Ladies First
Here, women board the bus first. Men step aside and let them pass. It matters not whether the man is old and the woman is young and spry. The same is true for elevators and building doors. The practice of letting women enter ahead of the men is so normal that women usually don’t acknowledge it with a “thank you” – even though, boarding a bus, it gives them valuable first dibs on the limited number of seats.
(Interestingly, once a man gets a seat, his is not eager to give it up. Men will trade places with a standing pregnant women, but less often an older woman, and almost never a young woman.)
I had to give a talk in Spanish class last week, which I’d planned to do on current perspectives on the population crisis, but thanks to a crisis involving my financial aid applications I didn’t have time to do the necessary research. Instead I talked about relations between the sexes here vis-à-vis the US.
The topic sparked fair bit of discussion, and the class – including representatives from Germany, Russia and Korea – seemed to be pretty much in agreement: sex roles are more clearly defined – perhaps exaggerated – here than at home.
I guess this is not surprising – I had known more or less that this is what things would be like when I came to Latin America.
What has surprised me is how relaxed relations are. Perhaps because people are more at ease with their sexuality or – I don’t know why, really – there is a feeling that less is at stake. If a man thinks a woman is attractive, he goes and talks to her. If a woman likes a man, she looks at him for a moment, and he comes over and talks to her. There appears to be less of the self-tortuous mooning over people – the “oh-my-god-what-would-she-say-if-I-talked-to-her?” – than back home. Or so it seems to me.
On a related note, things that would go to court in the US here go unnoticed. As my (female) teacher said, “many couples meet at work. How would they do so if everyone were concerned about sexual harassment”?
To introduce my talk, I told a story from my first week in Buenos Aires. I was sitting inside a café on Nueve de Julio, writing something for Unglued, watching two older men at table outside on the sidewalk. They, in turn, were watching women pass. That was all they were doing: just watching women walk by, for hours. When a particularly pretty girl walked past, they would stand up in her wake and stare until she disappeared completely from view.
At the time this struck me as rude and sexist. Now it strikes me as, well, normal.
I wonder: Is this what life in the US was like 50 years ago?
(Interestingly, once a man gets a seat, his is not eager to give it up. Men will trade places with a standing pregnant women, but less often an older woman, and almost never a young woman.)
I had to give a talk in Spanish class last week, which I’d planned to do on current perspectives on the population crisis, but thanks to a crisis involving my financial aid applications I didn’t have time to do the necessary research. Instead I talked about relations between the sexes here vis-à-vis the US.
The topic sparked fair bit of discussion, and the class – including representatives from Germany, Russia and Korea – seemed to be pretty much in agreement: sex roles are more clearly defined – perhaps exaggerated – here than at home.
I guess this is not surprising – I had known more or less that this is what things would be like when I came to Latin America.
What has surprised me is how relaxed relations are. Perhaps because people are more at ease with their sexuality or – I don’t know why, really – there is a feeling that less is at stake. If a man thinks a woman is attractive, he goes and talks to her. If a woman likes a man, she looks at him for a moment, and he comes over and talks to her. There appears to be less of the self-tortuous mooning over people – the “oh-my-god-what-would-she-say-if-I-talked-to-her?” – than back home. Or so it seems to me.
On a related note, things that would go to court in the US here go unnoticed. As my (female) teacher said, “many couples meet at work. How would they do so if everyone were concerned about sexual harassment”?
To introduce my talk, I told a story from my first week in Buenos Aires. I was sitting inside a café on Nueve de Julio, writing something for Unglued, watching two older men at table outside on the sidewalk. They, in turn, were watching women pass. That was all they were doing: just watching women walk by, for hours. When a particularly pretty girl walked past, they would stand up in her wake and stare until she disappeared completely from view.
At the time this struck me as rude and sexist. Now it strikes me as, well, normal.
I wonder: Is this what life in the US was like 50 years ago?
previously there was Elevator
afterwards you have Say ya to da UP eh?
Regards, [submitted on 01 Mar 03]
jeremy, i'm in buenos aires, so if you want to talk a little, let's meet. [submitted on 03 Mar 03]