In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Myth of the Man-Hating Feminist

It’s back! That’s right, the horrible man-hating feminist so angry she cannot function in the real world with even the likes of the chivalrous Neil Cavuto:

Ladies, if a guy holds a door open for you, do you like it, or feel patronized by it?

The reason I ask is that I did just that for a woman, leaving a building Thursday night. She was not pleased.

“Do I look paralyzed to you?” she asked.

I was so taken aback that I didn’t know what to say, or even what she was saying herself.

She went on to explain how I had just earlier stepped out of her way on the elevator to let her off.

I just assumed it was the gentlemanly thing to do. I guess I’m a bit old fashioned. But she was not and she clearly wasn’t into “gentlemanly.”

When I recomposed myself, I had to follow her.

“Excuse me,” I asked — now feeling every bit of my offended macho Italian roots — “but exactly what bug got up your butt?”

“Treating me like I have to be coddled,” she said.

“By opening a door?” I asked.

She went onto explain the door thing was part and parcel of a bigger thing: An attempt by men, she said, to make women feel like they’re lesser.

It made me think and it made me worry.

So let me ask you, ladies: Do you find it offensive when some big klutz like me opens a door that I’m patronizing you, or, in the case of this young woman, “offending” you?

Roxanne nails it in the comments of Michelle’s ASV, who commented on the story while buying into the myth.

Roxanne says:

I think Cavuto is making that story up because he was having a dry writing day. I consider myself a feminist and I’ve never said or thought anything like the situation Cavuto describes. And I’ve never heard of a woman in real life doing that, either. It’s all part of a feminazi mythology, one part in a series of urban legends that get repeated over and over until people believe that it actually happened. Next he’ll be writing about children being abducted in KMART, hair dyed black in the bathroom, and sold on the black market in Mexico.

I don’t think opening a door for someone should have anything to do with gender. If you’re at the door first, you hold it open. Duh.

Whoever gets there first opens the door. It is as common a courtesy as saying please and thank you, and I don’t even care what you have in your pants.

The biggest clue to Cavuto’s “dry writing day?” He doesn’t even have to mention the word “feminist” or “feminism” but I’ll bet nearly all of the commentary he received on his show was on the nature of feminism and the death of chilvalry. Even Michelle neglects to explicitly mention feminism, except through the pejorative “feminista,” but nearly all of her comments on her post address, you guessed it, feminism.

My favorite part is where Rox’s legitimacy is questioned due to anecdotal evidence, countered with, “Oh yeah? Well this happened to me once, so Cavuto is telling the truth and you are not.”

Extra special highlights include the spots where readers suggest that all the young lady in question needs to do is a) get laid, and b) shave her moustache.

I sprained an eyeball from rolling them so hard.


28 thoughts on Myth of the Man-Hating Feminist

  1. I’ve never done that, but it so freaking drives me crazy when a gentlemen falls all over himself to open a door for me in such a fashion that he gets in my way and seriously slows me down. I mean, chivalry is fine, but dude, no fifty-yard dash when my hand is mere inches from the door.

  2. On a related note, Cavuto has a huge head. He has to sleep sitting up, like the Elephant Man, or he’ll die.

    On another related note, why is it that when we try to pay women 65-70 cents on the male dollar, they don’t gush forth with appreciation at our studly generosity?

  3. Lauren, don’t you know that all feminists bite the heads off babies and cut off penises whenever they get the chance? Errrr, sorry, I’ve been watching too much Fox News lately. Nevermind.

  4. now feeling every bit of my offended macho Italian roots

    where do you think he was feeling these macho roots? this is the heart of Cavuto’s “article” – i performed my notion of chivalry the valiant & strenuous task of door-opening), the subject did not respond appropriately to his effort, therefore i am entitled by my macho roots to demand justification and redress – what a dick…

    actually, make that a lying dick… a fibbing dick? dissembling dick?

    note to related note: Michael Jackson recently put forth an offer on Cavuto’s skeleton! dead or alive!

    no, really….

