Urban politeness.

[rivka]

Vignette 1: I am sitting on a bench along the sidewalk, eating a sandwich. At the other end of the bench, a middle-aged man is talking quietly on his cell phone. I catch phrases here and there - benign ones, at first, but then he starts repeating, "Why you got to say that? Why you got to talk like that?" His tone remains mild.

Suddenly, he gets up from the bench and walks over to stand about ten feet away from me, still talking into the cell phone. It's still close enough for me to hear him, because he's gotten much louder: "Listen, bitch, you better remember who you're talking to!"

I was a bit taken aback, but pleased that he was considerate enough not to disrupt my lunch or make me nervous by shouting obscenities right next to me.

Vignette 2: I get onto a very crowded bus. There are no seats at all, even in the front section that's reserved for the elderly and people with disabilities, so I brace myself to stand. A frail older woman who looks to be about seventy catches my eye and starts to rise.

"Miss, would you like to sit down?"

"Oh no, ma'am, you don't have to get up."

Immediately, two middle-aged, apparently able-bodied men fall all over themselves to get up and offer me their seats. They'd be the right age to be sons of the older woman, although they obviously don't know her. "Here you go, miss, my stop's about to come up." "You can sit right here."

I thank them as I sit down, and then thank the older woman - who seems quite satisfied with the response to her etiquette lesson.

Comments

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Funny to read this stuff when I'm preparing to talk about politeness in my discourse seminar today.

And I continue to be amazed by the difference between your part of the world and my part of the world with respect to that latter example. That would never happen here.

-J

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

Which direction? No one would've given up a seat, or it would've been automatic?

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

In the city I live in, if someone who's pregnant or disabled in any visible way (even mildly) or who could at all be called "old" walks into a bus, the entire front half of the bus will absolutely fall over themselves to give up their seats. It's certainly polite, but it's also a little pathological, almost "typhoid Mary" in its extremity. I've often wondered what it would feel like to be the sort of person who doesn't think of herself as needing to be offered a seat, and have that sort of experience.

-J

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I try to offer my seat to folks who appear to me to need the seat more than I do, but I'm becoming increasingly aware that this is a difficult path to walk. First, I'm obviously ignoring all the people with "invisible disabilities" -- people who might look young and hale but who may be low on "spoons" for the day and such. Also, I'm treating people as if they have a disability of some sort based solely on their appearance, which even if I'm careful to not make snap judgments, may still fall short of a complete assessment (especially in the time it takes a person to pass my seat). I've also heard a number of people rant in their journals about how offended they were that somebody offerent them a seat.

I find that over time I'm more often just keeping my face deeply enough in my book that I don't notice the people getting on. :( I don't know that I like that compromise very much.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

I've thought about some of these things, too. Mostly I try to solve those problems by not sitting in seats in the front half of the bus. Heh.

I've also had a few observations with respect to people who might be considered borderline cases -- people with a small stroller, or people carrying lots of stuff, or people who are only mildly disabled or just starting to show in their pregnancy. What tends to happen there is that people will look at each other, with the unspoken message of "are you gonna get up?" If one person gets up, then, everyone does, since nobody wants to be perceived as impolite. But someone has to make the first move and declare that person someone whom it's necessary to stand for.

Incidentally, your solution with the book would absolutely not work here -- people are far too obsessive about standing for anyone they deem it necessary to stand for. If I were absorbed in my book, people would poke me and make me get up. (This has never happened to me, but I've seen it happen to other people.)

-J

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeeps! Where is "here"? (I'm in Toronto.)

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

I live in Edmonton.

-J

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I guess this proves the whole, "Toronto, home of cruel-hearted Canadians," reputation, then. ;)

The problem with the back-half-of-the-bus solution for me is that I'm a big guy, so more often than not, even if it's plausible to do so, people won't sit next to me. :( I normally don't really let it bug me, but it does mean that me sitting anywhere but in the highly-sought-after single seats near the front of the bus results in a very sub-optimal arrangement where one seat just goes unused. That's one of the few times I feel REALLY self-conscious about my weight -- when there's a packed bus with one empty seat next to me that nobody wants to take.

the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"

[(Anonymous)]

My colleague, who is 38 and has cancer (but who also has been a teacher), once returned angry and nearly in tears. Two pre-pubescent boys, she told, had insulted her in the bus. As it turned out the insult was giving up their seats after looking my colleague over.

The thing is, the said colleague does not look neither old nor sick - middle aged, yes, but nothing more. But I feel sorry for the boys for getting poisounous stare for accidentally touching the fear of sickness and mortality and the fear of her troubles being an open book to total strangers inside this woman.

