New York Attorney General Letitia James has appointed former federal prosecutor Jacqueline Kelly to oversee a criminal investigation into allegations that seven Cornell students sexually assaulted a young woman at a fraternity house in 2024.
The case has also prompted wider discussion about how boys are taught to treat women. Leonard Sax, writing for the Institute for Family Studies, argues that many boys receive too little guidance on what respectful, responsible manhood looks like.
His core point is hard to dispute: boys need to learn self-control, and a decent man does not exploit someone who is drunk or vulnerable. Still, telling young men simply to “be gentlemen” doesn’t explain the broader problems in modern dating.
What would Cary do?
Using 19th-century ideas about chivalry to navigate today’s dating culture can feel a little like sending a soldier into a drone war with a musket. Courtship has changed, and asking men to behave better, on its own, misses much of what has gone wrong.
Men are often expected to open doors, plan dates, pay for dinner, start conversations and project confidence. But some of those gestures can also be seen as old-fashioned or patronizing. The expectations seem to shift from one date to the next.
In theory, a modern man needs the manners of Cary Grant, the emotional insight of a therapist and the caution of a corporate lawyer. Even if he manages all that, he may still be ghosted on the way home.
Dating used to involve more familiar rituals: a young man might meet his date’s family, take her to dinner and have a clearer sense of what the evening meant. Now, people can exchange messages for weeks with someone they know only through a profile picture. Sometimes the person looks nothing like the photo; sometimes neither side wants to meet at all. Then both move on to the next profile.
We’ve kept the grand language of traditional romance while many of the social settings that once supported it have faded away.
An efficient livestock market
Most men aren’t just comparing themselves with someone nearby anymore. They’re competing in a digital marketplace built on endless choice and snap judgments. Dating apps can make the search for a partner feel like an efficient livestock auction: people are assessed in seconds on looks, height, job, hairline and whether their profile sounds clever.
A loyal, hardworking man can be passed over because his holiday photo is badly lit. Somewhere, a potentially wonderful partner may be swiped away because he doesn’t have a yacht or a golden retriever. It sounds ridiculous, but that’s part of the point.
One 2025 study examining more than 5,000 swipe decisions found that physical attractiveness mattered far more in initial choices than intelligence, occupation, height or biography. Other research based on Hinge data found that users often spent only a few seconds looking at a potential match.
That’s not much time to get a sense of someone’s character.
Contradictory instructions
Advice for young men can also seem to pull in several directions at once. Be confident, but not arrogant. Be vulnerable, but don’t seem needy or too emotional. Take charge of planning, but don’t be controlling. Pay the bill, but don’t expect anything in return.
Boys hear plenty about what they shouldn’t do. Practical advice about what considerate, healthy behavior actually looks like can be harder to find.
Before a man even gets the chance to show he’s decent in person, he may have to pass a quick digital screening. He plans the evening, sorts out the details and tries not to stumble into conversational trouble. He hopes his jokes land. Then the bill arrives, with a little more weight than it probably deserves.
He’s filled out the application, cleared the first round and paid for the refreshments. Now he waits for a response that may never come.
Discussions of chivalry also tend to focus on what men are expected to contribute. Even as society calls for gender equality, many traditional expectations remain: initiate, plan, impress, pay, act confident and take rejection gracefully.
Whose standards?
Women are entitled to have standards for the men they date, and men are entitled to have standards too. Yet men’s preferences are sometimes dismissed as entitlement while women’s are framed as healthy boundaries. Equality should work both ways. Modern dating can instead feel like a one-sided audition.
It’s not hard to see why some young men want to opt out.
Parents and schools have often fallen short in teaching boys what adulthood calls for. Into that gap have stepped dating algorithms and online personalities. Pornography can give a distorted picture of intimacy, while some internet gurus describe dating as a bitter contest, encouraging men to treat women as opponents to manipulate or control.
Sax is right about something important: boys need standards and restraint. They need to understand that strength includes controlling their own behavior, especially around someone who may be vulnerable.
But gentlemanly behavior also needs a culture where it has a clear place.
When traditional roles are dismissed as harmful, dating advice sends conflicting messages, and apps encourage quick judgments among seemingly endless options, it shouldn’t be surprising when some young men withdraw.
I think there are still plenty of decent, honest young men who would be glad to step up if they had the chance.
Whether today’s dating culture knows what to do with them is another question.
