A SoCon Defends Chivalry

Let's Give Chivalry Another Chance by Emily Esfahani Smith

Ah, but what definition of chivalry?

There is nothing novel to her argument.

The author leads with the sinking of the Titanic, contrasting the behavior of the passengers on that ship with what happened during the more recent sinking of the Italian ocean liner. I had intended to write something on this question, and the question of men's duties or obligations to women they did not know. I may still finish that piece, but for now I will write that the order of charity cannot be reduced to some Romantic notion of men dying for strangers simply because they are women.

At the time, Hanna Rosin noted that what these men did was "deeper" than chivalry. It was heroic. I agree. But heroism and chivalry share a basic feature in common—the recognition, a transcendent one, that there is something greater than the self worth protecting, and that there is something greater than the self worth sacrificing your own needs, desires, and even life for. If we can all agree that the kind of culture we should aspire to live in is one in which men and women protect and honor each other in the ways that they can—and not one in which men are pushing past women and children to save their own lives—then that is progress that women everywhere should support.

Writers in the androsphere will talk about the breaking of the "social contract" between men and women, and protest that men should not be held to older standards of behavior when women are not held to that same set of standards. I think that is a useful analytic tool in talking about expectations men and women have for one another, and the laws and customs that they advocate and follow. Nowhere in this article does the author repudiate feminism (in whatever form). She does think that men and women should be civil and respectful towards one another.

Chivalry is about respect. It is about not harming or hurting others, especially those who are more vulnerable than you. It is about putting other people first and serving others often in a heroic or courageous manner. It is about being polite and courteous. In other words, chivalry in the age of post-feminism is another name we give to civility. When we give up on civility, understood in this way, we can never have relationships that are as meaningful as they could be.

If women today—feminists and non-feminists alike—encouraged both men and women to adopt the principles of civil and chivalrous conduct, then the standards of behavior for the two sexes would be the same, fostering the equality that feminists desire. Moreover, the relations between the sexes would be once again based on mutual respect, as the traditionalists want. Men and women may end up being civil and well-mannered in different ways, but at least they would be civil and well-mannered, an improvement on the current situation.

But what about their duties within marriage and society at large? "Civility" is not enough, when we are talking about laws that treat men unfairly/unjustly.

Edit. The author is supposedly a liberal Muslim feminist, but she is associated with the Hoover Institute, The New Criterion, The American Spectator, and Ricochet, which are all "conservative" in some fashion.