Women and children first! (2)

I have not followed the Costa Concordia sinking except the very funny transcripts of the conversations between the captain and  his superiors. He sounds like Chico Marx without the skill at playing the violin. Mark Steyn laments that they failed to observe the rule of women and children first.

There was no orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the orchestra and a ship's entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom helped children to safety, the former paying with his life.

And really after having been forced to believe in sex (I hate the word gender, used except as a grammatical term) equality as a principle of overwhelming importance for forty years why expect men to surrender their lives for a principle – patriarchy, chivalry – which has become almost a crime to defend in public?

Even in the mid- nineteenth century A.H. Clough was not sure: 

Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female?

Really, who knows?

He had in mind saving the British female from a fate worse than death but nowadays it is agreed that there is no fate worse than death.