As Top Gear’s James May said this week, young men have lost their masculinity, in that they can no longer fix things. And this loss of manners is far worse. Young working British men: you should be ashamed.
Manners, sure. Not being able to fix things, though? Eh, stuff it. Not every man was born a wrench monkey.
I suspect that these days, the average man is probably more likely to help a male stranger than to help women he doesn't know. At least a man is likely to have the decency to be grateful and not take your assistance as some sort of rightful homage.
Sorta. I'd rather help a male stranger so I won't have to put up with a woman thinking I'm trying to get in her pants or claim some sort of sexual harassment. In Texas, though (ah, here we go again) the women here are usually better at fixing basic car issues than I am, so it's not really a problem. On the other hand, computers are still like alien technology for the wimmins around here, so men will never be obsolete in that department.
As for chivalry being dead, I think it is pertinent to quote Isaac Asimov on the historical conventions of the concept.
"This is Helen as viewed through the eyes of courtly love. By the convention of the troubadours, a woman need not deserve love, she need merely be a woman." And don't forget, a woman's chivalric champion was ideally supposed to be her adulterous lover. It is little wonder, then, that modern women lament chivalry's death.
"Chivalry" is usually just used by wimmins to mean some imagined era of male servitude. In reality, they're courtesies that men gave women in exchange for an otherwise patriarchal system. We're now living in a transitional state where wimmins who invoke "chivalry" are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Of course, actual medieval courtly love was something very different, and in the classical sense, women's issues were only a very small part of the knightly code of chivalry.
