The Case For Chivalry

As its author Olivia Barbulescu puts it, “modern freedoms allow us to appreciate men for who they are rather than what they provide.” Men are struggling to adjust. Barbulescu’s essay offers insight into the reason why, and how men and women should respond. 

Her essay has been viewed over 4.1 million times and has nearly 3,000 comments. Surprisingly, many of them written in by fellow feminists are critical. “Again this seems to be placing responsibility on women to make sure men feel comfortable,” one read. Someone commented that she isn’t interested “in teaching men how to be useful” or “coddling their emotions to make sure they feel important.” But conservatives have responded, too. Approach the Bench, an account run by conservative Harvard students, criticized the essay for promoting the idea that men are useless. Barbulescu says she has enraged the “misogynists and manhaters” alike.

Her essay was inspired by a recent experience she retold in a viral video. Unable to move a 100-pound weight from a gym machine, she enlisted a man for help. He excitedly assisted. “I was shocked at how happy he seemed to be helping me out,” she writes, “I wondered: is this the secret to talking to men? Do I just need men to do more tasks?” To her surprise, her video garnered positive comments from men, who expressed a desire to be useful to women. She concludes that men don’t enjoy the task per se, but the feeling of being chosen to help. 

Men struggle with the now-superfluous desire to provide for the women whom modern “freedoms” have liberated.

Men struggle with the now-superfluous desire to provide for the women whom modern “freedoms” have liberated. So how should women respond to this male angst? Barbulescu says that being condescending to men is not the answer. Instead, she wants to understand the reason behind this desire, and what true usefulness looks like in a world of romance shaped by “modern” values. 

In the most discussed portion of her essay, she cites an illustration. A mom told her daughter to let her brother carry something for her. The little girl wanted to carry it on her own, to which the mom responded, “sometimes we let the boys do things for us that we can do ourselves because it makes them feel useful and that makes them happy.” Barbulescu objects to this. “In giving the boy the chair,” she says, “we maintain the farce that he is successfully portraying specific, old-school, masculine traits instead of modern-day ones, like emotional strength, support, and kindness.” Men can still be useful, she says, but not in the traditional sense. They can provide the emotional support that women want, instead of the material resources that women need. Men fear this because “being wanted can be withdrawn at any moment.” But chosen love, she says, is a “lot stronger than any that’s built solely on necessity.” Women not needing men isn’t a rejection of romance so much as an affirmation of it. 

In a manner consistent with viral content, Barbulescu’s essay promises more than it delivers. Her argument is predicated on the historically erroneous claim that for most of human history, women were “forced” into dependency upon men. She opens her essay with the bold-faced lie that women couldn’t own land, sign a lease, or travel without a male escort. Predictably, she mentions the overused talking point that women “couldn’t sign up for credit cards on their own until 1974.” Except women could. In fact, many women throughout American history participated in the financial system as both debtors and creditors. 

Throughout American history, women also owned land and traveled. Under English common law, unmarried women regularly acted independently and were able to own land and sign leases. Alexis de Tocqueville, who documented the structure of early American society, noted with awe that women felt safe enough to travel long distances without a male escort.

Chivalry is paradoxical in that it isn’t a compromise between ferocity and meekness, but the embodiment of both with simultaneous intensity. 

The quality that Tocqueville marveled at—and that Barbulescu shrugs off as a “farce”—is chivalry. Chivalry is indispensable for a well-functioning society. C.S. Lewis argues as much in his essay, “The Necessity of Chivalry,” looking to the examples set forth in the courtly love tradition of medieval literature. The paradigmatic figure of chivalry is Sir Lancelot, who is “familiar with the sight of smashed faces” but is also “a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man.” Chivalry is paradoxical in that it isn’t a compromise between ferocity and meekness, but the embodiment of both with simultaneous intensity. 

Brushing this off as a “farce” contains some truth. There is nothing natural about this combination. Nothing gentle is implied in the brute strength of the warrior. A demure character does not seem well-equipped to fight for family and country in war. Chivalry isn’t as “old school” as Barbulescu thinks. It is a relatively modern phenomenon. In fact, chivalry is of utmost importance precisely because it is unnatural; teaching it is essential to the project of civilization.  

In failing to teach chivalry, Lewis argues that humanity falls into one of two categories: those who possess Lancelot’s ferocious strength but lack his meekness, and those who are gentle but useless in war. Men will either embrace the “red pill” of Andrew Tate or the effeminate emotion of the Soy Boy. When this occurs, Lewis says that history becomes a “horribly simple affair.” Societies run by weak men are conquered by the strong in a never-ending cycle. 

Letting the boy carry the chair is to choose the way of Lancelot. This holds true even if girls and boys are of equal physical strength, since the little boy will eventually grow up into a man. Expecting him to carry the chair isn’t about “making him feel good about himself,” but teaching him to channel his future strength into meekness. To let the boy carry the chair is to inculcate the unnatural, yet essential, understanding that the strong have a duty to serve the weak. 

Our culture takes chivalry for granted. Other nations aren’t as fortunate. Where norms of male restraint and self-sacrifice aren’t inculcated, women face higher levels of violence. Look no further than South Africa’s extraordinarily high rates of sexual abuse, Mexico’s femicide crisis, and the prevalence of domestic violence in India. Feminists might roll their eyes at the notion of “traditional” masculinity, which in their case refers to a tradition that is a blip on historical record and scarcely found across the world. Relative to the rest of the world and human history, the adoption of chivalric masculinity is more transgressive than its rejection. 

To let the boy carry the chair is to inculcate the unnatural, yet essential, understanding that the strong have a duty to serve the weak. 

Women might refer to “traditional masculinity” in scare quotes, but many of them still desire to live in a world of chivalry, Barbulescu included. In her conclusion, she sympathizes with women who make fun of men who split the bill or allow their wives to carry bags while they scroll on their phone. She doesn’t want men to abandon these qualities—she simply wants them to see the value in more “modern” ones. She wants a world where men are kind and physically strong enough to help her lift weights at the gym. She wants a world of Lancelots but doesn’t understand what it takes to produce them. 

Lancelots are not the creation of evolutionary processes or rational deliberation. As Lewis notes, chivalry is the product of art, not nature. It is embodied and passed down in fables, received into the heart, and mirrored in conduct. Society has labored heavily to achieve what nature could never create. Those who scoff at a man who opens a door for a woman are scoffing at a miracle of human history: successfully equating strength with sacrifice, leadership with service, and honor with mercy. Furthering that miracle begins with the little boy who carries a chair for his sister, and it dies with the little girl who scoffs at him for doing so.

The project of raising chivalrous men is incomplete without women. Any Lancelot needs his Guinevere. Men won’t be encouraged to open doors for women who roll their eyes at them for doing so. Just as the little boy should be encouraged to carry his sister’s chair, the little girl should gratefully acquiesce to his help, even if she knows she can do it herself. This might seem “old school,” but only to those who have taken the miracle of chivalry for granted.