  5. Being that I live in an uber-liberal, super feminist type of town, you’d think I would have been privy to dozens of incidents where women dressed down men for holding doors for them. Alas, no. And so I doubt the veracity of the story. Like you said, holding a door is common courtesy. I hold doors for women, men, children, and even pets. I expect the door to be held for me, regardless of who is doing the holding.

  6. You know, I hadn’t doubted the truth of the story till you pointed this out. I know I’ve never ever heard this happening, and I know some preatty radical feminists. So now I wonder. Because what this story means to do is make women delcare their own reasonableness and distance themselves from those whacky feminists who do things like that. It’s like the lovely article I read once while researching feminism on the internet (googling the phrase feminazi to see what showed up) where some guy proceeded to describe how he would know exactly when a feminist walked by cause she would be not wearing a bra, hairy, probably a lesbian, and smelly. Jeezum pete how long do we have to deal with the stereotypes? This is actually partly what my dissertation is about. (The myth/stereotypes vs. the empowering images). Sigh.

    Bad journalist. Making up stories.

  7. And the Feministe-appointed Angriest Feminist, I can assure you I would never dress down someone for opening a door, unless they whacked me in the nose with it.

    There is no way the story is true. If an angry guy chases down a woman to yell at her for not responding properly to his chivalry, she’s not likely to argue with but be afraid.

  8. Amanda: Especially some angry Fox News nerd whose head looks like it belongs in a Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade as a balloon. Drain some fluid out of that bad boy, Neil!

  9. I think it’s an urban myth as well. A more common occurrence in my experience is trying to open the door for a man who then tries reach behind me to wrestle the door out of my grasp or otherwise refuses to walk through it.

  10. I’ve known some incredibly radical feminists who actually do hate most men, and I’ve seen men hold the door open for them and most of them have said thank you. The only time I remember someone getting a different response was when a man held open a door for a friend who was mere inches from opening it herself. He was holding two grocery bags and she had to squeeze past him since he was taking up most of the doorway. She simply said to him after she’d passed through, “Thanks, but you probably should have let me hold the door for you.” He looked aghast for a second and then laughed. “I didn’t even think about it, it was just a reaction.”

  11. I guess the opposite has happened to me. I like to hold doors open. I like to smile at people I don’t know. When people do things like that to me, I get a little hope that humanity is not doomed after all. 😉 I’ve never had anyone be offended by me trying to be polite. However, I have had a woman expect me to open the door for her and get offended when I didn’t. I did ask her if she was disabled, maybe I could carry her purse for her as well? (So much for politeness I guess.)

    But since feminism is all about bringing women up and men down…who knows. Maybe it happened. 😉

  12. True story: I was in Austin attending a class on Gender Dynamics and as I held the door to the classroom open for the professor. She immediately stabbed me in the abdomen with her moustache brush, then summoned the rest of the “feministas” in the class to her side, and they pelted me with tampons.

  13. I don’t see any reason to think his story isn’t true. I mean, my dad once arrested a guy who had covered himself in tinfoil and refused to drink anything but Coca-Cola to protect himself from the “cosmic rays.” So there are weird people about.

    But, assuming the anecdote IS true, I find the “Hive Mind” assumption on the part of the raconteur irritating. Because one woman doesn’t respond well to something he does means ALL women wouldn’t respond well to what he does? You can’t describe women’s behavior like women are animals, yo: we’re not hamsters. When irritated, we do not all rear back and hiss.

    If we did, watching crowd behavior at sports games would be a lot more interesting, I think, though.

    And, I’m sorry, now we as a gender must answer for the behavior of a total stranger who happens to share our gender? Bite me.

    Yeah, holly, I know what you mean. I hold doors open for guys all the time–it’s a Whoever Gets to the Door First thing–and I’ve lost count of how many of them have been utterly flummoxed. Several have grabbed the door from my hands and insisted I go ahead; many have frozen, stunned, like deer–or hamsters–in headlights, totally bemused.

