Saturday, March 14, 2009

Gone by the Wayside...

Yesterday, a good friend of mine and I got into a really good conversation about how sad it is that chivalry seems to be dead... Now, I know it's not totally dead. I still know a number of guys who know how to hold the doors open for girls, but there are things that are obviously lacking in that area, and sadly, I don't think will ever come back... My friend was telling me about her visit to California a few months ago. While there she stayed with her uncle and aunt. She told me all about how her uncle would not only open the car door for her aunt whenever they went somewhere, but he also opened the door for her and her mother and sister too. Whenever it was time to eat he would always wait until all of the ladies in the room were seated before he, himself sat down. At first as she was telling me all this I seriously had my doubts. I am not used to seeing this at all anymore and it sounded more as a story she was making up, but she was not making it up at all. There really is a guy out there in California, who not only knows how to be respectful to women and how to treat them, but is not at all ashamed or nervous to show it. Now my friend is from Poland, and apparently she said that's how all the men treat the women there. It's just something that is expected... It's sad to me that here in America we have let those things just kind of become foreign to us.

4 comments:

Teresa said...

Hmmm...maybe Poland is the place for you two to go! :) I'm with you...whatever happened to it all?
Just because a few feminist Nazis acted like nincompoops and messed it up for the rest of us! Still, sometimes young men do try, but if they only realized how much more respectfully they would be treated on the whole as well, then perhaps they would long for that return treatment themselves. You know what you can do, girls? You stand at the door and if a man is around..you stand there..that is the only way we can hopefully help them to understand and perhaps to come back to it..you can make the first step by not taking the first step to open the doors for yourself unless there are no "gentlemen" in sight...movements begin by people making the first move and or in this case...not making a move. Surely, it won't work everytime because things are so bad, but so...you take a few chances. That's my two cents and I'm stickin to it! :)

Teresa said...

Teresa did not make that last comment...I did..her mom and I don't know why it came up Teresa...maybe it is because we are on the same computer and I am not signed in on blogger at the moment. WEIRD!

Anyway..
Signed Suzanne Mom McConnell ! Ha!

Mike Keucher said...

I am always happy to hold doors for girls, but oftentimes when I do--especially on the IU campus--I am met with death stares and certainly no smile or "thank you". Many seem to tell me, through their body language, "You idiot, I can open the door myself."

So I must admit that I rarely do this anymore, at least in certain places. Naturally at church I do it all the time! In other places, I will hold the door if anyone is following behind me closely, but I still walk through first. Perhaps I ought to change this habit and just know that I will get many a nasty look!

Mike

Teresa said...

Mom: Yeah, I don't think you signed yourself in... when I first opened up the comments I thought I'd lost my mind because I knew I didn't make a comment for this one yet, but then I figured out it was you. I gotta say that if we got enough girls to do that we might be onto something, but I don't know if that will happen... :(

Mike: I agree that a huge part of this problem is that girls and women seem to think that we can do things like that without any help from men... It's sad that a lot of women now do not like it when a guy shows them that kind of respect. We seem to have a mind set of where we're equal to guys or whatever and so we don't need their help period. It's sad we don't fight for that kind of respect from men anymore. I guess I should have put that in the blog too, but I just didn't think about it until now...