General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsChivalry as Corrective
Much of what is called "chivalrous" is not actually a strategy to keep women down, even where it has that effect. It might be terrible in practice, but it did not arise for the purpose of being terrible. It is actually part of the progressive wave of human history.
Much of it is corrective.
If the great concern over men beating women and raping women "benevolent sexism"? Is the violence against women act itself benevolent sexism?
Why not the violence against persons act?
Civilization is about civilizing MEN.
The sexes are quite different (for real) and from some differences springs a species psychology that prevents organized society unless we reign in MEN... in specific.
Our innate sexual strategies create male hostility toward women, and toward other men, and disguise paternal connection to children.
At a tribal scale that might all work. On any larger scale, however, we need a way to assign paternity to individual children and ways to protect women, because assigning paternity creates a family that is vulnerable, being a smaller unit than society itself, and so on.
It may be that at the most basic level we have rape laws because males need to be assured of the paternity of their children in order to be willing to play ball with civilization. That is sexist as can be, of course... but it is also better than having no rape laws.
Chivalry come from the idea (dated and flawed, of course) that the non-savage way men sometimes feel about women in the bloom of romantic love is a model for gentler interaction between the sexes.
That does not make medieval chivalry correct, of course. But is was a corrective measure. Be nicer to women and limit your aggressions to other men. Did it apply to unattractive female serfs? Probably not.
But the habit of treating noble ladies with exagerated respect is the sort of thing that infuses society. If the barron does not beat noble women that is an incrementaly better social example than the alternative.
I grew up with, "Never hit a girl." That is sexist on its face, but men who grew up with that are better men for it.
(Why not, "Don't hit anybody"? Because the don't hit anybody societies have tended to get over-run by the "hit people" societies and it will take a very, very long period of world peace for that to fade.)
Why were man's marital rights so great back in the day? Because that was something the sexes negotiated over a million years as the right price for a man accepting paternity. Women made sacrifices in order that their children survive... human beings are the only species where infants and toddlers are so helpless for YEARS.
(There's a reason. We walk on only two legs, so the pelvis can only get but so big. Getting smarter meant, in practice, doing more and more development after birth. We are born as a human-sized brain atop a puny body that then has to be fed and carried for a long time. Even a chimp can cling around it's mother's neck only days after birth so she need not carry it. Colts can stand almost immediately... etc. But we need social structures of more than one person to keep a baby alive. And since, in the state of nature, only maternity is known for sure it takes some doing to create needed paternal responsibility.)
As female independence increases the cost-benefit changes. In our world women have a reduced need of paternal support for their children, and thus the relative "price" of marriage for men and women shifts.
The sexes have a very complex relationship that is not usefully thought of in the same terms as racism. Racism is about two groups. Sexism is about one society and *was* (past tense) developed as something that benefited society. Not men. Society.
That does not mean "good for all." It means good for society. Human life got worse when agriculture was developed, but it caught on because it allowed a society to have an army.
Sexism in law and custom arose because, for whatever reasons, it was part and parcel of a society that could build a large irrigation system and repel invaders and conquer others. If those goals had been better served by less sexism then all societies today would be less sexist.
What most aspects of society have in common is they they are aspects of societies that crushed other societies. In the modern world a changing environment alters what is adaptive for a society and we are in the ongoing process of working to be as good as we can be in the context of environment.
But what we were, and much of what we are, is because that is what allowed (past tense) human groups to wipe out other human groups.
Does thinking of women as delicate flowers hold them back? Yes.
Is it better than thinking of them as sex toys and punching bags? Also yes.
Did it arise as a way to keep women down?
No. It arose as a way to civilize and restrain men... or rather, civilizing men advanced the material interests of a society of men and women.
It may no longer be needed or desirable. Or it may remain net beneficial. It's an argument to have.
snooper2
(30,151 posts)wins 150 DU bonus points!
Hint "door"
wryter2000
(46,016 posts)The study mentions "benevolent sexism," and that got a discussion going about if there is such a thing.
snooper2
(30,151 posts)wryter2000
(46,016 posts)This is the broader OP about benevolent sexism in general. Have at it.
snooper2
(30,151 posts)I think we killed this thread by the way
150 points!
Gravitycollapse
(8,155 posts)And it is absolutely intended to relinquish women to roles of subservience and weakness and further establish men as the savior and source of all things just.
It absolutely plays into violence against women as it attempts to portray them as delicate flowers and that empowers men to use physical violence against them. Do you see how that is exactly the opposite of what you are proposing?