The new age of chivalry

You hold the door open, you pay for dinner, you defend her honour. But are you wasting your time? The rules have changed, gentlemen. Have you noticed how women want sexual equality – but only on their terms, thereby nullifying the whole notion of equality? They demand to earn the same wages, and yet they still expect us to pay for dinner. There’s no such thing as “woman’s work” any more; we’re required to change the nappy and hang the washing out. That’s fine, but when the car needs an oil change or the bins have to be taken out – well, that’s “a man’s job”, obviously. Women want to have their cake and eat it – and they’re not even prepared to bake it themselves anymore.

This isn’t some chauvinistic rant about how women should know their place – mainly because I like my scrotum precisely where it is: attached to my personage. My point is that it can difficult for us blokes to know how to treat girls these days. Sorry, I shouldn’t say “girls”. I made the mistake of calling the women in my office “girls” the other day – and I nearly got lynched for being patronising. So I asked them if they even knew what the word “patronising” meant…

This helps to demonstrate what a tightrope made of eggshells us men now have to negotiate. In the bygone age of chivalry, where men were gallant knights and women were damsels in distress, we knew what our roles were and what was expected of us. They dropped their hanky and we would rush to their aid, lancing dragons left, right and centre and challenging any ne’er-do-wells who got in our way to duels at dawn.

The goalposts of gentlemanliness seem to have shifted even in my lifetime. I was brought up to treat women a certain way: to offer up my seat, to open doors, to try and remember their name the morning after a one-night stand. You know, the basics.

But now that women are our equals – at least when it suits them – the rules of chivalry have changed. Some women might want you to throw down your coat so they don’t get their shoes muddy. Others might look at you as if to say: “What the hell did you just ruin your coat for, stupid bastard?” So what are we supposed to do?

A recent incident springs to mind. We’re having lunch for a friend’s special birthday. She’s a big girl, it must be said, but it’s her 30th and she decides she’s going to have the chocolate fondant for pudding. The bloke at the next table snorts and – in the kind of affected stage whisper that he knows we will hear – says how disgusting it is that “obese people have no self-restraint”.

I see my friend’s face flush with embarrassment. I feel mine do the same with anger. There is no way I am going to let that go, especially on her 30th. My knuckles whiten, the vein in my neck pops out, but just as I begin to get to my feet to force-feed this shit-for-brains a napkin for his pudding, I catch my friend’s eye. It is welling with tears, but nevertheless it says: ‘please don’t make a scene’. She has more self-restraint than I do.

And she’s right, of course. Smacking this guy in the teeth would give his words the indelibility of a never-to-be-forgotten birthday anecdote. “And then Dan overreacted and got us all thrown out of the restaurant…” Far from helping, I’d be making it worse – rubbing salt into a wound rather than a wine stain.

The topic of table conversation is swiftly and adroitly altered by my other half, but I tune out. I sit and seethe in silence. I’m lost in a fantasy trance of what I should have said, what I should have done, how I should have dragged that punk out by his tie and punched him off the side of the wharf before coolly returning to my seat as if nothing untoward has happened. My girlfriend senses my tension and squeezes my hand like a hypnotist bringing me back into the room. When I snap out of it, I realise my heart is racing and my breathing has quickened.

Men are hard-wired to protect. Traditional, old-fashioned, throw-down-the-gauntlet, let’s-take-this-outside gallantry would have demanded that I settle this matter like a man. But that is not necessarily the best course of action. Hell, in some cultures, people get killed for dissing a woman.

Suppressing the impulse to intervene requires a strength of character that I evidently don’t have. It eats away at me later as I rehearse the incident on loop in my head. So I talk to my girlfriend about it. If it had been her that was insulted, I don’t think I could have held back. Nevertheless, I tell her I feel emasculated by the inaction. I feel less of a man. I, I, I… As I talk, I realise I’ve made it about me, about a need to feel in control, to feel like the alpha male.

You absolutely have to have a code of conduct for this kind of situation. It’s important. But you don’t have to follow it to the letter like some unwavering jobsworth with a clipboard and a ticklist.

I believe the impulse to protect is a correct one – but it needs to be harnessed, and it mustn’t be self-serving. You cannot have a Pavlovian, one-size-fits-all response. In the new age of chivalry, there are modern variables that need to be measured and weighed. You have to take the temperature of the situation. You have to feel the texture, read the context. And you have to do all this in that blinkered instant when your hair-trigger has been tripped and you just want to punch the fucker out.

Sometimes you step in, set things straight, punch fuckers out. Sometimes you don’t. And the only way you’ll know what’s appropriate is to read the situation first in that split-second.

True chivalry is not about you and your need to control the situation and make you feel like a real man. True chivalry is about her and what she needs you do. Sometimes she needs you to do nothing – and when every impulse in your body wants you to do something, that can take a lot more courage.

Months later, I speak to my friend about the birthday incident for the first time. She hasn’t forgotten. She thanks me for wanting to help but also thanks me for not weighing in, arms windmilling. She uses the word “gentlemanly”. I smile and give her a little bow. I tell her I will be there if she ever needs me. She smiles back and says that’s all a man ever needs to offer and all a woman ever needs to know.