TRUTH: Chivalry is Dead

For any curious new pregnant ladies, or women for whom pregnancy may be on the horizon: If you think that your protruding pregnant belly and cute waddle will afford you extra politeness and courtesy from other people (strangers) you're WRONG. No, no, even the men will ignore your condition with absurd indifference.

Alex and I were waiting in line for something a few weeks ago, outdoors, and along the line were a few benches. Not a single person offered to get up for me. (Pictures will be posted soon to show how painfully obvious my pregnant belly is.) "In Mexico, every one of these guys would have gotten up for you by now," he commented. Yes, even young, military-level-fit men were sitting and pretending not to see me. It has also happened in restaurants waiting for our table. Normally I don't mind too much (Alex gets more disgusted than I do - I have less and less expectations of people as I get older haha). I don't expect the world to revolve around this baby bump just because my world does. But it is interesting to observe - they don't just not give way - they purposely avoid eye contact, as if they know they should offer to get up and feel bad not doing it - oh but not bad enough to do it.

Every day at work, walking on a (fairly wide) sidewalk, I always walk all the way to the right side of the walkway. People walking in groups or just walking in the middle generally don't want to give way. Men and women alike. Mind you, on one side of the sidewalk is bushes and on the other is sand. People unapologetically bump into me as we pass, or will only move more to their half of the sidewalk if I literally stop walking and stand still (even then they sometimes still bump into me). And when they do bump into me, about 50% of the time I'll get nasty looks, as if because I'm in uniform and at work, by default I should be the one to jump into the bushes to get out of their way.

Today at work on our trolley a man sat in the reserved-for-escort seat, and his 12ish-year-old son sat across the aisle from him directly behind the driver. Both chairs are designed to seat two people. When I asked them to sit together so that I could sit in my reserved-for-escort seat, both of them looked at me blankly at first and then grumbled. They were seated and I was standing during this short exchange, which put the Bella Belly more or less at eye-level. This was after I had seated myself on the ground of the trolley riding between one stop and the next to test if either one of them would move on their own.

I have joked that women want equal rights which apparently includes the death of the expectation that men will give up seats for us, open doors for us, blahblah. In general, I feel that chivalry like this is nice but more like a "bonus." It's just that sometimes it's amazing how completely self-centered and inconsiderate people can be, and knowingly so. Sad truth.