Chivalry Was (Brain-)Dead
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Or: Blindly following 'rules' is the opposite of thoughtful.
A recent Miss Manners column concerns an older man's surprise at being told not to linger after his workout. He had done so a few days before out of concern for a younger woman's safety at the late hour she was there to exercise:
Given my age and where I was raised, I can imagine someone doing this out of real concern and even feeling indignant about being approached over this, but times have changed.After my workout, I sat on a bench near the door, waiting for her to finish so I could make sure she got to her car all right. Miss Manners, I did not keep talking to her while she finished exercising; I just looked at my phone quietly. I did nothing untoward to her.
Modified from image by Janson_G, via Pixabay, license.
As she left the building, she said, "Have a good night." Then I watched her from inside the gym to make sure she got in her car safely. After she drove off, I left. I intentionally waited until her car drove away before leaving so she didn't think I was trying to follow her.
More important, etiquette isn't about blindly following rules and customs: Credit the man for asking about what is going on.
The reply might sound harsh to some, but it is spot-on. It reads in relevant part:
How was the young lady supposed to know that?As Miss Manners notes, there is nothing wrong with looking out for other people, but it should come with an explicit offer of assistance.
If she, like you, worries about strange men targeting her -- well, what do you look like, hanging idly around while she is alone in the gym?
I might have been a bit more explicit than she: The offer of assistance is a way of showing respect for the intelligence and agency of the other person.
I say this, because the old man also reminded me of lots of help and advice I got offered from older women when I was the dad of an infant and a toddler.
Lots of it seemed couched in the presumption that since I am a man, I had no idea what I was doing. Aside from wanting to say No, I don't need to dress my daughter like an Eskimo, I often had to fight the urge to say something snappy like, My kids have somehow lived through several years of my care. I think I can manage.
It's the same with the woman in the gym: I bet she's gone there at night before and survived. She might even carry mace or know some martial arts.
To be honest, while the offer Miss Manners suggests might be nice, I'd leave it alone unless asked to do something like that.
Why not hold the door open for anyone coming in after you? And why not assume that we're all competent adults? Many people want to help others out of good will, but etiquette is required to keep it on the right side of being patronizing or looking like something worse!
-- CAV
2 comments:
Most of what we consider chivalry falls under the heading of "Useless or counter-productive nonsense". Things like holding doors for women, carrying things for them, and treating them like they'd fall apart if a big, strong man weren't there to protect them are products of Victorian social norms among the nobility--which means, they are arbitrary rules the point of which was merely to differentiate the useless "elite" from the commoners (who were becoming the most productive group of people ever to exist).
The complete uselessness was always the point. It wasn't about helping anyone, it was about making complex rules that allowed a dying, parasitic class to pretend they were better than others despite the increasingly obvious evidence to the contrary.
Real chivalry is more complicated by far, and for the time it was built for, far more useful. Knights and nobles were a combination of warrior, company executive, and diplomat, and developed a code of ethics suitable to that role. It's notable that in the Middle Ages women quite frequently wielded tremendous power and had more autonomy than is generally thought, especially among the nobility--yes, they were expected to maintain the house, but that "house" frequently involved managing a reasonably-sized CITY and surrounding countryside, since their husbands were so frequently away at war.
Your second paragraph is spot-on, now that I think of it, and it is fitting that to the degree people persist with it, it affects them a bit like a parasite would.
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