Recently, the Irish Times reported on a horrifying story about a woman who was tortured for three hours in a flat in Dublin city, assailed by eight men, five of whom have now been jailed:
At Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Wednesday, the judge jailed Mark McMahon (55), his son Mark Keogh (33), and Braxton Rice (21), all of Henrietta House, Henrietta Place, Dublin 7, along with Sean Conroy (21), of Sillogue Road, Ballymun, and Kian Walshe (22), of Constitution Hill, Dublin 7, who had all pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and assault causing harm to Ms Ennis.
The oldest member of the group made a curious statement, however, when speaking of his actions:
A 12-year-term was imposed on McMahon for reasons including it was his flat and he held a hatchet up to Ms Ennis’s face. McMahon had said he believed a “mob mentality” took over and he was ashamed to be associated with violence against a woman.
As awful as it would be for eight men to do this to another man, most of us experience a deeper gut feeling of disgust when the victim is a woman. That a group of mostly-young men would abuse a woman to the extent that they did seems incomprehensible at first. Did they not understand that in treating a woman this way, they were crossing a line even greater than that of similarly abusing a man? But we must ask why do we get this feeling, and why is it important?
For sixty years and more, the feminist movement has promoted the notion that men and women must be treated in exactly the same ways. This is, of course, founded upon the fundamentally good notion that men and women equally have human dignity. Nevertheless, it ignores the basic differences between men and women (of which there are many) and instead advocates for a kind of code of respect due to everyone equally, regardless of other factors.
This in itself is not a bad idea. Equal treatment can be achieved in two ways: by raising the lower standard of behaviour, or by lowering the higher standard. Traditionally, women would be treated with a kind of respect and courtesy not given to men, and so theirs was the higher standard. The standard could have been raised for men, and though there is nothing particularly wrong with a man holding a door open for another man directly behind him, but this was never a likely outcome of events. Instead, the standard of courtesy has been lowered for women to that of men. What feminism and the supposed equality movement have achieved is that nobody holds doors for anybody. Men and women are not treated with the higher level of respect previously due to women alone; rather, women now are treated as men. This means that men now feel comfortable doing things, saying things, and acting in ways around women which would have been completely socially unacceptable a hundred years ago.
This is a serious problem. It is a poor society that allows men to make crass conversation or use foul language in the presence of women. Of course, the objection always arises that treating women with any kind of special gentleness – what is sometimes called chivalry – is sexism, and a form of patriarchal oppression. I fail to see how the woman spared the minor inconvenience of having to open a door is so very oppressed because of it.
It is a basic and undeniable truth that, on a biological level, men and women simply are not the same. Men are – in general and by nature – taller, physically stronger, and more aggressive than women. Women in general are more sociable, agreeable, and emotional. Not only this, but women carry burdens that men will never experience, the most significant being, of course, those of pregnancy and childbirth. It is upon the recognition of these facts that the code of chivalry is founded.
Some might say that chivalry is an example of the soft bigotry of low expectations: that “chivalrous” men assume women are too weak or somehow inferior to do certain things for themselves. In fact, the opposite is true. The genuinely chivalrous man recognises that woman must bear concerns of a kind that he will never have to worry about, and so, in a spirit of charity and respect, he chooses to try to smooth her path, even if only in minor ways. Chivalry does not assume less of women. Rather, it elevates women to a level of respect greater than that due to men, and acknowledges the kind of work that women do that men simply cannot.
What then has this to do with the case above? We are living in a world where genuine respect for women is no longer practised at large. Often, feminists will shout for men to respect women, stop objectifying them, etc., but will likewise call chivalrous respect for women a sexist action. And so we find ourselves caught in a situation where no-one seems to know what the concepts of equality or respect for women really are. It is no wonder that women are being degraded and abused at higher rates than ever before.
I am not suggesting that the men involved in this terrible crime would not have done what they did if they had held a few more doors open in their lives – although doing so might have given them more pause for thought. Nor am I suggesting that a society in which chivalry is encouraged will never see crimes like this. However, a society that encourages true respect for the dignity of women – a society which looks down upon pornography, one-night stands, and prostitution as contrary to that dignity – will not see nearly as much gender-based crime, and will be much more appropriately severe in punishing it.
Chivalry is not dead, but it will be if nobody practises it. As long as there are men who are willing to show true respect for women, chivalry will remain alive. If it is to prosper, however, it must be picked up again by more men. Young men, in particular, must learn how to be chivalrous: how to talk with a woman, how to talk about a woman, how to treat a woman, and how to show gratitude to women at large. If men are to be affected by a mob mentality, let it be the one that condemns and disgraces any man who would dare to treat a woman with less respect than she is due.
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Patrick Vincent writes from Dublin