The young actress Emma Watson has been making waves in social media and news outlets due to her recent U.N. speech declaring the common sense of feminism as part of the “HeForShe” campaign.

Heather Wilhelm at The Federalist notes a bit of irony in Watson’s speech that modern “feminism is not” as Watson described: “a simple quest for equal opportunity” or “basic common sense.” It has “very clear tenets,” Wilhelm continues: “abortion, leftist politics, victimhood, and an ever-morphing ‘gender spectrum’.”  Reading that last “tenet” reminded me of a discussion this past summer on sex and gender, when a Cambridge philosopher remarked to me sarcastically, “Gender has only to do with biology.”

Our dominant cultural narrative says that sex is biological and gender is a social construction. Saying that gender is a social construct emphasizes its contingency—it would not exist in our lives had we not built it, and we may desire to build it another way altogether. As Simone de Beauvoir said, one is not born a woman; one becomes so (“on ne naît pas femme, on le deviant”). Consequently, the traditional norms of how the sexes relate to each other are social constructions, which to affirm today may be considered reactionary.

Consider chivalry for instance. Christina Hoff Summers relates how one of the least visited memorials in Washington D.C. is a 1931 statue commemorating “the men who died on the Titanic.” While 74 percent of the liner's women survived, 80 percent of the men died because the “the men followed the principle “‘women and children first.’” The monument was constructed by “the women of America” in gratitude for their chivalry; its inscription reads, “To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic … They gave their lives that women and children might be saved.” This monument celebrating ancient chivalry, Summers writes, “implies the sexes are objectively different.” Hence it is one of the least visited. But whether or not chivalry is dead in the popular mind, it ought to be resurrected.

The medieval virtue of chivalry calls to mind Camelot and coats being put over puddles for the Queen of England. In older generations, chivalry might have been seen as a quality to be encouraged. The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies describes chivalry as one of “the noble qualities a knight was supposed to have, such as courage, honor, loyalty, and readiness to help the poor and weak, especially women.” It is that last phrase, “especially women,” that causes stir in much of contemporary industrial western society. Borrowing a term from third-wave feminism, an act of chivalry today is an act of “benevolent sexism”: it represents an attitude that views women and men in stereotypical roles since it idealizes them as complimentary in nature through traditional gender roles, hence perpetuating patriarchy. Chivalry may be risky, at least in some socially liberal circles. Then again, might it be realistic?

There is some evidence for a contemporary social combination of egalitarianism and essentialism. A 2011 article in the American Journal of Sociology entitled, “The End of the Gender Revolution? Gender Role Attitudes from 1977 to 2008,” notes in its abstract that “gender role attitudes in the General Social Survey have changed little since the mid-1990s. This plateau mirrors other gender trends, suggesting a fundamental alteration in the momentum toward gender equality.” The authors conclude that the “recent lack of change in gender attitudes is more likely the consequence of the rise of a new cultural frame, an “egalitarian essentialism” that blends aspects of feminist equality and traditional motherhood roles.”  This egalitarian essentialism is consistent with what Summers elsewhere calls “equity feminism”—simply the moral view that men and women are equal but open to the empirical possibility that men and women may be different. This kind of feminism is often called "Feminism for Everyone" on college campuses.

The question becomes how to morally educate our culture in virtues of romance. In an article for The Atlantic, Emily E. Smith and Galena Rhoades summarize a recent study conducted by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Every romance “goes through milestones, or transitions, that mark how serious the relationship is getting,” they note. The data from the study “show that couples who slid through their relationship transitions ultimately had poorer marital quality than those who made intentional decisions about major milestones.” Here, the skills needed for a healthy and lasting marriage include deliberately choosing these milestones. Intending to enter or experience a milestone together as a couple is a virtue for a good marriage.

Chivalry can be a virtue for how the sexes relate to each other given the lack of cultural guidance for the young concerning how to to date, or even how to relate to each other as good friends. But chivalry is a virtue not just for men. Chaucer in Canterbury Tales speaks of the knight who “from the moment that he first began / To ride about the world, loved chivalry, / Truth, honour, freedom and all courtesy.” Truth, honor, freedom (in the classical sense), and courtesy are virtues available to anyone. Why not chivalry? Both men and women can have the knightly qualities of courage, honor, loyalty, and readiness to help the poor and weak. Was not St. Joan of Arc the greatest knight of all? One can simply read Chesterton’s description of her in “The Suicide of Thought” and see that she truly embodies “moral unity and utility.” Joan of Arc may be rightly called the patron saint of chivalry.

In the absence of chivalry and the presence of the breakdown of traditional sexual morality, human relations are in a fix. Our culture is beyond Lady Chatterley’s Lover—with longer cohabitations, the hookup culture, and the breakdown of courtship—partly due to the 60s Nietzschean ‘transvaluation’ of sexual mores" (as the poet Phillip Larkin wrote, “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three”). How are young men and women supposed to learn how to rightly relate to each other given the upending of dating culture and the hedonist philosophy that Ross Douthat dubs Hefnerism?

Well, the traditional virtues of chivalry and modesty can provide a template to guide both sexes in our current morally confused culture. Aristotle saw virtue as “complex rational, emotional and social skills” of human flourishing—being able to principally and practically attain the goods pursued in our activities. An example of romantic virtue is couples being deliberate in the milestones mentioned above. This view of chivalry, according to which each sex wills the good of the other, can rehabilitate a necessary tradition and at the same time respect the western achievement of female emancipation. It respects egalitarianism and allows for the possibility of gender essentialism.

Admittedly, virtue is more often seen as a negative feminine trait rather than an equal opportunity skill at living. Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig in First Things notes that while “there was a time when virtue summoned manly images like that of The Iliad’s Prince Hector soothing his wife and infant son before venturing out into battle,” the idea of virtue is often associated and mocked as feminine “‘pearl clutching’ and ‘think of the children’-style moralizing.” But as Stoker Bruenig rightly points out, virtue is for everybody—for both sexes, equal if different; for warriors whether Joan of Arc or Hector. When feminism is seen as (in Watson’s words) “too strong, too aggressive, isolating, anti-men and, unattractive,” chivalry as “benevolent sexism,” and virtue as “pearl clutching,” chivalry as the virtue of feminism for everybody could do some good.

The good life of courage in all our individual capacities, and concern for those materially, spiritually, and physically least among us, are the perfect antidotes to the cult of Hefnerism. This charity in armour is a virtue for he and for she. Chivalry—or as John Addington Symons called it, “charity in armour”—is a suit that we all can, and need, to wear.