I have been riding the New York City Subway system since the 1960s and on my own since the 1970s. In my younger years, I would sometimes offer my seat to the elderly and to women I believed were pregnant, until I learned the hard way about the risk of wrongly assuming a woman is pregnant.
By the mid 1980s, I began noticing something. Women were rarely giving up their seats, even for the elderly or for pregnant women. And when they did, it was usually for an elderly woman, almost never for an elderly man. On the rare occasion they did give up their seat, they did it with an attitude, as if resenting the fact that no one else had done it first, as if they were performing some reluctant act of forced charity.
In all these decades, I have only counted three women who willingly gave their seat to an elderly man. Three. That is not an oversight, that is a pattern.
Today, when I give up my seat, I give it to elderly men. Sometimes I will give it to a man who looks like he has been through hell that day. I do not give it to women, because women have long abandoned the idea that respect and courtesy go both ways. If they cannot show it, they should not expect it.
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