Today’s column, plus a very special letter
Today’s “Miss Conduct” column is online here.
Also, I’ve been meaning to share a very special letter that came in a week or two after my July 12 column. In that one, I answered a question from a fourth-grader, which delighted me because that is the youngest person, as far as I know, who has ever written in. I don’t know if it was a boy or girl–the e-mail was signed only with initials (kid reads the column and knows the protocol, apparently!) and was sent from the mother’s e-mail.
Here is the child’s question:
I am 10 years old. My fourth-grade teacher taught my class that girls always go first and boys are to hold doors and help girls with their coats. He says that when a girl comes to or leaves the table, boys are supposed to stand up. A lady’s job is to help the men be gentlemen by letting the men do these things. These guidelines seem old-fashioned and unfair. My mother suggested I ask you what current etiquette should be and what it may be when I am an adult?
And here is my response:
Some people think etiquette should be different for boys and girls or men and women, like your teacher does, and some people think it should be the same for both. People who think etiquette should be gender-neutral (the second kind) still practice good manners but don’t think it should depend on who’s a boy and who’s a girl. They will hold the door for someone who has packages or who is behind them, and stand or not depending on how formal the occasion is and how old the person is that they’re greeting.
Mostly, at work or school, manners are the same for men and women. People are likely to be more traditional about etiquette in dating or social situations. So it’s good to learn both ways. Etiquette isn’t just one thing; there are different manners for different situations — just like you have different clothes for school and soccer and church. Since you asked, though, I do think manners are changing. Probably by the time you are an adult most people will practice “same for both” manners, except for a small handful of people who don’t and are very angry at the people who do and write letters to people like me about it.
That last line is emphasized for reasons that will shortly become obvious, because here is the totally awesome letter I got in response:
Dear Ms. Ill-Mannered:
You contend that men and women will be treating each other the same in
terms of manners and etiquette.You could not be more wrong, and it’s a sign of your own narrow views that you do not recognize this.
Do you open car doors for men and make sure that their coats (or dresses, in some cases) do not become caught in the door? No, and you never will.
Do you take a man’s arm to steady him (not for him to lean on) across an
icy sidewalk? No.Do you jack up the car to fix a flat tire while the man stands to the side
of the road? No.If an intruder came into your house – and you did not have an opportunity to immediately call the police, or if you and you husband (or wife, as the case may be) are confronted on a sidewalk by ruffians, do you stand in front of your partner and say “Darling, let me handle this.” ? No. You depend on him to protect you and put himself into harm’s way. That is how the vast majority of people behave.
I could go on and on.
You are clearly trying to social engineer young people. That’s wrong. It
is not up to you to do that. It’s up to their parents, their church, and whomever other people or groups their parents appoint. Or do you feel that you always know better?Let us be clear that you gave the young lady factually incorrect
information in order to inject your own factually incorrect views into the
matter. You lied to the young lady, in effect, and I think you know it.
In a sense, you’re a predator, setting yourself above parents and society
in terms of morays (sic).How sad that you set yourself above traditonally-minded people with your misguided superiority complex.
Perhaps another more objective advice columnist could straighten you out?
Would you consider that?
Okay, kids, I don’t have all the time in the world this morning, so I’m just hanging this paper target on a tree for y’all. Take your own best shots in comments. Extra points to anyone who can come up with a good “moray” joke.
(Okay, okay, just two of my favorite logic fails: Good job trying to convince me I was wrong by behaving exactly as I already predicted a small number of cranks would. Also, the LW says that it’s not up to me to “social engineer” young people, because that’s the job for their parents and whomever their parents appoint. Which, if you read the child’s original letter, would be, um, me.)
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Oh yeah, a more ‘objective’ approach would be to tell kids to treat the ‘opposite’ sex differently, for no special reason!
As a complete klutz who often wears high heels, the icy sidewalk thing annoys me. It’s generally *harder* for me to navigate icy sidewalks, rocky trails, or any other uneven or slippery surface when I’m *also* trying not to take down another person who’s now attached to me. Holding onto someone’s arm screws up my center of gravity and therefore my balance.
I suspect that “taking someone’s arm (not to lean on (!))” really only works as intended if the arm-offerer is a fairly large person and the arm-taker(-not-leaner!) is a teeny tiny scrap of a thing.
Which, surprise!, might fit into the idea that it makes more sense to treat others as individuals with individual preferences and needs rather than as completely interchangeable cookie-cutter stereotypes based on gender.