Re: the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

And that's exactly the thing -- while you might have perfectly good intentions, there's just no way of knowing what impact your actions will have upon someone. It seems sometimes easier to just risk being perceived as rude rather than causing someone else injury or offence. :(

Re: the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"

[rivka.livejournal.com]

...but it can also cause injury or offense to leave a person with a disability standing. I was once left standing on the subway while I was using two crutches - an unmistakable sign of a physical inability to stand, one would have thought. The people sitting down all avoided my eyes.

No one expects you to get every "edge case" right, or to accurately diagnose invisible disabilities - I'm sorry, but people with invisible disabilities who need to sit down also need to learn to ask for a seat. But I think it's much worse to hide in your book and avoid offering a seat to someone who uses a cane/crutches/walker, or is white-haired and physically frail, or is enormously pregnant (not just sporting a small belly bulge), than it is to occasionally give offense by offering a seat to someone who doesn't think they need it.

I feel sorry for the two prepubescent boys in the anonymous commenter's example, because the first thing that leaps to my mind is that they might have been raised to offer their seats to an adult woman regardless of health. I'm fairly sure that curiousangel, as a child, would not have been permitted by his mother to sit while a woman was standing.

Re: the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

The offering of seats to an adult woman regardless of health was a fairly widely accepted standard growing up around here, but is less common now. To some degree, I think rightly so, in that the same people wouldn't imagine offering their seat to an adult man who seemed healthy -- it would just be a bizarre think to think of doing. I could see a blanket "younger folk should offer their seats to people older than them" thing being much fairer.

I try to offer my seat in most non-edge cases, but I'm over time getting more worried about edge cases in general. It's a difficult time in many ways to be an adult man and decide what's proper conduct. Many of the standards of behaviour we were taught as children are now considered somewhere between intolerably sexist and hopelessly gauche, regardless of the intention. Unfortunately, most of the change has been through negative reinforcement -- pointing out what's wrong -- rather than positive reinforcement. It leaves a real void in behavioural expectation, and a lot of people after they get burned several times, either by doing something which comes around to bite them in return or by causing hurt to someone else in a situation in which they had no expectation that their behaviour *could* cause hurt, end up feeling like they're feeling their way in the dark in a room filled with traps. The result is that it feels best sometimes to just do nothing than to risk doing the *wrong* thing.

Re: the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

Many of the standards of behaviour we were taught as children are now considered somewhere between intolerably sexist and hopelessly gauche, regardless of the intention.

This is where being a stiff-necked Southerner is helpful, because it's given me the confidence to rest on the assurance of my own good intentions, and not worry about someone else's drama. :)

Seriously, though, I think the problem comes from people who make more out of an offer than is actually there. You make the offer of the seat, you accept the answer no matter what it is, and you then let the other person have their privacy. The biggest problem comes from folks who abuse the privacy part -- giving up your seat to a woman doesn't give you the right to hit on her, or stare down her cleavage, or make a condescending remark. You don't get to ask personal questions or to make comments, and you haven't incurred some obligation on the other person's part (besides the obligation to politely respond to polite communication, which doesn't necessarily include small talk).

Making the offer doesn't give the recipient the right to criticize me and my manners, either -- they can accept or decline as they see fit, but any response flavored with hostility or meanness should be reacted to like the person started spewing random obscenities about insect infestation. They don't get to inflict their personal drama on me, and I refuse to accept delivery of that package, thank you very much. Folks who attempt to discern the "true motivations" of others, and who insist on "educating" people who are only attempting to show some courtesy, deserve to have their efforts rebuffed as firmly as needed. Those are the people being rude, not the people following the rules.

Re: the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

This is probably sage advice in general that I'll try to take. It sounds like a good approach, anyway.

I've become very sensitized during the last 12 years or so and especially over the last year or two to upsetting other people. While I believe it's possible to go too far into the, "Own your own emotions," camp, it's probably the case that I've strayed too far into whatever the opposite camp is called because of various life experiences. Maybe it's time to do some re-centering.

Re: the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"

[rivka.livejournal.com]

The biggest problem comes from folks who abuse the privacy part -- giving up your seat to a woman doesn't give you the right to hit on her, or stare down her cleavage, or make a condescending remark. You don't get to ask personal questions or to make comments, and you haven't incurred some obligation on the other person's part (besides the obligation to politely respond to polite communication, which doesn't necessarily include small talk).

In my experience, when women resent chivalrous behavior, it's because they've run into too many situations like this - where a man thinks that offering his seat entitles him to a conversation, or he expects more of a deferential/flirtatious/personal response to opening a door than a simple "thanks" or polite nod. You'd be surprised - or I don't know, maybe you wouldn't - at how quickly politeness can turn into open hostility, if the guy thinks you haven't been appropriately grateful in your response.

