At Amherst, it is easy to forget that door-holding can be a controversial gesture. When opening a door involves typing in a high-security seven-digit number, it is downright rude not to hold the door open for anybody within a two-minute radius. To their credit, most people are often not guilty of such rudeness. But it is still just courtesy, and it would be silly to call it anything else, even if the holder happens to be male and the beneficiary female.

Door-holding is a degraded metaphor of the feminist movement, an action that used to have significance but no longer does. Often, degraded metaphors hurt, in the public consciousness, the ideas that they represent. A majority of people of both sexes have always considered it appropriate for men to hold doors open for women. For some time, a forceful minority saw and denounced this act as a form of male condescension. Now, that minority lives in places like Amherst and does not particularly care. If this is only about door holding at Amherst, the current state of affairs is justified. However, since this is about the larger issues that door-holding used to stand for, the current trend is quite disturbing.

Sex-specific door-holding is among the few surviving vestiges of chivalry in our society. Chivalry is obviously a bad thing, and I cannot imagine why anybody would approve of it. First of all, it is brutal and stupid. The knight-errant runs around proclaiming that his lady is the most beautiful one on earth and threatens all those who happen to disagree with physical force. His real-life equivalent, the strapping young man, threatens to "kick your ass" if you say anything uncomplimentary about his girlfriend. "Honor" is an ugly but integral part of chivalry. It is a surprisingly tenacious notion; a majority of my friends seem to think the strapping young man would be justified in threatening and attacking you. This is residual barbarism and it should have vanished with the Vikings.

Chivalric behavior is also extremely patronizing. A true gentleman protects his lady from the external world, both physically and mentally. Physical "protection" includes, but is hardly restricted to door-holding, bag-carrying and other simple acts. These are all things that any woman can do for herself, so the gesture is of no practical use and is condescending at best.

These aspects of chivalry are still disturbingly common, even though the metaphor is dead. Worse still, objecting to them is considered mildly absurd. Most women, even at Amherst, are "not feminists," generally because they consider feminists to be loud and aggressive. Women would be better off if all of them were loud pushy feminists, but any particular woman spoils her appeal by joining the movement, so she doesn't. If she needs an excuse for not being in the movement, she uses the legal fiction of the equality of the sexes-"hasn't feminism served its purpose, now that we're equal?"

This is unfortunate because the feminist movement has not by any means fulfilled its purpose. Despite the fairly sincere efforts of the government over the past 40 years, men still earn 25 percent more than women on average. This is not due primarily to open sexism; the main reasons are deeper and harder to solve-women quit earlier, change jobs more often and tend to work in professions with lower pay.

The most common excuse for the professional underperformance of women is that they are "less competitive" than men. This problem can be solved either by making work less competitive or by making women more competitive. The first solution seems to be the more popular one, even at Amherst. But it is a chivalrous solution and reeks of condescension. This attitude is similar to adults playing games against children: "we'll let you win, because you're cute and small and can't help being weak." There is also a danger that the other way will make women less "feminine," and most people of both sexes seem to dislike that thought. Both men and women have something at stake in defending traditional femininity: men because they benefit from the condition and women because they suffer from it. The obvious truth-that femininity is largely a social phenomenon engineered by the male sex for its own benefit-goes largely unnoticed.

Equal economic status cannot be bestowed on women; it must be earned. This is not to say that men cannot help the cause, or that they have any excuse for continuing to make economic equality difficult for women. But all that they can usefully do is to clear roadblocks and unlock doors. Dignity is a necessary precondition of equality, and dignity is impossible for those who do not control their own actions.