Valentine’s Day is basically here, and with it, a tsunami of debates regarding the consumerist nature of the holiday, whether or not it’s socially acceptable to spend the holiday sitting on the floor in your underwear binging on Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and if love is real or a lie.
While these are all weighty topics, I also hear a lot of contention regarding the idea of chivalry's death. Despite the prominence of hookup culture and dating apps. I’d argue that chivalry is very much alive and well, but not necessarily in the ways people would hope to see.
If you’re pro-chivalry, like my mother, you might describe the act of being chivalrous as “politeness, kindness, and gentlemanly behavior.”
To be honest, the dictionary definition of chivalry isn’t too different:
Chivalry: the medieval knightly system with its religious, moral, and social code; courteous behavior, especially that of a man toward women; the combination of qualities expected of an ideal knight, especially courage, honor, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to help the weak.
In the historical context, chivalry developed in 10th century AD Europe as an attempt to regulate violence. Knights, being vassals of legal and military powers, were systematic servant-soldiers. They held societal power above peasants and were an authoritative presence that enacted violence regularly.
In the Christian church’s eyes, however, they also had a responsibility to remain active children of God. This responsibility created a need for a humanizing moral code, something to give knights a set of limits in informal spaces and interactions with the common folk. Hence, chivalry was born.
Essentially, there was a need for a group in power to protect the social classes beneath it. The roots of chivalry as a social construct is one deep in the patriarchal ideals that founded the governments of the time. Men were more powerful than women in both the essentialized biological and social sense— they were perceived as physically stronger and given more social advantages— but this essentialism also made men seem inherently dangerous and emotionally distant.
Chivalry was meant to humanize a specific group of men known for perpetuating violence and cruelty in a particular circumstance. It was invented in a time where women’s agency and abilities weren’t questioned because they simply didn’t exist. Women barely existed in the eyes of society.
While women are specific targets of gender-based violence, gendered violence is multiplied in times of war, and there are times where women need special consideration and treatment, women are capable of agency in society today. The chivalry of ye olde days fails to encapsulate this, and in fact, perpetuates gendered violence.
Chivalry has created a toxic double standard that’s unfair to both men and women. Men, having societal power, are forced to prove themselves as something other than inherently violent and able to fulfill the essentialized role of “provider”. To do so, they provide women, the lesser sex, special attention that then creates the assumed need to receive something in return.
In the (deeply heteronormative) romantic lens especially, it can be easy for chivalry to turn into an excuse for sexual favors or the idea that women “owe” men for being gentlemanly. It stops being about respect and more about power, a societal toolkit for manipulation and justification of entitlement and dominance.
Kindness for the sake of believing someone is below you and therefore deserves an extra courtesy isn’t kindness, but the perpetuation of inequality. There is a crucial difference between being compassionate and doing something because you feel socially obligated to.
The double standard extends to women as well. Bred to expect chivalry, women look for specific behavioral patterns from men that deny men the right to exist outside of stereotypes. Men have the right to ask for help, be provided for, and show emotion. Men have a right to be seen as more than “knights in shining armor” as much as women deserve to be seen as more than “damsel in distress.”
We no longer exist in a medieval society, and we need to start acting that way.
I’m not anti-chivalry if you separate the medieval manipulation and gender binary for the moral core of compassion and courtesy. Your gender identity doesn’t affect why you should hold the door for others, pick up something that someone dropped, or allow someone to leave an elevator before you.
We don’t need to justify subtle forms of manipulation. We don’t need to view kindness through a gendered lens.
We don’t need chivalry.