(Also, I avoid confrontations with “ruffians” (!) *much* more often when I’m out with men, because a male presence automatically increases the probability that someone’s going to get physically violent, at least in my experience.)
You know, one of my dreams in life was to be a marine biologist. No, to be honest, my dream was to be a dolphin. I never did want to be an eel, even though ‘eel’ is my surname spelled backwards. Morays, in particular, have a reputation for being foul-tempered, even vicious. They also inflict a nasty bite, which, while non-poisonous, is prone to infection due to the ample bacteria on their pointy little teeth.
While I certainly do have respect for most living creatures (flies, mosquitoes and various other insects excluded), I certainly do not think we should be looking to current morays for behavioral cues.
You’ve done standard pet etiquette already, so why *not* do a segment on how to deal with people with more exotic animals, like morays? Could be an unexplored niche…
I think my favorite part is “Ms. Ill-Mannered,” which I imagine the LW sneering in the snidest voice he or she (but I’d guess he) can muster. “Mizzzzzzzzzz,” uttered in a tone of unsurpassable distaste, like one discussing a person who talks about poop during a fancy dinner, and “Ill-Mannered,” pronounced with the great satisfaction of one who is sure they have just landed a cutting and clever insult. Because truly, what could be worse for a person arguing for equal treatment of the genders than to be implied to be a feminist, and how better to disparage someone who writes under a handle that is a play on the word “misconduct” than to insinuate that she is not 100% perfect in all her social interactions. That must have cut you to the quick!
As for a “moray” joke, I wish I could come up with something good, but it’s impossible with Wally Shawn in my head yelling about the shrieking eels all the time.
As for moray, I rather like Glen Moray whisky, despite the fact that it’s often characterised as a “ladies’ dram” – for the record, I’m female and really like single malt whisky, and the peatier the better. In general, something described as a “ladies’ dram” tends to taste bland and/or perfumey in my experience (because, you know, we ladies really like to drink perfume). If you can make something of that, feel free.
Other than that, what about replying by politely thanking him (well, probably) for giving you (and us) a good laugh? I, for one, needed one.
I especially liked the accusation of giving “the young lady” “factually incorrect” information. Says who? You say some people currently think A (your opinion) and some B (the teacher’s opinion) – statistically (though I wouldn’t advice using such a small poll to generalise) you have 50-50 for the two views (discounting the 10-year-old’s “I don’t know”). This proves “some people think A and some B”. Then you go on to say YOU THINK most people will think B in the future. How could that be factually wrong unless (s)he has mind-reading abilities and knows your actually thinking quite the opposite?
Uhm, I seem to have mixed up my A’s and B’s towards the end there. Easily done after a couple of glasses of wine, I’m afraid.
maybe i’m confused about what etiquette and manners entail, but changing a flat is a skill. i know there are men who probably can’t do it and women who can do it. and being protected by my man when I’m in a home invasion probably isn’t the first thing on my mind. if he wants to go be hunter/gatherer/defender, that’s his choice. i’m hiding in the closet with high heels at the ready to gouge eyes out and my cell phone on 911. I imagine the dog barking would be a burglar alarm before the robbers got upstairs.
I think the LW has confused etiquette and manners with gender roles. I mean is it good manners for a wife to slave over a hot stove so her man can have a good dinner, or is it just nice for whomever gets home from work first to take care of dinner?
Thanks for the letter, it was awesome and so much fun to read.
Occhiblu, Mr. Improbable and I have this conversation every winter! He always wants me to hold his arm and I have to explain every time that I need *both* my arms to balance with. Also, despite any clown or martial-arts training, I fall really well. (I’m sure the author of the Angry Letter would not be surprised to know I’m a fallen woman …) I’m less likely to hurt myself if I can fall freely than if someone is grabbing me and trying to prevent it.
Gee, I just changed a tire at 6:30AM yesterday, on account of I’m the one who broke it, and I’m female.
OK, my spouse is female too, but being able to change your own tire is a valuable skill for ANYBODY.
And in a dramatic subject change, I agree completely about falling…I’ve tried skiing and snowboarding once each (so far). I fell more often on the board, but I hurt myself falling on the skis, because the skis were going separate ways, while both feet were strapped to one snowboard, making falling much easier to control.
When I had manual car locks, I always opened the car door for a passenger. I admit that the remote locking technology has made me lazy, and I don’t do that anymore, but gender never played a role. (I’m a woman, if that matters at all. Does to the LW, apparently). I also open regular doors. I think in the gender-neutral etiquette of the future, we’ll all have to pull out our own chairs and seat ourselves, though, as otherwise that will get ridiculous.
