Pride, Prejudice, and Personal Honor
This is not the adaptation with the hand scene
I’m still thinking about Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis (2021).
Last May, I relayed the brainworms this book gave me in a doomed essay to exorcise the affliction. I could not survive more than 11 of the book’s 22 chapters, but an online summary suggested I missed important details about the side character Tom Benton.
Tom is an oncology researcher at Harvard University and—so the plot twists—a friend of rom-com deuteragonist Adam Carlsen. He had been in professional contact with protagonist Olive Smith prior to Olive’s fake-dating bargain with Adam. He had already been impressed with Olive’s work prior to recognizing their mutual connection, and he encourages Olive to consider working in his lab in Boston. In one notable scene, he asks, genuinely, why Olive cares so much about pancreatic cancer. But in Chapter 14, at a conference in Boston, Tom turns. He corners Olive for a predatory advance, insinuating that despite all implications to the contrary, he had only encouraged Olive to come to Boston because she had great legs.
This vignette, to me, reads strangely. Even if we grant Tom an indifference to feminine interiorities, he is framed as an impressive scientist with an appropriately large budget. Olive herself is—by Tom’s own account—a researcher far more motivated and original than one would expect of a third-year Ph.D. student. Making a graceless sexual advance jeopardizes his chance to furnish her novel line of research with real budget. Are sexual favors worth the loss to science? And even if we grant Tom a sociopathic entitlement to women’s bodies, this is a Bro Code violation. You don’t go after your buddy’s girl.
This B-plot to the novel reveals, to me, a troubling view of Men Writ Large. Any man, the account suggests, no matter how he behaves in public, could turn monstrous if he believes he can get away with it. Not all men are monsters, caveats, caveats. But you, a young woman in the 2020s, have no way to identify such a monster until his teeth find your neck. This account is reflected in the polemic “Why Are Men Still So Dangerous?” by rhetoric professor and writer of The Burned Haystack Dating Method
.1 Young’s proposed answers are:
Because they want to be.
Because they’re allowed to be.
This account of the male psyche does not resemble a human—instead, it resembles Sudden Monster Tom Benton. And for all the “men can be dangerous” discourse I have consumed, neither Jennie Young nor Chelsea Fagan nor Rayne Fisher-Quann have a cogent means of differentiating a Normal Man from a monster beyond checking for fangs when your dinner date laughs.
Now, I don’t have a good account of why men do monstrous things to the women in their lives. I, for one, have better things to do than enact needless violence. But I am looking for an account of male individuation compatible with the feminist principles I took to heart in college. Unfortunately, the people shouting loudest about the moral failures of Men Writ Large have little to offer towards a positive moral philosophy. Jean Shinoda Bolen and bell hooks recommend I seek healing, but healing my psyche has not made pretty girls text me back any faster.
I was mad about this, and a friend recommended the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice as a better point of reference.
Misreading Faces
The BBC adaptation hinges on the nuanced and subtle expressions of the actors—knowing smirks, evasive glances, scarcely-perceptible raises of an eyebrow. This mindfulness of presentation allows a running theme of misreading men’s faces. Darcy misreads Bingley’s countenance with Jane—nervously wide-eyed as always—as indifference. The broader society misreads Darcy’s discomfort with social interaction as haughtiness. Mr. Bennett lets everyone misread him, such that he can roast people to their face and only let Lizzie in on the joke. The core plot rests on Lizzie looking past Darcy’s demeanor, but she never pieces together why Darcy is Like That—only that underneath that “prideful” face is a truly good man. This misreading is excused by the plot—but the misreading of Wickham is not.
If I had not perused the Wikipedia article first, I don’t think I would have figured out Wickham’s deal either. He’s warm and charming, and his only warning sign is a slight evasiveness when asked pointed questions. The impression he gives in the first half of the show, as he points his attention towards Lizzie, does not indicate that he is the kind of man to convince a girl to elope with him against her best interests. In fact, the elder Bennetts get little indication of Wickham’s character until it’s too late. Caroline Bingley gives advance warning, but she is clearly no ally to the Bennetts. Darcy gives his side of the story in writing, but his account is not trusted until Lydia leaves a giddy note of her intentions to become Mrs. George Wickham.
However, only this tragedy allows Darcy to show the goodness beneath his tense countenance. He finds Lizzie mere moments after she learns of Lydia’s disappearance and gives condolences so stiff that Lizzie fears she’ll never see him again. But because Darcy alone holds himself responsible for letting this happen, he tracks down his wayward friend, pays his miscellaneous debts, and presses Wickham into a shotgun marriage with a giggling bride who innocently asks where all the guests are. Darcy, for his part, insists that Lydia and Lizzie’s uncle take credit for this arrangement in his stead. Only Lydia’s loose lips reveal Darcy’s involvement, solidifying Lizzie’s ultimate love.
A Moral Revolution for One
Moral philosopher Cheshire Calhoun might describe Darcy’s insistence of responsibility for Wickham’s behavior as an abnormal moral context:
Abnormal moral contexts occur when some segment of a society produces advances in moral knowledge that outrun the social mechanisms for disseminating and normalizing that knowledge in the society as a whole. In that case, a gap opens between what “everyone knows” is right and what from a (presumably) advantaged [epistemic] position is viewed as the right thing to do.2
No one asked Darcy to bail out his deadbeat ex-friend for the benefit of a silly girl with a middling fortune. In fact, it’s a breach of norms for him to bother. There’s a gap between what Darcy thinks is right and what everyone else considers appropriate for his station.
Granted, Calhoun has greater moral ambitions than Darcy. Her account of abnormal moral contexts focuses on living based on feminist principles. In such a case, a moral revolutionary has an obligation not only to live according to their morals but also to propagate those morals, to convince others of those morals, to bear the consequences of resisting a society wracked by the wrong morals.
