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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: the offence of "wow, you look OLD and SICK"
Date: 2005-03-08 02:06 pm (UTC)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.