I watched her point and roll her eyes and look embarrassed. It was a crack in her usual façade of impeccable properness and good manners. She was irritated that her 80 year-old partner, who experienced some incontinence was dribbling a bit while he tried to rush to the bathroom, frantically pushing his walker ahead of him in this losing race. “He does that on purpose,” she said inexplicably. As if he had some master plan to make her life more difficult by getting a few drops of urine on his pants. In truth, it was so ingrained in her that men don’t piddle their pants, that she needed to make an excuse to let everyone know she knew better. She needed to separate herself from him. She was no longer his ally since he could not perform proper good manners. She needed everyone to know that she, unlike her partner with the enlarged prostate, was a proper person who would never make such a social faux pas.
In truth, under the properly dressed and coifed exterior and the good manners, she was still just that immature mean girl from middle school. And it was coming out as her partner became more and more disabled. Her manners that she depended on to get her through any situation in life with grace, were failing her. And there wasn’t too much left underneath.
This is why I hate manners.
But lets get a few things straight, first. Manners are social norms and rules that should not be confused with kindness, compassion and consideration. It may be that the Venn diagram between “manners” and “kindness” overlap at times, but they are not the same thing. I am not against kindness and consideration. I am not against manners when they are used as tools to be kind and considerate. But they are tools. They are not moral qualifiers.
Manners are almost entirely social constructs. There is really no universal “good manners.” They are not static and evolve with time and place. Manners used to mean that woman wore corsets, gloves and petticoats when going out. They no longer need to do this. It used to mean a black person gave up their seat for a white person. We now see this not as good manners but as oppressive behavior. Manners in different cultures and geographic locations are also different. Many Muslims do not shake hands with their right hand. Swedish folks are less likely to find kindness in a total stranger’s uninvited small talk than we do in the U.S. Chinese folks line up ahead of getting on the bus instead of clamoring on willy-nilly like we do in the US.
These types of manners and conventions have their place in society. They help people to connect more comfortably and to know what to do and what to expect in new situations. Manners make it so every new interaction isn’t as if you’ve met an alien from another planet with no idea how to behave. They can bring people together, show respect, and smooth social awkwardness. Manners and social conventions are constantly being negotiated by society as a whole. They change slowly, and they often change when someone breaks convention and gets socially punished for it, until everyone slowly accepts the new convention and finds it’s actually preferable to the old way. All of this is normal and culturally healthy.
But “good manners,” like anything, can be abused. Sometimes people lean on good manners and proper convention so hard, they become weaponized instruments of exclusion and oppression. Manners are tools, not moral imperatives like kindness. Many times, the ones who are hit hardest by the weaponization of good manners are those already marginalized. It used to not be good manners to socialize with a person of a different race. This issue was life threatening to black Americans. People were murdered over it. Women in some cultures are still murdered if they walk down the street and talk to another man without a father, brother or husband escorting them. Transgender and nonbinary folks still face violence today for using certain pronouns, wearing certain clothing or going to the “wrong” bathroom. Weaponizing manners and norms sometimes have life or death consequences.
But I’d like to talk about how “good manners” harm and exclude disabled people, because that is the community I know best. Disabled people have a long social history of being hidden away in institutions or almshouses because they did not look or act conventional. “Ugly Laws” in several states were on the books as recently as 1974. They made it illegal for those who looked or acted in unconventional ways could be arrested just for walking down the street. Blind folks did not move correctly, folks with facial deformities were deemed illegal for just being seen. People who maybe could not behave with conventionally—aka with proper manners—could be arrested. Proper, well mannered people were not to be subjected to any social unpleasantness. And this unpleasantness was conflated with low morals and even thought to be inspired be Satanic and evil forces.
Today, it is much harder to arrest folks for how they look or if they act unconventionally. However, I still see examples time and time again of disabled folks being excluded and harmed by people who lean in to their good manners as if they hold some kind of moral high ground.
