Over at one of my favorite man-haunts, the Christian Pipe Smokers forum, our own bearded brother and combox maven Del gives as pithy an explanation, and as pointed a defense, of chivalry as you could hope for.
He elucidates not only the real nature of chivalry, but the course of its decline in the modern West;
The real Chivalry was a culture of Christian soldiers.
Chivalry was replaced by "manners".... oh, about the time that Christendom fell, I reckon. Cervantes ("the last knight of Europe") mocked chivalry at its end, in his Don Quixote.
Anyhow.... chivalry was about having a heart of heroic self-sacrifice. Having good manners was easier, because good manners could cover a bad heart.
The Feminists of the 20th century were an insane lot. But they understood one thing rightly: They did not want to be abused by predatory pigs with good manners. At the onset of the sexual revolution, the feminists still wanted the good men back (in spite of their perverse notions of what a good man should be).
Chivalry (a singularly Christian idea) is dead in the post-Christian era. We can see its corpse rotting, in the vast number of single mothers and deadbeat dads.
BUT! -- as Chesterton said, "What Man has done before, Man can do again!" We see a rising chivalry in groups like Promise Keepers and March for Life. The battle now is for families and for life, and chivalry is rising like a pheonix in Christian fatherhood.
This "John Paul II" generation of young Catholics are embracing chastity and fruitful marriages, in defiance of their parents' lack of faith...
What thinkest thou? The original post that Del was responding to asked whether or not Chivalry is dead. Clearly it is not... but maybe it has been in a coma.

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