It’s been said that chivalry is dead, but I don’t think that’s true. I think that somewhere in the back of both men and women’s minds — in the assumption that a man should carry more Wegmans bags to a car than a woman, for example —chivalry lives on.

And I think it’s time to kill it.

Death to chivalry does not mean that we should do away with mutual consideration altogether. When the situation calls for it, I’m all for sharing umbrellas and standing up so someone else can sit down. But the idea that these actions are gendered — and the baggage that they carry as a result — has no place in a society where men and women live and work as equals.

I’ll acknowledge and even appreciate that chivalry is rooted in admirable intentions — respect for and the elevation of women as a whole. In practice, however, opening car doors for women and pulling out their chairs carries the implication that women constitute a gentler and more delicate demographic. Men, meanwhile, act as protectors in a chivalrous society.

In this sense, chivalry becomes a benevolent form of sexism that substantiates negative gender norms for men and women.

Take a recent study from Purdue University, for example. Men reported lower self-esteem when someone else held a door open for them, compared to men who opened the door by themselves, according to researchers who distributed brief questionnaires immediately after the subjects entered a building.

Researchers concluded that door-holding is still gendered in nature, and further speculated that the non-normative behavior — in this case, having a door held rather than doing the door holding — is responsible for the negative response.

The idea that respectful and considerate actions should be associated with gender roles is ridiculous. But this is the idea the supposedly “sweet and romantic” chivalry supports at its very core.

A gender-neutral system of general consideration should surpass chivalry as the societal standard, and both men and women will have to change their thinking to make this happen.

This will require us to hold doors for anyone who has their hands full or who approaches a door immediately after us, regardless of his or her gender. It will require the taller of us to hold umbrellas for the shorter. It will require us to all pull out our own chairs, something nearly anyone is capable of doing.

And sometimes it will even mirror old-fashioned chivalry. The flat-shoed among us will sometimes be expected to walk across snowy parking lots and pick up cars for the painfully high-heeled among us. But the reason must be consideration, not expectation.

When logic and courtesy serve as our guide, gender roles have no role to play.

So let’s vote down chivalry and vote up mutual consideration. After all, at the end of the day, I’d hate to be responsible for lowering the self-esteem of whatever classmate I hold the door for at Schine.

Nicki Gorny is a junior newspaper and online journalism and Spanish major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at nagorny@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @Nicki_Gorny. 

Published on March 5, 2014 at 1:00 am