Something completely different: Click because everybody wants to love you.
To the one, as Jeeves↑ noted, there are popular definitions in play, and therein we find something about culture and code. More particularly, that occasion with that guy I know, the word came up along the way, a few times.
Part of the reason for juxtaposing such assertions of "chivalry" and sexual violence, of holding doors and rape culture, is that, yeah, it might sometimes seem hard to explain in any given moment, but it is true that life in human society will eventually hand us an example. And in this case, it's not an utterly obscure, dead-end example.
Furthermore, the word comes up, from time to time. An example from 2012↱:
MRAs, by and large, aren’t big fans of chivalry, and complain bitterly about the terrible injustices forced upon them by this archaic concept, like having to hold doors open for ladies from time to time.
But perhaps they are not considering the many fine benefits of chivalry. In the comments section of Alcuin’s pro-patriarchy blog, our traditionalist friend fschmidt recently set forth the case for chivalry in a way that even the dullest misogynist could appreciate:
But perhaps they are not considering the many fine benefits of chivalry. In the comments section of Alcuin’s pro-patriarchy blog, our traditionalist friend fschmidt recently set forth the case for chivalry in a way that even the dullest misogynist could appreciate:
In early western culture around the time of the Renaissance, chivalry meant that ladies should be honored and sluts should be raped. This is a totally sound concept and encourages good behavior on the part of women. You cannot expect women to behave if they are not rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior.
And because Futrelle has been taking those notes for a decade, it's not merely a fast-forward to 2017↱, when he covered MRA/DVA Paul Elam denouncing chivalry after a man harassing a Muslim woman on a train escalated, stabbing to death two men who intervened. "Two more good men killed by chivalry," Elam warned. "Let this be a lesson to your sons." Indeed, he would justify some element of the murders by observing, "no one was being physically attack[ed] till the white knights showe up".
And if we can think of a group of so-called usual suspects, just covering the places to look will provide myriad examples, such as a few months before↱ the killed by chivalry post, Futrelle had occasion to parse a particular difference: "Granted, 'white knighting' is not the same as feminism; it’s a rather patronizing form of 'chivalry.'" This distinction arose in considering a would-be MRA movement arguing that male lives matter, a clever notion given that nobody had ever heard of mocking the #BlackLivesMatter movement°°. Given how smart they are, or not, we really ought not be so surprised to read that, "The reason some women are so shitty and entitled is because they're spoiled by the way betas and white knights treat them". After all, it's not news that the insecure men who can't tell the difference between "special treatment", and basic human decency like to tell themselves, "The truth is, most women want the alpha males."°°°
If I point to 2016↱, it reminds how much there is to cover, as Futrelle leads with his puzzlement at having missed something from 2015—
The site launched the campaign on Facebook with an inadvertently hilarious mini MANifesto:
Men: The FORGOTTEN GENDER.
Manism. This is to remind us of the forgotten gender, who, regardless of the situation, are expected to be such gentlemen.
Men: The FORGOTTEN GENDER.
When women talk about being put on the same pedestal as men, simultaneously there is an unsaid expectation of chivalry out of them. It is time we realize that they deserve a break from being all heroic and they too suffer a different level of harassment.
—and it really is rather unbelievable, except it happened, and it is interesting to note who the multicultural masculinist campaign out of India targeted for what questions. One of the complaints is about men buying drinks for women at bars, or bars trying to attract female customers. I actually do remember taking seriously, at some point, years ago, complaints about "ladies' night" being discriminatory, and to this day I wonder why the men were complaining. And as to men buying women drinks, talk to the men, don't complain that you've been "mancriminated". But, yes, it's a prettyish white male face telling women he doesn't have to hold the door, or hold the bags, or give over his seat, and if we stop to think about it, who the hell is going to date someone that petty, so who the hell is he talking to when he says, "You want gender equality? Take it." And not quite weirdly°°°°, it sounds like, well, just this guy, y'know, who makes up fictitious people for lecturing and issuing stern talking points to, because he doesn't know how to say it about the real people he actually wants to denounce; vis à vis, it's really, really weird. But, to be clear, this guy is different from the first, that guy I know, in the topic post, and, as the first footnote is already written, they are yet separate from the other, recalled below. No, really, life does hand me examples.
As matters of code and culture, we find diverse pop-subcultural assertions of colloquial but thematically intertwined commonality. Part of the blur about code and culture has to do with the point that these particular men aren't putting much thought into their bawls about chivalry. And in a global market context, one of the most prominent things about the difference between the Indian presentation and what we hear in the U.S. is the occasional syntactical deviation, like, "If woman loses her job", juxtaposed with, "If a man loses his job"; or the part about "Even product discriminate", which goes on to complain that, "Short men don't have heels. Ugly men don't have makeup. Stupid men can't be blonde." As ridiculous as the whole campaign was, I can't help notice the lack of a plural. Then again, if I wonder about the lack of an article preceding the word, "woman", in the one juxtaposition, I am, at least functionally, asserting Freudian slip within the context of a postfreudian psychoanalytic meaning of history, which circles right back to thematic consistency°°°°°.
But otherwise, yes, the absurd stupidity is thematically consistent throughout. Diverse, contemporary iterations of chivalry, framed as an anti-identification—counterargument, an assertion against, a response, a reaction—come back to blaming women. Or woman.
Still, the mancrimination question seems to be more mgtow than MRA, and if I'm skipping out on Nazis, it's because it's more implicit than anything else, so they don't call it chivalry. To the other, we can try subsuming it under men being men, but even then we don't necessarily know what Rotunno meant.
Even if it's not the kind of thing one goes looking for in the news, it has a way of coming up. But, yeah, life has a way of handing us the examples, and the chivalry defined in these is, of course, something of a pathetic joke, and, y'know, we try to ignore it as much as we can, but every now and then it just sort of lands in front of us.
