Elegy to Chivalry
For my birthday last month, my boyfriend and I went out to dinner with my good friend and her partner. Anticipating the fact that our meals would be a bit pricey, I had offered ahead of time to split the bill with my boyfriend, even though I knew he would refuse, as it's important to him to treat me to supper on my birthday. Just as it's important to me to treat him to dinner on his. When our waiter arrived at our table to take our payment, I happened to be holding the bill, surveying the damage caused by a few glasses of wine and some seafood. I promptly passed the bill back to my boyfriend when I noticed the waiter standing alongside us. This prompted some staggering insight from him:
"Yeah, I thought that was weird that you had the bill. I was like 'Wait now...are the girls paying?' Because that'd be a first."
His tone wasn't insulting in any way. It was just a matter-of-fact statement of a universal truth: girls don't pay for boys' meals. I was floored.
Me: "Hang on. You can't be serious. It's that rare to see a woman paying for her meal?"
Him: "Oh yeah, I never see it. It's always the guy who pays." (nodding to my boyfriend as he left our table) "Guess chivalry isn't completely dead, hey?"
The whole exchange, seemingly innocuous and meant only as cheerful banter, left me feeling completely awkward. Cheap. Dependent. I wanted to call the waiter back and demand that I pay for my own meal. For my boyfriend's meal. For the entire restaurant's Goddamn meals. I wanted to declare that I was being treated to supper because of my birthday, not because of my vagina. I wanted to explain that my partner and I have a very egalitarian concept of money. That we treat each other on special occasions. That we split everything else 50/50.
It was that word that left a bad taste in my mouth. Chivalry. It seemed so archaic, so oddly insulting.
Because chivalry is literally a medieval concept, predicated on the notion that men, by dint of their physical, mental, and moral superiority are responsible for the underlings of society. For the weak. For the oppressed. For women.
Medieval conceptions of sexuality largely stemmed from the Ancients' "one-sex theory," which assumed that men and women were, biologically, identical. Women, however, were basically inverted men, their genitalia pushed inside rather than proudly displayed outside their bodies. Inherent to this theory was the idea that all bodies are male bodies, that women were, quite literally, imperfect men, their subordination rationalized as a biological inevitability.
Chivalry prescribed, in part, the appropriate relationships between the sexes, and thrived in this culture of entrenched and systemic gender inequality. Chivalric knights were pure of mind, body, and soul, and were taxed with the responsibility of defending the honour of women who were clearly incapable of defending it themselves. Within this chivalric ideal, Woman was both Dependant and Prize, something to be lusted after, protected, won.1
So that word, "chivalry," is sexually and historically loaded. It's not just about your boyfriend buying you supper because it's your birthday. It's about your boyfriend buying you supper because your gender, your sex, your subservience, your incapacity render you incapable of buying it yourself.
As always, Mary Wollstonecraft says it best:
I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority [...] So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles,when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude to lift a handkerchief, or shut a door, when the LADY could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two. (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792)
You go, Mary Wollstonecraft. And Glen Coco.
Yes, I like being treated nicely. I like being taken out to supper. Being offered a coat when I look cold. Feeling a protective hand on my shoulder or the small of my back. I like it when I get a door held open for me, largely because I don't like getting doors slammed in my face. As such, I return the favour - to women and men alike.
I like being treated nicely because I'm a person. Not because of my uterus, or breasts, or generally "feminine" appearance. But because being treated well is a human prerogative. Because the desire to be respected and cared for is universal and gender-neutral.
So can we just do away with "chivalry"? Can we banish the word and all its baggage from our lexicon? Put gender politics aside and focus on being good to each other? On being people who care about the feelings, comfort, and well-being of other people?
You know what I say to you about chivalry being dead, waiter?
Here's hoping.
1 I once wrote a paper for a second-year history course examining "conflicting medieval views of masculinity," so I'm basically an expert on this topic. That said, my inner academic won't let me pass up this opportunity to cite some of the works I've probably borrowed heavily from in these few paragraphs: namely, Bullough and Brundage's Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (2000), Schultz's Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (2006), and Kaeuper's Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999).↩
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