I guarantee this is true. My generation (50s) and older have dealt with a barrage of these aggressions (micro and macro) our whole lives. Most of them we had to shrug off as ‘that’s the way it goes’. So I do understand that our more senior members may feel like the rules have changed and now suddenly all these harmless things are now considered wrong. I would counter: the rules were always there–it was always wrong. We just didn’t have the voice / the power to enforce them.
Personally I’m glad the coming generations are refusing to shrug it off, and calling it out for what it is.
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Okay and I don’t necessarily have an issue with manners per se, I’m gonna explain further down in this post more what I meant and note that, in this case for me this was really situational.
Honestly I don’t discriminate when I hold a door, if someone’s very close behind me, I’ll hold it for them regardless of gender presentation. Never had a guy personally when I happen to have held a door for him make much a fuss over it. Vice versa I 99.999999% of the time don’t have an issue with a guy holding a door for me. I also will generally hold it e.g. for an elderly person close behind me and that’s as much a holdover from growing up with a Grandma who was well into her 70s when I was born as anything else. I have been groused at for holding a door once by an elderly man with a cane but the grousing was b/c I was wearing a mask and he was one of the anti-mask type idiots, not b/c I was holding the door. 
Okay - now onto my bigger point, apologies for my post being long. 
In general I have zero issues with someone holding a door for me. In the situation I related above, I found it a little weird b/c the two men did kind of make a show of it the first time (I was barely up and putting my coat on and they were already over there holding the doors, plus, these guys weren’t like, regular ol’ cops, one was the county sheriff and the other was his jail commander and in the second scenario it was the sheriff. Both are long since out of their respective positions in the community.) and in the second example, the guy had to literally turn back around and go back to the door specifically to hold it for me as I walked in, going out of his way to do so as he left right after that (he’d seen me walking up to the coffee shop as he was heading out and wanted to tell me about something). It wasn’t the holding the door but rather making SUCH a point of doing so that struck me as weird. I don’t interpret holding a door as a diss unto itself 99% of the time.
And yeah I felt it might be a smidge sexist b/c I can’t imagine either man doing this for just some random dude they didn’t know. I ultimately had dealt with both of these guys enough professionally to have a decent sense of their personality. Neither were creeps, I didn’t see eye to eye w/one of them politically, I was sure (probably not the other either, but he was a lot more reserved/quiet in personality from what I observed), but outwardly both were friendly enough to deal with as press.
Too, this was me speaking more about a specific case, again, most of the time I have zero problems with holding doors or with someone else holding doors it was truly just a thought of, “I doubt this guy would do this to this degree for a man.” (again, the one at one point had to literally go out of his way to do so and my hands were nooooooooot that full). I feel like this snowballed into a bigger COTH tangent than I intended and just want to really emphasize that I generally don’t find good manners or being something of a gentleman an issue, just this specific case…honestly in the moment I found it more amusing than anything and was not at any point like, icked out, I just felt like it is an example of a type of sexism we maybe don’t always think about consciously.
I sure as heck ain’t generally going to complain if someone holds a door for me if they’re not making a huge point of it and probably not even if they are making a huge point of it b/c it ain’t worth it to chide someone for generally having decent manners. I just was like, “thinking back, that’s kinda sexist in its own regard just in a different way.”
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Seconding this! Hope everything has continued going well for you, OP!
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He sure does!
I don’t consider men who follow Jordan Peterson and the like men. They are man-babies and not who I was referring to when I said they can’t win.
@forfeit thanks for explaining further. I totally get it now and I’m sorry for misunderstanding your original comments on the subject.
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Hey no problem, it wasn’t just you and I just wanted to clarify generally that it was more a person-specific situation and something that came as much from knowing the two people involved somewhat and it just struck me as a “I bet this guy wouldn’t hold a door for a man to this extent.” I mean, maybe they would, but I never saw either of 'em do it and I saw them both at that coffee shop quite a bit.
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I’m from the Midwest myself and feel like everyone holds the door for everyone around here if you’re like, close behind or what have you and we all generally say “thanks” or maybe nod our head at the absolute worst, but we’re generally not all showy about it.
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How did this discussion come down to holding doors open for dozens of posts? 
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Weird tangent…and yeah let’s move it on. I saw it kept going on that tangent and I’m like, “okay, forfeit ya might wanna clarify.” 
Think we can hit the 500 post mark with this thread?
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Okay I’ll help. This whole “holding doors open” tangent somehow has stuck in my head these past several days. The most common place I am at where people hold doors is our local post office. I’ve held doors for others, they’ve held doors for me. Smile say thanks and move right along. Nothing else necessary.
OTOH, I recently had my truck in a service shop. Not a big dealer-type place, a local shop the kind where “everybody knows your name” and every time I talked to the guy on the phone he kept calling me “dear”, and all I could do was think of this thread. And no, he does NOT know me, LOL. I wondered what would happen when I went in to pick the truck up. I have a pretty good RBF I am told, even tho I’m not one. He was chatty, on topic, didn’t call me dear, end of subject.
