this makes me want to visit Japan, since I almost always have pain from sitting in any public place which makes me choose between being able to sit all the way back but then my legs dangle, or having my feet on the floor but then I’m on the edge of the chair. (When I got to movies, etc, I have started bringing a pillow to put behind me)
I keep meaning to get a folding footstool – and then to remember to take it with me if I expect to be sitting anywhere for a while.
Sometimes there’s a stack of old chairs someplace; if I can find one of those, they may be the right height. Old chairs are often lower to the ground, as people used to on average be shorter. But by now the old chairs have usually been discarded, or maybe locked up in the basement someplace and forgotten.
The planning board did eventually get adjustable chairs! maybe because the town had gotten tired of my determinedly hunting down one of the old ones, after they gave us “new-and-improved” non-adjustable taller chairs a few years before the adjustable ones appeared.
Omg, yes!! At work, I sit in a chair that’s too low for the desk just so my feet reach the floor. I use a raised foot thing, but it’s a poor sop at best. I do use your back pillow idea at work. And don’t get me started on counter-height chairs at restaurants and pubs - they’re torture. At least I don’t have to sit on a phone book in cars any more, like I used to have to in the 1970s (and I was a whole 5’2-1/2" back then, which wasn’t even unusually short in the area I lived in!)
I can totally appreciate what extra-tall women and men must have to endure in airplanes.
I really don’t understand the appeal of those tall chairs.
The tall chairs allow the seated people to be closer to the same height as someone standing up, so they’re more useful in bars/pubs where people mingle around the room.
Yes, yes, yes!!! I’ll always wait for another table if all they have is seating with barstools. None of them fit me right. Either my legs dangle, and the backs of my thighs are in pain from the edge of the stool seat, or my legs dangle so my back starts killing me.
Good points, both.
I suspect that “tight enough to prevent botulism” and “too tight for a woman to open” are distinct thresholds, by the way.
Not really.
One thing being a systemic problem is not excused by the existence of other systemic problems in the world. Nor is it useful to attempt to pit ableism against sexism.
The point I was trying to make was that although jar lids are tight for a reason, that reason doesn’t apply to most other things – including the tools available to help open jar lids.
Ah. I didn’t see it as pitting one against the other, but as both issues being part of a larger problem with a subset of people setting a standard without considering the full spectrum of humanity. If it was an attempt to diminish the problem of sexism by “whatabouting” with ableism, then I reject that diminishment
And I apparently misunderstand you too - sorry about that.
Great post!
Apologies unnecessary but I realize it’s what we women do sometimes to soften our message.
The toughest stuck lid I ever came across was on a single serve bottle of applejuice. My kid took it to school and no one could open it not even the 200# foot players. She brought it home and it was still not budging. Got the pliers out and mangled the screw top lid destroying it. Defective definitely.
Colorblind people are not more than half the population of the world. That is what makes women as a class different than any other population the world isn’t built for.
oddly, I just ran into a podcast called Visible Women, by Caroline Criado-Perez the author of the 2019 book Invisible Women.
Just glancing at it I see that if a woman is in car crash she is 17% more likely to die than a man in the same crash.
Color blindness affects a minority of people; average height of women vs. men affects roughly half the people. Perhaps you can see the difference.
And a big part of that is because in designing vehicle safety tests, they only used male crash test dummies. The first female crash test dummy wasn’t designed until 2022.
Does she sing “Fff Fff Fff Fff”?
Although, to be fair, dgy has a point that the same sort of oblivious and lazy “default” thinking is at work in both kinds of bad-design scenarios.
Male designers socialized to think of men as the “default” human individual are reflexively designing for men, in the same way that non-color-vision-deficient designers are reflexively designing for the non-color-vision-deficient user.
ISTM that the most important issue is not how big a population somebody is ignoring with their particular “default” design choices, but whether a designer has the awareness and ingenuity to think beyond the “default” and come up with designs that really do satisfy a wide diversity of user needs.
Hah! Love it!
Pickle jar lids and shelf heights aside, I kind of feel like the problem the OP describes is not really a mainstream one. I’m about the OP’s age and it’s been my experience that most people in life “engage in emotional involvement with women” as one would expect them to. They date, some get married, sometimes it doesn’t work out, they date again.
What the OP describes is a world of crazy people where seemingly normal interactions might be met with unpredictable, agenda-driven responses.
I would submit that making casual conversation leading up to asking a woman out is perfectly normal behavior. Not being a psychic, I have occasionally misjudged whether a woman was actually interested in going on a date.
But once a woman has expressed a lack of interest, the appropriate thing to do is move on and keep any future conversations legitimately casual and “on point”.
Also, many people might not feel comfortable in or want to date the sort of person who goes to such singles venues. Not that there’s anything wrong with them in and of themselves, but they tend to focus more on short-term style of relationship,
Case in point, if every time I started a conversation with a woman I was treated like a rapist / murderer and lambasted with a diatribe on the patriarchy and whatnot in a manner that @Moonrise describes, I might also choose to disengage from women.
Hopefully that doesn’t represent the vast majority of women any more than angry incels fuming away in their basement engaging in the online “manosphere” represents most men,
I agree. I feel like being in the grocery store, seeing a woman who appears to be single (no ring, etc.) and striking up a conversation, even one as lame as “Do you know if I should get yellow or white onions for hamburgers?” is innocent. If she doesn’t seem interested in talking, let it drop. If she answers and seems friendly, introduce yourself and say something to keep the conversation going- maybe why you’re cooking burgers, for example. If that works, keep on going. If not, then let it go.
Nothing creepy, nothing pick-upish, just a conversation. And if things turn out, then ask for a phone number/coffee date or something similarly low-stakes.
That’s all I’m talking about- it’s super easy, and I’ve done it plenty of times just for legitimate advice at the store. Like - “Hey- is X a good brand of detergent? I’ve always gone with Y, but wondered about X” and then see what they say. Some people aren’t social and react weirdly when you talk to them, but the vast majority are friendly and will answer your question.