The author argues that men shielding the women beside them in disasters is not manners but an evolutionary instinct that merely lies dormant today.
The author opens by saying his takes are served cold: he does not chase the news cycle, he pressure-tests a view before publishing it. His subject this time, chivalry, will probably strike readers as rather hot.
Giving up a seat is instinct, not etiquette
From a reproductive standpoint the egg is far scarcer than the seed, so men are wired to protect women. That is biology, not morality.
When the Titanic went down, 74% of the women survived and 19% of the men.
In the 2012 Aurora cinema shooting a gunman fired 76 rounds into the audience and killed twelve people.
Several of the dead were men who put their bodies between the gunfire and the woman beside them. Not a wife, a mother or a daughter, just that evening's date.
In peacetime the instinct has nothing to do
Most people live somewhere safe and no longer need chivalry to stay alive, so they are free to mock it as obsolete.
The author's point is that it has not gone anywhere. It has only sunk below the surface, ready to flare up again the moment conditions change.
A recent online row began when a man refused to lift a woman's heavy suitcase into the overhead bin.
He was a jerk, but other men rushed to defend him, and that, the author says, is the genuinely sad part.
Why it matters
Framing courtesy as an evolutionary instinct moves it out of the ethics classroom and into the biology textbook: it stops being a politeness you may or may not observe and becomes a program that runs on its own in extreme situations. That also explains why mocking it costs so little in ordinary life, where it is rarely needed and therefore easy to forget.
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