Where have all the gentlemen gone?
In an elevator descending from the eighth floor of a Singapore hotel recently, I witnessed what I thought to be a terrible thing. There was this man whose nationality or provenance I couldn’t really place because he looked like the typical Asian man. He entered the elevator with his wife who was pushing their toddler in a stroller. He walked in ahead of them and the elevator was already quite packed so they had to squeeze in. He positioned himself in one spot and watched as his wife maneuvered the stroller with some difficulty through the other passengers’ feet and legs. She did eventually manage by herself so he stared into space in perfect stillness and silence as the elevator hummed its way down to the lobby.
As the doors opened, his wife pushed the stroller through the doors but she was far from clearing them when it started to slide shut. Their child screamed in a state of panic because it would have directly slammed into the middle portion of the stroller, where he was snuggly fastened. The rest of us were helpless because none of us could reach the panel of buttons to keep the doors open.
His wife started speaking in a language I couldn’t understand but it was obviously directed at him. He remained as comatose as he was when he had entered the elevator and stayed far removed from the whole scenario. One gentleman had to lunge forward to hold the doors open, shoving his wife unintentionally in the process just to save the child from being sandwiched by the doors. After remedying the door problem, this gentleman proceeded to assist the wife in lifting the stroller out of the elevator; the husband, meanwhile, alit the elevator and casually strolled out into the lobby leaving his wife and child, both still flustered from the experience, trudging behind him. There was no acknowledgement from him at all in any shape or form of the incident that had just transpired or of the gentleman’s efforts in assisting his family.
Wow, I thought to myself, what a throwback to Edwardian times, when disinterested men who were pampered and couldn’t be bothered with assisting women and children and the elderly were all the rage.
I was so tempted to walk up to the man and give him a piece of my mind — but then again, cases like that are most often hopeless, so it would have been an utter waste of time, not to mention the fact that it could have earned me a black eye or a bloody nose considering the sensibilities (or lack thereof) of this man.
“Chivalry is overrated,” an elderly mathematics professor declared at a dinner party I attended a little more than a year ago. “So much for all the noise of the so-called women’s lib during the Sixties and Seventies with Gloria Steinem burning her bra and all that b*** s***! If women clamor for equality then they should open their own doors and pull out their own chairs!”
I remember, too, responding very calmly, “Sir, women’s lib is over. We are now in post-postmodern times where the issue is no longer whether women are equal to men.” I wanted to say that the fight is over in case he had slept through it but thought better of it. I continued: “Women now have choices in everything. They can very well choose to deem chivalry as one of the necessary virtues in men or to dismiss it as utter garbage.” I added that he could be right in saying that chivalry is overrated, so he may live his life guiltlessly leaving women to their resources. I then followed it up by asking, “Sir, I hope you don’t mind but are you married?” To which he replied, “Never been, never will.”
These days, folks are much too busy to concern themselves with opening doors, pulling out chairs and carrying heavy stuff for women. We of the push-button generation are addicted to instant gratification. We want things done yesterday, so we can’t be bothered by this “doors and chairs” stuff; if we can do it ourselves — men and women alike — we will. Women don’t judge men by how many doors he opens for them. There are so many other traits in a person’s character that are far more important to look out for so that acts of chivalry become almost negligible.
But when I visit my father I eat my words. He, like most gentlemen of his generation — those of the white dinner jackets or the polo jacks with sharkskin pencil trousers, the slicked-back hair, and the properly buffed leather shoes — opens doors and pulls out chairs for women as though his life depended on it. He and his kind — the boogie-dancing fellows who extend their hands to ask ladies to dance and deliver them back to their seat afterwards — breathe life back into the concept of chivalry and catapult those in their company back to the medieval ages.
My father has slowed down considerably lately but he still races me to the door just so he can hold it open for me. I do have to pull my pace back, ever so stealthily, to make that possible; but the joy it brings has not diminished one bit. It gets comical sometimes because I am now a bit faster on the draw so I beat him to my chair without meaning to. There have been instances when I have had to stand back up so as not to deny him the opportunity to pull it out for me. It is a knee-jerk reaction for him; something so natural, so ingrained in his psyche that it has become second nature.
I have called my son and nephew’s attention to this habit — something to the tune of, “Look at Lolo, that’s what a being a gentleman is all about.” Then they give me look as though I had just uttered something in Greek, Urdu, or Swahili. And then they promptly return to their PSP or some other portable electronic gaming device and carry on with their life’s purpose for the moment.
How much does it really take anyway for a man to be chivalrous? How much effort does it need to open a door, pull out a chair, place an order at a restaurant, or guide a lady in crossing a street? It takes a lot, apparently, from men of my generation or younger. I’ve had male friends and the odd date or so unintentionally slam a door, leaving me literally sandwiched between door and jamb in their scurry to enter some establishment. I have had to beg a date, busy engaged in animated conversation with someone else at the table, to free me from a chair made of solid narra that was so heavy it refused to budge when I needed to rush to the restroom to answer a call of nature.
Did I get offended during those occasions? Not really. The post-postmodern woman has no such recourse, nor is she supposed to require such assistance. Such is the order of things: it is every man (or woman) to him or herself.
But isn’t it nice when such gallantry arrives, unsolicited and out of the blue?
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Thank you for your letters. You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com.
