Activity – Like a man

I want to introduce my experiences of how I could learn men's manner in the United States and try them for myself.

I think that there are the different etiquettes in Korea and America when people use public transportation. In Korea, men give their seats to not women but elderly people and pregnant women. Even though a young lady, wearing a short skirt and high-heels, stands next to a young man, he does not usually give his seat to the lady. It is not a required manner for a man. However, I realized that male students in America naturally give their seats to female students on shuttle buses to campus. The first time a strange student gave his seat to me, I said, “Oh, really? Thank you so much, but I am fine” because it was not a familiar situation for me. The problem was the student was obviously flustered. After that, whenever other male students yielded up their seats, I accepted it thankfully. As a foreigner, it seemed like very necessary manner of men and women in the United States.

The other thing is holding a door. I thought it is natural that a person who is close to the door holds it for other people who come in or out. Therefore, I usually hold doors for other people regardless whether they are my friends or not. But sometimes some men wait for me to come into the door first because I am a woman. In some cases, I tried to hold doors for men waiting for them to come in first, but in most cases, I failed. As expected, whenever I tried, I could see they felt curious about my action.

In these experiences, I think what men do and women to seem fixed. The interesting thing is that those fixed man jobs and woman jobs in America and Korea might be different slightly.