Chivalry and Rape on the American Campus of the 1950s
A few years back, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece about a campus gang rape case in which he said that the best approach to preventing such incidents was the approach that colleges took in the days before the sexual revolution.
Educators in decades past, Brooks wrote,
understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That’s why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
There’s a lot to object to in this — starting with the suggestion that all men have the impulse to rape, and that the best of us are merely taught to restrain it. But there’s one bit that I’d like to address specifically, as a