    The obvious conclusion, of course, is that all men are anti-feminists who refuse out of spite to go through doors opened for them by women.

  14. Pete, was that an active extension of “I bleed, therefore I am?”

    Perhaps. Or it could be that I re-watched “Carrie” the other night and that opening scene was still fresh in my mind.

  15. I consider myself a feminist, but I’ve never been offended by someone just being nice. I do, however, become very angry when people assume things about independent girls – When I got accepted to Smith College, I had a lot of guys ask me if I liked girls. I ended up not attending and going to a different school. Maybe a guy opening a door is a much more mild way of assuming something, but it’s pretty harmless in my opinion.

  16. I’m willing to believe that this guy’s story is true (it takes all kinds, and all); I’m a lot less willing to draw a single conclusion from it, while Cavuto seems to have no trouble at all drawing several. Heck – true story – a few months ago I ran into a Swedish immigrant who engaged me in conversation for an hour about how Canada sucks and the US rocks, and how the metric system is (I am not making this up) a liberal hippie communist plot to destroy America. I guess I could write an article about how the culture in Sweden produces paranoid, anti-Canadian SOB’s and sends them to Vancouver Island, but I don’t see the point.

  17. I totally find the story credible. I’ve moderated from full-on frontal absurd levels of finding courtesy an offensive insult calling me the weaker sex, but I’ve been there. I’ve given drop dead looks and refused to go thru doors and taken the door back from the man. I’d rather scrape the floor and break my back carrying a table myself than have a man help me.

  18. I think it’s a bit rich for a person to try to pen an incisive allegory on personal social experiences when a vast portion of society would immediately kick him in the balls if they ever saw him in the street.

  19. Honestly, this guy’s story was a revelation to me… Maybe it’s just the places I’ve lived but I’ve never seen this to be an issue. I open as many doors for other people (whether male or female) as are opened for me. I really haven’t given it much thought. If I get to a door first and other people are on their way in, I open the door for them. I frequently receive the same treatment from men and women – it’s not a chivalry issue, it’s a matter of common courtesy, imho. Maybe I’m living in a different world than this guy, but I truly haven’t noticed the door being that big of an issue one way or another. I really didn’t think something like that would be a big issue for anyone these days….

  20. My dad’s the kind of guy who likes to open doors for women, I’m guessing just because he’s always done it and because he feels its a polite thing to do. He said this has actually happened to him a few times, though not quite as rudely, where women give him a ‘what do you think you’re doing?!’ look when he goes to open the door. But his comment on it was pretty much ‘oh well…let them be mad’ because he’s not doing it from a condecending perspective and most women are fine with it or flattered thus so what if one woman a year makes a big deal out of him trying to be nice. And…I think he’s probably right that its not worth it to worry about one person overreacting once in a while. I mean…I’ve had people get mad at me for all sorts of silly reasons when I was just trying to be nice.

  21. I’ve never run across this problem, nor have any of my friends. I always open the door for people behind me, whether they are male or female, out of politeness. Plenty of people have done the same for me. What I see far more often are jerks who go through the door and keep on walking, leaving the door to nearly slam on my face. That is downright rude.

  22. Having never watched Cavuto’s show, I cannot comment on his “journalistic” “ethics” (oh, we’re going to need lots of quotation marks to discuss anything on FAUX Noise), but it strikes me as pure ballyhoo. I mean, is his ostensibly a news program? And if so, what the heck is he doing editorializing about doors and women and his own magnanimous gentlemanliness? Keerist, does anything resembling news make it on that channel?

    My guess is that since Shrill O’Lielly was off hunting falafels somewhere, Cavuto took it upon himself to hold the pro-woman torch up high.

    Okay, wait. That was all supposed to be in quotation marks. 🙂

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