As I talked about in my last post, blind people are often accosted on the street for merely walking. I am not talking so much about well-intentioned people who just ask us if we need any help, although that is how some of it starts. I am talking about people who do not listen when we say we are fine, grab our bodies and pull us around obstacles, yell that we shouldn’t be out alone, even call the police on us. This is not because of some well-intentioned worry for our well being, this is because people don’t find how we MOVE to be proper. We do often move differently, tapping a white cane into an obstacle and walking around it, reaching out to feel for a door, or using our feet to find the start of a flight of stairs. We move unconventionally, and so people who see themselves as the arbiters of what is proper and well-mannered don’t want to see us on the street.
I have heard of blind kids who want to be in a school play, but are told they can’t because they won’t be able to hit a mark on the stage. But we can hit marks, we just have to do it in the unconventional way in which we move. But that would upset the audience, so kids are often excluded from drama. This is not because they are blind, this is because of people’s over sensitivity to manners.
The same goes for kids with autism who may flap their hands or have poor eye contact or not use vocal communication in the conventional way. People exclude them not because an autistic person can’t enjoy or benefit from a particular activity, but because social convention and manners calls for a way of behaving that will not make anyone even slightly uncomfortable. I know people with cerebral palsy, which can cause unconventional movements, getting denied jobs because their bodies and how they moved would be “upsetting to customers.” And make no mistake, being uncomfortable at difference and using that as a reason to exclude is a social convention-a manner- that we have chosen to accept as a society. We could choose to look at difference as a chance to learn and get over our discomfort. But that is not the manner we have often chosen. Society has decided that it is a better convention to just exclude those people.
Disabled people can even hurt themselves by being too bogged down by manners. There are many disabled people, a large amount are elderly, who just stop participating in life when they can no longer function in ways that ensure to the outside world that they have good and proper manners. I’ve seen elderly folks shut themselves in because they can no longer wear make up or do their hair like they used to be able to. Or, go to the bathroom in the usual way. They refuse to ask for help or find alternative ways to do things or simply change their priorities. They often say they have lost their “dignity.” Dignity is not about how you walk, dress or do your hair. Dignity is about being the best person you can be. People are born with inherent dignity. Disability cannot take dignity away.
I am constantly shocked by how what method is used to go to the bathroom is so conflated with “dignity.” And how often “dignity” is confused with “manners.” Often, this is the issue cited when people talk about assisted suicide. We all need to relieve ourselves. That just is. There is no morality to it. As a society, we have an infrastructure set up to use toilets. That is one way to do it. There are many others. Leaking and incontinence can be very inconvenient and physically uncomfortable. That is a physical reality. It should not be so fraught with emotional baggage. Thankfully, there are products and systems that help deal with incontinence. Once the right solution is found, it doesn’t have to be a big issue anymore. Even then, every once in a while there might be an accident. It is not a moral failing. It is not an embarrassment. It has nothing to do with dignity. Beyond hygiene, it has nothing to do with manners. It is either caused by a temporary illness or a permanent disability. It should not be cause for an inability to live life to the fullest and certainly shouldn’t be a cause to institutionalize someone or to end their life.
When I heard the woman make constant polite yet passively cruel comments about the elderly man and his incontinence, there was a part of me that said “what a bitch” under my breath. But soon after, I just felt sorry for her, because she is aging, too. It is 100% guaranteed that she will also lose her ability to maintain her good manners in the future, and it will be hard on her without some real foundation in love and kindness to back it up. They could throw out convention and good manners, accept where things are in life without being saddled with some false morality about it and enjoy life as much as possible—finding solutions and getting help when they need it. But instead, she is holding on so hard to her idea of what is proper and her good manners that she is going to fight an uphill battle that they won’t win, and make every second of it harder than it needs to be.
Good health and ability is always fleeting. It will never last. There is always disability and illness to deal with. That can be hard enough. There is not reason to bog it down with useless social conventions and false morality. We need to change our “good manners” to be not so much about making things look polite and proper so no one will ever feel uncomfortable. Manners should not be about using the proper fork or knowing what Mrs. Manners would say in every situation by heart. Those things are just an empty drama in a bad play. We need manners to that accept difference and a little awkwardness as normal, and to work through issues with honest communication and compassion. We need our good manners to not be shallow conventions with nothing behind them. The Venn diagram between manners and kindness and consideration should be overlapping circles. Good manners should never be about appearances, but about truly being kind and considerate in everything we do, even when—especially when—we are faced with difference.
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