But what if an abnormal moral context applied only to one person? Then, it would look like a personal moral code. I, for example, have an annoying commitment to quality coffee. It is a personal moral failing for me to drink cheap swill when I can drink stuff that tastes good without milk or sugar. As a consequence, I brought an AeroPress to work even though my office had free coffee. If you call me a snob for this insistence (you may), then my commitment to quality coffee is morally illegible, in Calhoun’s terminology. And Calhoun would argue that I should at least attempt to promote my commitment towards quality coffee:
Moral rules are not designed for individuals. They are designed instead for the social worlds that individuals inhabit. Similarly, even though individuals are to cultivate virtues, the point of virtue is not just to make our individual lives good but to make our common lives good. The shared cultivation of virtue enables us to count on others to do the things that need doing.3
But my personal commitment to quality is supererogatory: it is beyond what is morally necessary. I cannot expect normal people to insist on high-quality chocolate in their mocha lattes, nor spend for better bearings in road bike components, nor take the time to understand the complexities of a “cost-reflective” hourly electric rate (if it was just about the coffee, it would simply be a hobby). Instead, I deliberately hold myself to a higher standard than I do other people with respect to demanding quality, because in this specific regard, I cannot count on others to do the things that need doing—and considering the revenue on signifier without substance,4 things need doing. So I must do so myself, for my own behalf if not also for others.
By now you should have an intuition about how I comport myself:
“Ichiro is a fop of a dandy of a snob.”
“Ichiro likes spending money on expensive trinkets.”
“Ichiro will not buy, gift, nor endorse slop.”
Like with the Bro Code, my commitment to quality is a matter of honor. It’s why I roll up to the function with a thoughtfully-chosen bottle of sake, and why I make single-origin artisanal memes for this blog. Of course, I still aspire to make my personal abnormal moral context—my honor—legible. I want you to know I take fundamental underlying quality seriously, even if I don’t expect you to learn specialist knowledge in advance of a decision. And I also hope that my time-intensive, expensive, and self-imposed insistence to check the supply chains for the stuff I buy can guide your intuitions about whether I’d accuse someone of incompetence without a stack of printouts suffused with red ink. On the record, before God and
: F. Ichiro Gifford does the reading.Why Men Are Still So Dangerous
What concerns me is that even the feminist writers most sympathetic to the male psyche fail to speak about honor. Jean Shinoda Bolen does not speak about honor in Gods in Everyman. bell hooks does not speak about honor in The Will to Change. But self-described “medic in the Gender Wars” and man Terrence Real gestures towards honor when he relays a Maasai account of what it means to be a great warrior:
When the moment calls for fierceness, nobody f—s with you. And when the moment calls for tenderness, you are not tender; you are very, very tender. And a great [warrior] knows which is which.
When Real gave this talk in 1997, he emphasized the importance of tenderness, reflecting his contemporaries Bolen and hooks. But in 2025, this account from Maasai elders provides an answer to Jennie Young: men are still so dangerous because sometimes we need to be.
I am no exception. I still need, as Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette describe in King, Warrior Magician, Lover (1990), to be “energetic, decisive, courageous, enduring, persevering, and loyal to some greater good beyond [my] personal gain.” One could reframe that loyalty to a greater good beyond one’s personal gain as an abnormal moral context demanding supererogatory action: in a word, honor. In order to fix the ailments of the American electric grid, I will need to make enemies, end careers, and seize power for myself. But when I take that power, I will prove immensely dangerous should I turn monstrous the day I can get away with it. My honor would be the first defense against my abuse of power.
I submit a test for a man’s honor: Assess what he’ll pay—in money, status, dopamine, etc.—for a principle he claims. Don’t take him at his word; see it for yourself or corroborate his stories. If his honor is cheap to buy, or unmoored entirely, then he cannot be trusted with power. But an alternative to honor is a credible threat of violent enforcement.
Wickham took Lydia as his wife out of fear of Fitzwilliam Darcy.
It’s Not Enough for the Apps
None of this is of value to the readers of the Burned Haystack Dating Method. I am neither Carol Gilligan nor Eva Kittay nor Nancy Folbre, so I cannot offer cogent feminist moral philosophy, much less a surefire method of ascertaining whether a man is a monster. Worse, I fear it may not be possible to differentiate monsters from men with the limited data provided by a dating app. The Bennetts had much better information on Wickham than the sloppy Hinge profile he would have made, and that man still would have taken Lydia for a situationship from Hell, were it not for Darcy’s intervention.5
But I think any functional account of What To Do About Men must consider honor. Dragons must be slain. Obelisks must be built. Principles must be stuck to, at dire cost. The people who take such tasks must be dangerous, or else they will fail. And dangerous people must first be restrained by themselves.
What matters to me is that Jane Austen insists that intelligent, upstanding women like when men do that.
This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of SemiAnalysis. This is not investment advice. For analysis on semiconductors, AI, energy systems, industrial inputs, or utilities, visit https://semianalysis.com
I must give Young credit for the “Burned Haystack” method—the practice of blocking unwanted dating app profiles to prevent “recycling” from the recommendation algorithm is a savvy hack.
Calhoun, Cheshire, 'Moral Failure', Moral Aims: Essays on the Importance of Getting It Right and Practicing Morality with Others (New York, 2016; online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 Nov. 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199328796.003.0002, accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
Ibid.
Labubus cost forty bucks!? You could get a really good stuffie for that money.
More pressingly, Lydia seems uninterested in inquiring about Wickham’s character, because her personality is apparently hollow without a pretty boy to fawn over.
" Darcy misreads Bingley’s countenance with Jane—nervously wide-eyed as always—as indifference.”
You remember this backwards. Darcy thinks that Jane is indifferent to Bingley, not vice versa.