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8/10/08 12:11The NYT has a new article on gender and fine dining that made me ponder something that happened a few months ago.
I didn't say anything about this when it happened, because, well - I went to a very nice French restaurant, oh poor me! But I'd just gotten the book deal, I wanted to take my sister and her boyfriend out someplace very nice, and of course it was the boyfriend who got the wine list and the check. He corrected the server and said that I was the host of the evening, which was kind of him and all to his credit, but he still got the check.
It's a really small thing. But there's still this idea that in formal settings you have to observe the old-fashioned protocols of how men and women are treated - and I would just rather pretend those protocols didn't exist at all.
Etiquette works on the premise that 'what adheres to the rules' and 'what makes other people most comfortable' are the same thing because everyone knows what the rules are and everyone knows what to expect when the rules are being followed. It's like driving on the right side of the road; there's not any particular moral superiority to doing it one way or the other way, but everyone had better agree about what you're going to do. And that works... until you have the kind of dramatic cultural shift we've had over the last fifty years, and people can't agree any more about which side of the street to drive on.
I didn't say anything about this when it happened, because, well - I went to a very nice French restaurant, oh poor me! But I'd just gotten the book deal, I wanted to take my sister and her boyfriend out someplace very nice, and of course it was the boyfriend who got the wine list and the check. He corrected the server and said that I was the host of the evening, which was kind of him and all to his credit, but he still got the check.
It's a really small thing. But there's still this idea that in formal settings you have to observe the old-fashioned protocols of how men and women are treated - and I would just rather pretend those protocols didn't exist at all.
Etiquette works on the premise that 'what adheres to the rules' and 'what makes other people most comfortable' are the same thing because everyone knows what the rules are and everyone knows what to expect when the rules are being followed. It's like driving on the right side of the road; there's not any particular moral superiority to doing it one way or the other way, but everyone had better agree about what you're going to do. And that works... until you have the kind of dramatic cultural shift we've had over the last fifty years, and people can't agree any more about which side of the street to drive on.