Steyn on the damage feminism's cultural changes have wrought

Here's a post from Mark Steyn I found powerful.  It's about the "Montreal Massacre", about which I knew nothing until reading his post, in which fourteen women college students were killed after all of the men in their class simply walked away at the order of a crazed gunman.  Steyn takes this story as symptomatic of the loss of masculine spine in modern culture:

https://www.steynonline.com/9892/men-walked-away

Here's an extended quote I found particularly powerful:

When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It's supposed to be "women and children first", but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In real life, First Officer William Murdoch threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship – the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron's movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director subsequently apologized to the First Officer's home town in Scotland and offered £5,000 toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.) Mr Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. "An alien landed" on the deck of a luxury liner – and men had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, and watch them clamber into the lifeboats to sail off without them. The social norm of "women and children first" held up under pressure. 

Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our "gender-neutral society", there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under 15 or over 65 made it. Only five per cent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three per cent of men aged 20-24 made it.

"There is no law that says women and children first," Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine. "That is something from the age of chivalry."

If, by "the age of chivalry", you mean the early 20th century.

 There's a lot to unpack from this comparison.  Here are my thoughts:

1. In Titanic, again we see the reinterpretation of history in the hands of filmmakers in order to fit a particular worldview, and this in one of the most watched films of all time.
2. In the "women and children first" rule, one of the first principles of "chivalry" is revealed: the point is that the strong should protect the weak.  It is, of course, very improper nowadays to say anything to imply that woman is the "weaker sex", but when reality interposes itself upon ideology, ideology always has to give way.  If you forbid all sexual discrimination as contrary to polite thought, then it really has to be "every man or woman for themselves" in a crisis--and then because of irreducible differences of biology, almost three times as many men will survive.

The whole article is worth reading.