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Doing my part toward the 500 milestone…
Worked as a travel agent for a few years. Loved everything about it except for a masher of a client who called anyone with girl parts, “Honey.”
He also was super needy. For instance, he had to have ridiculously fancy, expensive rental cars, regardless of middle-of-nowhere destinations, and was LOUD when he didn’t get his way.
Super tall and handsome-ish for an old dude, he worked as an artist and children’s book illustrator, so had lots of access to younger women. I miss the patient, competent women in that office; I do not miss him.
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OK, helping to get to 500: I’ve also been thinking about people who hold doors and the like. It reminded me of an experience I had in a London tube station. We were coming from Heathrow, going to the apartment we rented, with a ton of luggage (DH, DD and me), My suitcase was very heavy due to all the crap I have to bring with me: CPAP, meds, etc. Of course there was no escalator. DH and DD had their hands full, so I was struggling up the stairs with my suitcase (stairs without something heavy to carry are hard enough for me). All of a sudden it got lighter–huh? A man had seen me struggling and picked up the other end to help me get up the stairs. I was so grateful. It never crossed my mind that it could be nefarious–he was just being a nice human being.
Rebecca
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Why does this thread need to get to 500 posts?
Especially posts straying farther from the very important purpose & point of this thread?
This just doesn’t seem to be the time or place … to me, anyway.
Plus the thread keeps showing new activity that has nothing to do with the thread, just when we hope to hear back from the OP.
But whatever. It’s the internet. It’s social media.
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I agree…I keep thinking OP has an update, only to scroll down several debates that stray from the purpose of the original post. My question is also…why?
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It doesn’t, but thanks for the addition to the count? lol
We may never hear back from the OP. I hope we do so that we can offer congrats or further support or whatever she may need, but chances are we won’t.
However, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the OP, not only for sharing her problem and accepting our advice and encouragement so graciously, but also for her topic opening up a bunch of other interesting topics within it. There is a LOT of stuff behind/around the original topic and it’s refreshing (and yes, somewhat depressing) and needed to talk about some of it.
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Doing my part to make it to 500:
My DH would hold doors open for me all the time, car doors, doors to stores, etc. Not every time but a lot and not because I can’t, it’s just the way he was raised. I didn’t mind and I still hold doors for people, it’s just what I do. I dislike it when I hold the door for a friend and 10 people come in behind them without even a thank you or even look at me, like I’m the doorperson at Red Robin or something.
Last time some random man told me to smile was about 4 years ago. I was walking to the bus stop on the streets of Seattle after work and some stranger said “Smile.” I said no and then he threw some nasty comment back at me. I was 59 years old at the time, do I think some schmuck gets to tell me to what to do with my face? I just kept walking. Probably called me a stuck up bitch or something equally classy. My mouth turns down naturally and I had to remind myself to walk around with an expression that wasn’t natural for me to avoid someone telling me to smile.
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OP, not sure what you decided to do, but I can relate and wanted to share a personal experience that might motivate you to speak up. When I was a freshman in college, a member of the dining hall staff singled me out and would always talk to me. It wasn’t weird at first, but it became progressively more awkward and uncomfortable. I started to avoid that dining hall and would walk well out of the way to a different dining hall across campus. A friend encouraged me to report something, but I thought that would be unfair to the guy. I was very concerned about his job, for some reason. I didn’t want to cause trouble for him.
The next semester, a girl in my dorm also mentioned the same guy was giving her problems, and instead of validating her concerns, I just advised her to do what I was doing. Go to a different dining hall, avoid the weird guy, don’t cause trouble. For 4 years!
Then, a couple years after I graduated, I saw a news report that the police had arrested a university employee who tried to abduct a student at knifepoint. Luckily she fought him off, but there was duct tape and more weapons in his car. This employee? Worked in the dining hall. 
I’m so glad nothing happened to that girl, and idk what would have happened if I had spoken up sooner—if he would have lost his job, or faced closer scrutiny around his interactions with female students, or even if he would have snapped and come after me (which to be fair, could be why I felt such a strong instinctive impulse not to speak up)—but it just made me realize how often our intuition about dangerous situations is correct, and it’s unwise to overrule that and continue putting yourself at risk.
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Although we all know that we swim in patriarchy, you’re right, it does my heart good to hear others’ tales of woe and intrigue, especially if they have a not-tragic end. The OP, and the rest of us, can see, that regardless of our preferred solutions, we’ve all been there.
Gah! The “Smile” dudes used astonish me. A coach at a rural high school where I taught in the 90s used to command certain HS girls to smile in crowded hallways until a few of us younger teachers took him aside.
More recently, I heard it less and less as my middle-age invisibility cloak improved into my late 50s.
Since 2020, wearing an n95 in public over the last three years, it has stopped completely. I call that a win.
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This will probably be my last update in this thread but since people were curious, the employee has been terminated. Thank you to everyone who provided great advise and personal stories!
I am so glad the situation was taken seriously and that I was able to protect myself and potentially others. It’s like a weight off my shoulders.
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I am so thankful you updated us.
I hope you continue to enjoy your horse time, now with no worries from this out of line person.
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