Duty2Please
Posts: 74
Joined: 4/15/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: juliaoceania
I have never told off a man for opening a door for me, but I know what the gesture symbolizes even though I do not get troubled over it. I would if it were a coworker or an academic peer that did it in a gesture of "politeness", I would not see it as such.... It is a form of body language in some instances Poor little helpless thang, let me get that for you
juliaoceana, what you say is certainly a reasonable view held by a number of others, but perhaps the assumptions are wrong. Even in the Nineteenth century (or earlier) did opening doors or holding packages really symbolize that a woman is weak and a man is strong, or did it symbolize the idea that the man was a gentleman and the woman was worth fussing over? These things would not have been done for lower-class woman, I don't think. The practice came to us from the old upper classes, didn't it? And wasn't it, even a century or two ago, thought of as something akin to chivalry? And a lot of chivalry was about the binding of the physically powerful, militarily imposing knight in a submissive role with his lady, I think.
I don't think the point of it all ever was that a woman couldn't do these things for herself, and at first the lower class women were left to do just that. (In fact, weren't all manners back then a way of recognizing the respect owed to others at court, as in "courtesy"?) And now, the point is the same -- women should be given a bit of extra respect, a little extra care, and that has spread through much of society so it encompasses all women, and it may even be spreading to men. Have others noticed that women are now opening doors for men, too (although they're certainly not making a big deal over it). And it's not flustering any men at all for them to do it. I think it's interesting though that I've never seen a woman carry a package for a man if he could do it, no matter how light. I'm not sure what that means.
Think about waiters. We could all go to self-serve restaurants without them, but sometimes we pay a little more to have a waiter stop by with water and to take our order and get our food, then take away the plates and silverware. Is any of that dominant behavior on the part of the waiter? It's usually more pleasant to fully concentrate on the meal and on our companions, and it seems more like dominant behavior on our part than submissive. We feel the waiter is serving us, and not in any way putting us down or having any control over us, even symbolically. I think this is true even for French waiters.
When men do these things for women, I think it's a bit of male submissiveness winding its way throughout society. We've had so much female submissiveness to males that we should appreciate the opposite when it comes to us through a tradition that we don't have to invent for ourselves. Let's hold on to what's valuable.
< Message edited by Duty2Please -- 6/8/2007 10:18:29 AM >
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RE: ladies..... and gentlemen (2) - 
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