I’ve never heard of someone confusing chivalry with chauvinism. I think when people make fun of chivalry, they know exactly what they’re talking about. Namely, they’re making fun of guys who make it a point to let everyone around them how wonderfully they’re treating women.
“Look at me! I’m opening a door for Susie!”
“Look at me! I’ve taken time to ask Mary how her day was!”
“Look at me! I can sucessfully balance my manliness and the ability to act like a decent human being!”
I don’t congratulate anyone on tying their shoes at a 100% success rate each day, it’s something I’ve come to just expect from normal people. The same goes for treating other as an equal.
I work in a big office complex. I’ve noticed that everyone makes an effort to be helpful to anyone in need. When a guy is balancing a coffee and a suitcase, I get the door for him. Most of the guys wait for the women to board the elevator first, but it isn’t expected. It’s really nice to see people simply treat each other with civility. I’ve never understood why it was expected of men to do these things all the time, while women were always the recipients of the niceities (sp?).
Of course during the golden age of chivalry, none of its practitioners had any trouble killing every living being caught outside of castles under siege. The peasants represented your enemies economic base, so you were just reducing his assets.
And there was another pious activity during this time: “kill all the Jews.”
It was a common practice of the Burgundians, among others, to kill all prisoners who couldn’t raise a worthwhile ransom. This was justified by the lesson it taught their younger knights: it insured that they would see a battle that must be won, or else.
So in practice, chivalry just translates literally into “I’m up here on a horse. To bad if you’re not ,” and its best characteristics offered only the germ for a better idea. To my mind it was best developed by a young Italian knight, St Francis of Assisi.
Many people will disparage your decision to live by a code they associate with feudalism, war, and male dominated violence against the weak. Of course, your code has nothing to do with those things, but that is unimportant to people who like to disparage the faithfulness of some other person to a thing they cannot disparage on its actual content.
That should not discourage you, of course, because the fealty of the Knight is not affected by the popular response. You are dedicated to a higher ideal. And you will be mocked because of it, and other ideals will be imputed to you. Surely you expected nothing else. These souls do not appreciate that Don Quixote was no less a Knight because he had been knighted by a commoner, and served the cause of chivalry without legalistic approval.
There is no great press knights striving to serve true humility, true honor, and true virtue. If you but try to do it, then even unknighted, unblazoned, and unknown, you will be seen for what you are, by those you do in truth serve.