The Cocktail Party Contrarian: Chivalry Is Not Dead

Every time I have dinner with one of my husband’s oldest friends, Steven, I tease him about his charming, chivalrous habit of standing when I get up from the table. He rises to his feet to attend to the lady, like all the well-dressed gentlemen of the 19th century must have. Sometimes, just for fun, I get up and sit down three times in quick succession to see how consistent and nimble he is. He never fails. Someone trained Steven as a young man to treat women like ladies, and I want to thank that person, whomever it was.The old-fashioned gesture is a bittersweet reminder that something meaningful has been lost in our confused culture, even as we claim we are racking up gains for both sexes. A man’s innate sense that he ought to protect, and a woman’s sensibility that she is to be treated with care, run deep. They have been shamed out of us in the name of an extreme type of feminism that hates femininity perhaps even more than masculinity. It isn’t at all clear we are better off.I asked my teenage son and daughter about elevator etiquette at their New York City high school. “Do the boys hold the door open for the girls and let them enter first?” I asked, knowing it was an absurd question. They both laughed. “Everyone is just trying to get to class,” my son responded, mercifully with some measure of guilty recognition in his voice that made me feel only slightly better. “It’s a free for all,” my daughter said, shrugging, with little hint that she ever expected any boy to make way for her.That was a sad moment for a mother, to be sure. I corrected the record and reminded them both that a gentleman always holds a door open for a lady. Always. I sounded like my corset was too tight, I know, but I was determined to grind the idea into their heads. A woman can simultaneously run for Congress and have a man offer to help her on with her coat, I assured them. The only thing inappropriate about that is the fainting couch the crazed activists fall on at the mere thought of the implications for “power dynamics and the patriarchy.”I don’t want chivalry to die. There is much about the way women used to be treated that society has happily discarded, but not everything about being men and women 100 years ago was wrong. Times may change, but human nature doesn’t. Third-wave feminists and bullied men menaced by the Me-Too movement aren’t going to convince me that a world in which a man offers a woman his seat on a crowded bus is bad. They aren’t getting their claws into my kids, either. My son now knows to grab the heavy grocery bag out of the back of the car without being told. If anyone sees him push his way through a door before a female friend, please message me. I will call him out publicly.As for my daughter, she now expects to have her male friends walk her home or see her into a taxi at night. I sense she will be disappointed quite a bit as she makes her way through life, but at least she will know she is being let down. All the women out there who don’t even know it are the ones I feel sorry for.

The Cocktail Party Contrarian: Chivalry Is Not Dead

The Cocktail Party Contrarian: Chivalry Is Not Dead

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