hate what I have come to observe as a society which favors women who know no shame, but will lie and exploit, and help to spread the myth that women are victims, and men the victimize of past and present.
And so in closing I shall return a last time to the siege of Weinsberg and call out to my fellow womenfolk, to rise and show the world that we are not just compulsive consumers, selfish and only obsessed with our own well-being, but that we understand a man’s right to live free and unharmed is just as much a human right as it is ours.
No one is asking us to carry men down a hill. All we are asked is to end our ignorance and raise our voices in defense of those who for the longest time have shared their gained resources with us, and kept us safe, even at the expense of their own lives.
Help end this human injustice.