That said, way to discourage children from seeking information and answers to their questions, LW. A 10 y.o. who has the presence of mind to question one of her teachers — politely — about something s/he feels doesn’t sound right? Amazing, and kudos to the kid’s parents for encouraging and directing her/him to do so.
One of my favorite things is how–and I truly do not understand what is going on here–the LW goes all gender-neutral sometimes. Like this:
“Do you open car doors for men and make sure that their coats (or dresses, in some cases) do not become caught in the door?”
Huh? Does he know about my crush on Eddie Izzard? Is this supposed to be some kind of slight on my husband’s masculinity? Or is he saying that it is okay for men to wear dresses, as long as women don’t open car doors for them? If you want to draw the line somewhere on properly gendered behavior, that seems like a really weird place to draw it. He does this again w/the “intruder/ruffians” paragraph.
Bluemoose, I do the same thing (still have a manual lock). Mr. Improbable drives about 99% of the time when we go out, and he opens the door for me, then I reach over and open his from the inside. When I have passengers, I and they do the same. (Mr. Improbable does not do the driving because he has a penis, but because he’s a native and understands Boston geography and psychopathic driving habits infinitely better than I do.)
And yeah, I thought the original letter from the kid was just so great. Even if I hadn’t found the question itself interesting, I’d have tried really hard to publish it anyway. What a good lesson for the kid, that you can think for yourself, that authorities sometimes disagree, that you can express yourself in a public forum.
I don’t blame you. If I need to go somewhere in Boston (as opposed parking under the Common and walking), I would let anyone else in the world drive. Boston driving is not for the faint of heart.
Do you jack up the car to fix a flat tire while the man stands to the side of the road? No.
Umm, since I’m the one who actually knows how to change a tire, yes.
Plus it doesn’t get into the whole marriage equality issue. Or Eddie Izzard’s clothing tendencies. :)
Sometimes when we express an opinion, the listener hears the most extreme version of our opinion that they’ve ever heard in the past – all those previous disagreements they’ve had with ANYONE on the topic fill their ears – and they reply with an argument that has only a passing resemblance to what we actually said.
I’ve often met with this (left and right, male and female, young and old) and tried to diffuse the situation, sadly with widely varying amounts of success.
I’ve used “we” above, assuming that this happens to a lot of people. Does it?
David, I have met people who reply to arguments that way, and I know that I do it myself quite a lot, too! Good point.
David, I deal with that all the time. Less so in my personal life, because if a person is like that on a regular basis, I will avoid them as much as possible, and when I can’t avoid them, stay away from certain topics in order not to set off a rant … unless of course I’m in one of THOSE moods and think it would be amusing.
But I’m continually fascinated by the fact that *at least* half the letters I get disagreeing with me–aren’t. They’re cases where the reader is disagreeing with something they think I said, either out of poor reading comprehension, or because I used some particular keyword or phrase that sets them off.
Occasionally, if the person seems reasonable–the LW above would distinctly NOT fit into that category–I will write back to them and attempt to clarify.
When I wrote my surviving the holiday season article, I got an e-mail from a woman who objected to this line: “If you haven’t celebrated Hanukkah since childhood, but this year you are in special need of spiritual rededication, it’s time to break out the menorah and prayer books.” She wanted to do the “Hanukkah is really a minor holiday, the HHDs and Pesach are more important” rant at me. But she seemed nice, so I wrote back and pointed out that 1) I’m Jewish, too 2) I wanted to frame Hanukkah in the context of spiritual rededication, not the way it is often misinterpreted as “Jewish Christmas,” and most of all, 3) I was writing an article about the November/December holiday season, and minor or not, that’s when Hanukkah *is*.
Sure enough, I got back a very nice and slightly sheepish e-mail apologizing and agreeing that there’s not much point discussing Passover in the context of winter holidays.
Somehow, I have less hope for a productive beer summit with Mr. “Don’t Open the Car Door for a Man in a Dress” above.
I don’t know honestly if Eddie Izzard would need help not getting his dress stuck in the door, have you seen how good he is on platforms?? Better than I by far!
