You'll Kill Marauders, But Will You Change a Diaper?

Fatherhood is rewarding, but it's light on the killing.

Photo by Mulyadi on Unsplash

Recently, in my weekly segment of Twitter drama, Many Such Takes, I covered a guy who said he would gladly kill 1,000 strangers for any member of his family. I don’t want to pile on him too much, because he’s hardly the first person to make this assertion (Matt Walsh claimed, unprompted, that he would kill every ape on Earth for any one person on Earth, family aside.) Given that I’m regularly served content in the trad/right-wing dad milieu, it’s a common purity test: how many people would you rip limb from limb in cold blood to save your family? (Or in Matt’s case, replace people with “apes” and family with “some guy?”) This is basically the right-wing dad version of the leftists who say, “What would your job be after the Revolution? Mine would be the uniform designer for the new KGB and freelance anime reviewer.”

But I get what they’re saying. I’d give my life for either of my kids, and I’m sure if I had to, I’d kill for them, but this thought experiment is not something I enjoy (it is not lost on me that as a woman, I might just not be as programmed to enjoy thinking about such things.) What strikes me about this topic, every time it comes up, is that the people engaging in it don’t seem reluctant. They seem, quite frankly, really excited to imagine themselves killing. The family serves as a very convenient excuse. There’s a reason they never pontificate over how many glasses of semen they’d drink to save their family.

But alas, we are living in 2025, and no matter how many people claim things are “dystopian,” the vast majority of American fathers (nay, any father) will never have to murder anyone to save their family, let alone 1,000 people. Thanks to us living in a relatively prosperous and peaceful time in history (for most of the world, anyway) most dads can rest assured that they can put the killing aside to focus on the more mundane parts of fatherhood, like buying soccer uniforms and going to Back to School Night.

But what if that’s….kind of a drag for some guys, actually? What about all the barbarians in need of slaying?