When I see this on my dash: “Chivalry is only dead if you let it die”
kill-to-save-a-life:
andyouhavetogivethemhope:
kill it. it reeks of sexism and misogyny.
Feminist, always killing a man’s attempts of romanticism
i feel that you misunderstand me. lets take a stereotypical act of “chivalry” — a man holding a door open for a woman. please bear with me here, this is kind of a long read. it is an excerpt from Marilyn Frye’s The Politics of Reality (1983). She asserts that the act of opening a door must be viewed not as a single act, but as a piece of a much larger picture. and because we live in a patriarchal society that actively oppresses the female gender and anything resembling a feminine attribute, the act must be viewed through that lens. because of this context, these often well intentioned acts, such as opening door, are ultimately patronizing and mock women. women are more than capable of opening a door themselves. they don’t need help with that. as Frye explains, women need help in manner that actually means something. where are these “chivalrous” men when it comes to fighting for women’s rights? when it comes to assuring that women get paid as much a men? when it come to calling people out on sexist jokes and sexist behaviors? when it comes to making sure women have affordable and equal access to heathcare? where are these men when one in four women will be victims of sexual assault in their lifetime? those are the real issues that women need help with. not opening a door. those issues are romantic! i identify as a gender queer woman who is attracted to women and even i would think a man being involved in these issues is more attractive than a man holding a door for me. so please take the time to read this excerpt from Frye’s book and rethink your politics of helping women. you’re heart is in the right place.
also, feminism is not about man hating. it’s the radical idea that women should be treated as equals.
Frye:
“The arresting of vision at a microscopic level yields such common confusion as that about 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 whom do not find it offensive. Look at the scene of the 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 in order to see the whole picture.
The door-opening pretends to be a helpful service, but the helpfulness is false. This can be seen by noting 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 or even noisome “help” occur in counter-point 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 either in mundane affairs or in situations of threat, assault or terror. There is no help with the (his) laundry; no help typing a report at 4:00 a.m.; 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 behavior of servants toward 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.
One cannot see the meanings of these rituals if one’s focus is riveted upon the individual event in all its particularity, including the particularity of the individual man’s present conscious intentions and motives and the individual woman’s conscious perception of the event in the moment. It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic view and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macroscopically. At any rate, whether it is deliberate or not, people can and do fail to see the oppression of women because they fail to see macroscopically and hence fail to see the various elements of the situation as systematically related in larger schemes.”
![[Image: Picture of Karen (played by Amanda Seyfried) from the movie Mean Girls, under the text, “Oh my god Karen, you can’t just not ask someone what their preferred gender pronoun is.”]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzczjrMuZT1qg117qo1_500.png)
