Now, we are sure that if you have Architectural Classics handles on your door, you’ll be standing there holding it open for people who haven’t even entered the room yet (!), just for the pleasure of touching the gorgeous antiques a little longer.

A different proposition entirely though, are shop and public doors. In many things in life, there are two types of people in the world – those who will hold open a door for somebody behind them and those who simply let the door go as if the person weren’t there. This used to be a gender-assigned task – men were completely responsible for holding open doors for women, and a woman that held a door open for a man would cause a miniature riot around them! We must take into account the fact, though, that in the times this custom originates from, women often wore huge bustles and skirts with metal hoops in them … making it quite difficult to do things like open doors for yourself! Not to mention the corsets many women wore, which left you little lung power for doing anything other than basic subconscious bodily functions.

Nowadays few women have the problem of skirts with hoops! But how far has the attitude carried into popular culture? Do women still expect to have doors held open for them? Do men still feel the need to hold doors open for women (but perhaps not other men)? To find the answer, we went to the highest authority on this and many other subjects… the online community!

On Yahoo answers, 100% of people surveyed said that they hold doors open for people behind them. A large percentage of the respondents were female, though there were a few males in there. And some usernames that were a bit hard to call either way! Some people did qualify this with saying that they hold the door open for elderly people, kids, or people carrying things, but tend to ignore them otherwise. One person said that they hold the door open when people are older or younger than them, but not for their own age group – but nobody said that they hold the door only for women, or expect to have the door held for them simply because they are a woman. These results are exactly what you would expect from people using the internet, and especially forums like Yahoo answers though. The population is a little skewed. What do other people say on the subject?

One person from Texas A&M responding to a separate post on thebatt.com, says that saying women should always accept having doors opened for them, or people’s seats on buses, implies that they are deficient somehow. Only a university student could make this leap of logic … and then use it to attack somebody with a positive point 

On askmetafilter.com (the subtitle of the website is ‘Querying the Hive Mind’ … fascinating!), someone asks a similar question. Ther are some really classic and really interesting answers on here. A pertinent one is from fuzzbean – “I certainly don’t expect people to hold doors for me because I have boobs”. That sort of sums up the modern position on many things, which extends equitably to doors. There is also a much larger range of geographic positions of respondents on this site (or at least, people talk more freely about where they are located). People notice the phenomenon in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, that doors are held open regardless of gender, which never seems to enter into the rude/not rude debate. However, another young lady who lives in the ‘quasi-South’ of America, says that she had to get used to not having doors held for her when she went to college elsewhere in the country. Some of the other great comments on here included “a lot of times when guys complain about these types of social pressures, for the guy to pay for the date, opening the car door, etc. it’s really the guy who’s enforcing these actions, most younger women don’t really care…most”. Also “I politely open the door for whomever is nearby regardless of age/race/sex. It is just the polite thing to do. Sometimes it is easier to open the door and let them go through. Other times it makes more sense to pause a moment to hold the door for them as they walk through behind me.” Another one which pretty much summed up everybody’s sentiments.

Then again, muddgirl on askmetafilter.com also has a great point … “Wow, I think some people think about this too much!”

Photo credits: Open Door Policy by kaneblues

          

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