... the male door opening ritual. This ritual, which is remarkably widespread across classes and races, puzzles many people, some of whom do and some of who do not find it offensive. Look at the scene of two people approaching a door. The male steps slightly ahead and opens the door. The male holds the door open while the female glides through. Then the male goes through. The door closes after them. "Now how', one innocently asks, "can those crazy womenslibbers say that is oppressive? The guy removed a barrier to the lady's smooth and unruffled progress" But each repetition of this ritual has a place in a pattern, in fact in several patterns. One has to shift the level of one's perception to see the whole picture.
The door-opening pretends to be a helpful service, but the helpfulness is false. This can be seen by nothing [as much as] that it will be done whether or not it makes any practical sense. Infirm men and men burdened with packages will open doors for able-bodied women who are free of physical burdens. Men will impose themselves awkwardly and jostle everyone in order to get to the door first. The act is not determined by convenience or grace. Furthermore, these very numerous acts of unneeded of even noisome "help" occur in counterpoint to a pattern of men not being helpful in many practical ways in which women might welcome help. What women experience is a world in which gallant princes charming commonly make a fuss about being helpful and providing small services when help and services are of little or no use, but in which there are rarely ingenious and adroit princes at hand when substantial assistance is really wanted in either mundane affairs or in situations of threat, assault or terror. There is no help with the (his) laundry; not help with typing a report at 4.00am,; no help in mediating disputes among relatives or children. There is nothing but advice that women should stay indoors after dark, be chaperoned by a man, or when it comes down to it, "lie back and enjoy it."
The gallant gestures have no practical meaning. Their meaning is symbolic. The door-opening and similar services provided are services which really are needed by people who are for one reason or another incapacitated - unwell, burdened with parcels, etc. So the message is that women are incapable. The detachment of the acts from the concrete realities of what women need and do not need is a vehicle for the message that women's actual needs and interests are unimportant or irrelevant. Finally, these gestures imitate the behaviour of servants towards masters and thus mock women, who are in most respects the servants and caretakers of men. The message of the false helpfulness of male gallantry is female dependence, the invisibility or insignificance of women, and contempt for women.
Marilyn Frye, "Oppression," in The Politics of Reality, 1983
5 comments:
This is great Deborah, thanks so much for posting it. I've often felt a bit strange about men opening doors for me and this really explains that. I like to turn the tables and open the door for them, which generally creates confusion. If a man beats me to it and opens it for me I usually just say "no you go first" and that neutralises it. Unless of course I'm heavily pregnant, or need to go to the loo, or carrying a whole bunch of stuff (quite common now that there is a baby to lug around), in which case it just makes sense to have someone else open the door for you (regardless of genders) if they are in a position to do so.
See, I don't really get this.
I've always felt like a man is holding open a door for me to be polite, not as a subtle hint that I am far to weak and pathetic to do it for myself.
But then maybe that's because I KNOW I am not weak and pathetic, so the thought never even occurred to me. And I hold doors open for people all the time.
I get much more enraged when someone doesn't hold the door. Especially on lifts. Aaargh.
Politeness is one thing - I happily walk through doors that people hold open for me, but the holder will get big eye-roll if they've made a huge fuss about getting there first. I also expect that the holder, male or female, would walk through a door that I hold open for them, if it happens to be that I get there first and it makes, um logistical (?) sense for me to open the door.
I always step back / make space for / open doors for elderly people, heavily pregnant women, parents managing toddlers, people burdened with parcels and shopping, people in wheel chairs on or crutches or whatever, and so on. That's the sensible and polite thing to do.
It's the 'chivalry' door openings that get to me, people who open a door because I'm female, not because it's the sensible (and polite) thing to do.
It's worth looking at the publication date for this piece - 1983.
I think it's a context thing - the gesture meant something different when Marilyn Frye was writing than it does now.
At the time that piece was written, women still had trouble getting mortgages, NZ women needed their husband's written permission to get their tubes tied, marital rape was still legal in lots of places, major NZ newspapers refused to allow women to use the title 'Ms', etc. In that context, the door thing is perhaps part of a larger picture of women being dependent/disabled. It reminds me a bit of that awful photo where Tom Cruise is steering Katie Holmes around by the back of the neck as if he owns her - yick!
In these liberal times when we're told (wrongly) that everyone's equal, I don't think door opening has quite the same connotations. I tend to see it as quaint rather than offensive.
I agree about the context thing. At uni there was a very annoying patronising young chap who used to open doors for women he knew identified as feminist, every chance he got. He always made a big deal out of it. He was also the first person I ever noticed looking at me like I was a piece of meat. Urgh. Opening doors for him became a self-protection mechanism - if he went first he couldn't be oggling your arse as you went by.
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