As I have mentioned before, these courtesies are taught but by mothers, not fathers, so I think you are off-base here. My father worked every day of the week. My mother taught me everything I know about how to treat a woman, plus I loved and respected her deeply, and then he died when I was ten. I think you need to address the inherent stressors in a Capitalistic society that stem from competition and adaptability. David G. Meyers professor of psychology at Hope College, wrote in his book, “Social Psychology,” that “prejudice is bred by social situations, while emotional factors add fuel to the fire.” Meyers suggested that “one source of frustration is competition, when two groups compete for jobs, housing or social prestige, one group’s goal-fulfillment can become the other group’s goal frustration… Similarly, researchers have consistently detected the strongest anti black prejudice among Whites who are closest to blacks in the socioeconomic ladder.”
Meyer’s also said that “pain and frustration can evoke hostility when the cause of our frustration is too intimidating or too vague. We often redirect our hostility, a phenomenon known as ‘displaced aggression,’ which may have contributed to an increase in the number of lynchings of black people in the Southern United States between 1882 to 1930. There was a tendency for more lynchings to occur in years when the cotton price was low and economic frustration was therefore presumably high.”
Meyers said, “when interests clash, prejudice pays, for some people.”
You are worried about a chair being pulled for a woman, when you should be worried about the economy. You might also look at Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son, where he yells at his mother because she got fired from an abusive White home, where she was working as a maid. Why would any huge, refrigerator-sized Blackman not just go over to a White man’s house, where they fired his mother, who needs her job to feed a household of children and herself, and knock some sense into them instead of yelling at her? Well, because he knows he can’t get away with it. But, you can bet he had tears in his eyes and he didn’t mean to hurt her and it turns out he brutally murders his girlfriend, who if I remember correctly was pregnant. It’s all about the perception of success and roadblocks, as well as those who appear weaker than yourself, whom you can attack to make yourself feel better. No, pulling a chair out for a woman is a rest stop, an attempt at sanity amid the horrors of what you have to do to survive. Sure, this may be the only game a man has got in his arsenal of courtship, but he is struggling to commingle his needs with the reality of his attractiveness in a world that demands an economic superiority over everyone and everything.