On a serious note, I live with 3 roommates and we had a mouse recently that my 6’3″ male roommate and another roommate were afraid to go near. The tall, male roommate was afraid the mouse would run up his pant legs (which I assured him is a mouse-myth; believe-you-me this mouse does not want to get stuck in your jeans!). So I took the trash can from them and pursued the mouse into the bathroom and everyone was impressed by my bravery. However, when an arm chair had to be moved to look for the mouse we asked the 6’3″ roommate to do it. While I may be the critter expert he has longer arms. I’d say being practical makes life much easier!
As for car issues/intruder issues if my bf and I were approached by someone scary I would definitely expect him to do the fighting and me the phone calls. But that’s because he has the army training– they actually have spent a lot of time training him to do this kind of thing. Now when someone needed to drive our friend’s standard mustang home I was the one who drove because I drive stick much better than he does. Again just practical!
Thanks, Robin, very interesting!
First of all, as a mommy of two grade schoolers, I am wondering where this child goes to school. We have line leaders, cabooses, door holders who do all the door duties, and instructional aides & teachers who do the coat helping on & off. All jobs, including table washer, pencil sharpeners & teacher’s helper are non-gender.
Second, I thought Miss Conduct was your advice/opinion giving role, not your reasearcher role. So facts, from what? And I think by expressing two opinions, you are showing yourself rather broad-minded, not narrow-minded.
As to predictions as to how people will treat each other in the future: schools are doing their best to leave the parenting to the parents, but sometimes they have to model appropriate social interactions for the students, which include “passing back” the door-holding when a bunch of people are going through the door, and my personal fav, “you get what you get and you don’t get upset” when treats, supplies or any nearly-identical but slightly different thing gets passed out to a group.
That being said, I fear most people do not place value on showing their children that living in a society means you have to follow (most of) the conventions of the society–which includes basic civility to the other members. What we have instead is rampant entitlement,which is probably where I should end my rant, because a rant it could become.
And for changing a tire? That’s what AAA, OnStar & Roadside protection is for. Sheesh.
This makes me remember the time when my boyfriend (now husband) let me take the lead late one night when a “ruffian” appeared as we were going back to his apartment. He came to my IMPACT graduation so he knows that I can set boundaries and defend myself, and he hadn’t had that training. So I walked ahead of him with my face set on “you do *not* want to mess with me” and the ruffian did not try to press matters with either one of us. I thought it was pretty cool – not that there were jerks in his old neighborhood, but that he acknowledged without angst that I am the expert in dealing with scary dudes.
Is it good etiquette to write an etiquette blog post that invites readers to sneer at and shame a “very special” letter writer for bad spelling and obvious intellectual inferiority? Bad, bad taste. I don’t recall “snotty” and “smarmy” making anyone’s list of what constitutes good manners.
If a person disagrees with me in a logical and respectful fashion, JC, I will respond to them in kind. (You can ask frequent commenter OffTheGridGirl about that, we had a lovely, vigorous, and civil argument about the merits of Facebook on my other blog.)
If, on the other hand, a person calls me a liar and a child predator, I feel remarkably little obligation to them. The LW attacked me in an ad hominem fashion, and quite hatefully. I, however, am merely pointing out, satirizing, and generally having fun with the contents of what he wrote, and am not engaging in ad hominem insults toward him. Have I said anything about his character or intelligence?
Come to think of it, you’re the one who attributed “obvious intellectual inferiority” to him as a person; I’m only saying his letter didn’t make sense. For all I know, he’s brilliant in other contexts. Maybe he isn’t a native English speaker. Or perhaps he’d had more than a few glasses of wine when he wrote what he did. I don’t know him, so I won’t assume.
If you don’t like how we do things on this blog, the internet is a big place, and I’m sure you’ll find plenty of others that are more to your liking!
I would suggest that basic respect, kindness and courtesy is more important than determining the correct duties for men and women in today’s world. It is unfortunate that one view chooses to attack the opposite. To each their own. At Scarlett Academy we are more tradtitional, however we understand that manners evolve and are respectful of any new culture within a culture. Scarlett Ladies find pleasure in being more traditional. There is nothing wrong about learning about manners. Infact, sometimes it can be quite fun! Manners are unwritten rules about social conduct, and they are fluent. Unless the child is attending an etiquette school, I would offer that it is likely inappropriate (to enforce such gender roles unless it becomes part of the cirriculum. Perhaps a lesson on manners and the history of where they came from with a fun game attached would be easier for students to cope with. It would need to make sense as part of the cirriculum though (history?). When the lesson is over, it would be up to the child to practice as they wish…and if the social norm of the school is not to practice, well maybe that particular history lesson will come in handy down the road when they are older :)