For a certain kind of man, "treating her like a woman" equals "treating her like a sex object." It's not surprising that, eventually, a lot of women decide that they would rather just be treated like men.

It should go without saying, I hope, that you don't give off even the teensiest vibe of being that kind of man.

Re: the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"

[lcohen]

you know, i wish this didn't get read as sexism to the extent that it does. *i* was taught to hold doors (not car doors, but you can bet i help my mother with her car door these days) and yield my seat, too. if someone is having any sort of trouble, i'll help them into their coat although i seldom do that automatically. the chair thing--i actually often find that more unhelpful than helpful.

yes, someone with a sense of entitlement might see being politely helpful to me as entitling them to something...but that adheres to that person, not the behaviour in my world.

Re: the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

I feel sorry for the two prepubescent boys in the anonymous commenter's example, because the first thing that leaps to my mind is that they might have been raised to offer their seats to an adult woman regardless of health. I'm fairly sure that curiousangel, as a child, would not have been permitted by his mother to sit while a woman was standing.

Mom wasn't much for public transport -- then again, in Memphis in the 70's and 80's, there wasn't much public transport to consider. Still, she was pretty definite about teaching me to hold doors and offer assistance, and had the situation come up, I feel certain that she'd have made her expectations crystal clear. My father would have had similar expectations, but he'd have led by example instead of instruction. I don't remember it ever really coming up -- by the time I was old enough to remember, it was effectively ingrained in me that there were just things you were Expected To Do.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Funny to read this stuff when I'm preparing to talk about politeness in my discourse seminar today.

I'd be interested to hear more about the context in which your seminar looks at politeness - not to mention how it interacts with your personal feelings about etiquette!

An interesting "politeness and language" sidenote, which I didn't think about until after I wrote up the story: within the culture in which I was raised, it seems to me that there would be impolite connotations to addressing a pregnant woman as "miss," because it would mean implying that she wasn't married. In the culture in which I'm living now, "miss" is much more of an age-related term.

So in Baltimore it was perfectly polite for the lady on the bus to call me "miss" and for me to call her "ma'am," because she was my elder by quite a bit. And that's how I read the exchange, so I wasn't bothered. But a tiny corner of my upstate New York heart had the niggling feeling that it would have been more proper for her to say "ma'am" to me, as well as me saying it to her.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

within the culture in which I was raised, it seems to me that there would be impolite connotations to addressing a pregnant woman as "miss," because it would mean implying that she wasn't married.

Mine too, and I noticed that right away in your story.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

curiousangel is of the opinion that when there's a great age differential (as there was between me and the woman who offered me the seat), it is always appropriate for the older woman to call the younger woman "miss." But the middle-aged men also called me miss when they belatedly offered me their seats, so obviously it's not the only rule in effect.

The other thing that occurred to me is that, forty years ago in Baltimore, I would have been making a strong political statement by calling that woman "ma'am." And probably the men would've been making a subtler political statement by not jumping up to give me their seats. Today, general rules of politeness apply regardless of race, so hooray for progress in etiquette.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

In Canada, I've too often encountered "Miss" by itself (not Miss Lastname) as a term used to a social inferior or used as part of a rude sentence. (People complaining to young waitresses or young store clerks for example.) I therefore cannot stand being addressed by my students as "Miss", and have come to the conclusion that it's better for me to tell them that directly than for me to seethe and remain especially critical of those students. On a bilingual campus, it was not uncommon for Francophone students to address me in English as "Miss" - I think maybe they assumed it was equivalent in connotation to "Madame", which was an appropriate way to address a professor.

On the other hand, I know women my age who take offense on being addressed as "Ma'am", because they feel like "Ma'am" is only for old ladies. Go figure.

I agree about the social progress that you mention.

Where you at?

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

That's why I hate those BoostMobil phones. I can hear not only what the person standing next to me is saying, but what the person on the other end is saying.

And it is invariably vital information about a bra and panty sale.

Or something...

Re: Where you at?

[ororo.livejournal.com]

have you seen the prices of bras and panties lately? I'd call that vital ;)

"Where you at?" bugs the hell out of me, though. Makes my inner pedant scream.

Very interesting that it took someone acting like their mother to remind those men to be considerate.

Re: Where you at?

[darthgeek.livejournal.com]

It's because people don't take the extra second to press the little button on top that turns *off* the speaker. I *always* use a headset whether I'm using the DirectConnect[tm] feature or not. Just plain courtesy, it seems to me.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Hurray for that older woman!

