by Mona Charen
The chivalric code persists to this day, despite the best efforts of the feminists. When a shooter opened fire at an Aurora, Colo. movie theater, no fewer than three young men protected their girlfriends from bullets with their own bodies — and died in the process.
Chivalry is back in the news. The always-alert Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute draws our attention to an item in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. A new study on what the authors are pleased to call “benevolent sexism” (which, as Murray translates, seems to mean gentlemanly behavior) found that both women and men are happier when men behave like gentlemen.
This being a sociological publication, though, the findings are not written in English, but rather in academic argot. It’s full of sentences like this: “A structural equation model revealed that benevolent sexism was positively associated with diffuse system justification within a sample of 274 college women and 111 college men.”
If you spend more than $100,000 on an undergraduate and graduate education in women’s studies, you can learn to be this impenetrable, too.
The authors of the study were quick to warn readers about what they’d discovered. “Our findings reinforce the dangerous nature of benevolent sexism and emphasize the need for interventions to reduce its prevalence.” Right. Though it seems to increase the life satisfaction of both sexes, it must still be eradicated.