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

They're apparently starting a scheme on London Transport, to give pregnant women badges to wear, inviting people to give up their eats. The newspaper report suggested that many people felt embarrassed about offering a pregnant woman a seat in case they'd got it horribly wrong and she wasn't pregnant at all, and many pregnant women felt unable to ask people to surrender their seats.

I can understand that latter ... PK has intermittent problems with his knee and while he looks superficially fine, standing for long periods is agony. But he feels totally unable to ask for a seat because he doesn't look obviously disabled. This is partly why I insist he uses a stick when he's got problems, simply as a visible reminder to others. However, on one magnificent occasion on the Underground, a member of the Underground staff saw him come limping along the platform and get on the train, somehow noticed he was having to stand and got on the train to demand that someone give up their seat for him. I think he came from the same set of moulds as your older woman. Interestingly, I notice in London that it's almost invariably young women who get up to offer other women seats.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

There is no way on earth that I would wear a badge to let people on the bus know that I'm pregnant. When I wasn't pregnant enough to very obviously show, I just stood if there were no seats.

When I was more disabled than I am now, for a long time I found it impossible to ask for a seat. Carrying a stick probably does help, but I have found that it's not always sufficient. Eventually I was so unable to stand that I had to figure out how to get up the guts to ask. But it was hard.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

There is no way on earth that I would wear a badge to let people on the bus know that I'm pregnant. When I wasn't pregnant enough to very obviously show, I just stood if there were no seats.

I frankly have my doubts about its efficacy. We shall see. I'm occasionally offered a seat on the Underground, though I can't determine whether it's because I'm female, look pregnant or deathly ill; I usually accept if I'm going a long way as I figure it doesn't hurt people to exercise that politeness thing, but actually I'm usually quite happy standing.

I was actually quite shocked at how people treated PK when we were out, during the period when he was having to use a stick quite heavily.People, usually men, would just barge past us on the stairs, when it was obvious that he needed space and to go slowly, while older people would always make room, step round and so on. In the end, I took to acting as a human shield, taking his arm or keeping pace with him on the stairs so people had to slow down and take notice. It made me very angry.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

People, usually men, would just barge past us on the stairs, when it was obvious that he needed space and to go slowly, while older people would always make room, step round and so on.

This supports a conclusion I've reached from how people treat my sister with lupus, which is that most rudeness like this to people with physical problems is due to ignorance, and in our culture most people who don't themselves have physical problems are blissfully ignorant of the whole issue. When my sib went back to grad school, none of her twenty-something fellow students had the dimmest notion of how someone could just be unable to work long hours, stay out late, etc. I mean, my sib would say that about themselves, and it had no impact on the fellow students, because there was no place for it in their mental landscapes.

[boxofdelights]

This is something that all children should be explicitly taught. It isn't hard to teach: a few explanations, a couple of times of hauling the child into the appropriate passing distance. But most children won't realize unless you tell them that most people need more space than they do, and that if someone could be hurt by being jostled, it isn't enough that you are sure you won't jostle them; you've got to leave enough space that they are sure you won't jostle them.

Anyone who hasn't learned this is a barbarian. Any culture that doesn't teach this to its children is not civilized.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I still can't do it, even when I really need it.

People here are often very good about it, though it seems to be inversely proportional to how much I'm carrying -- if I have a lot of shopping, I'm clearly judged fit enough to stand.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I've had days when I've brought my cane places when I didn't quite need it, because I knew it'd get me a seat, and I needed to sit down. Because I don't limp when I'm in a lot of pain, there's really no way for anyone to see, otherwise, and I have to request seats when I want them.

seats on London Transport

[(Anonymous)]

When I was first pregnant, in London in 1987, I had very low blood pressure in the first trimester and used to faint if I stood for long. The pregnancy wasn't showing of course, but I found it quite effective in a British Rail train compartment, to say loudly, "I'm pregnant, and if someone doesn't stand up for me, I *will* faint on you!" No shortage of seats, at all ;-).

In later stages of later pregnancies, in Sydney, it was always women who stood for me on trains. Men would take the 'bury head in paper' option.

Emma

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"I thank them as I sit down, and then thank the older woman - who seems quite satisfied with the response to her etiquette lesson."

I've seen it work that way lots of times.

B

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I'm glad etiquette lessons work like that somewhere.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I know that among African-Americans, older women get a lot more respect than they do in most European-American cultures. There's also more of a cultural expectation that a neighbor or acquaintance of your parents' generation is within their rights to correct your behavior. So I'm not sure how the situation would've played out if everyone involved had been white.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. I've wondered about race and culture being a factor in other ways, too. The times I've had a problem with people being unwilling to get up were also the times with the highest density of African and Asian college students, and white American students seemed more polite about it. Not very many American blacks went to that community college, though.