When we’re young, we don’t think much about how we learn what we learn. We just learn.

But while writing She’s Such A Liar: Incest, Power & Knowledge and reading about the whole structure of unequal social relations and prejudicial ideologies that support and maintain patriarchal culture, I remember thinking quite a bit about how I learned that there was a lot more than clothes that divided girls from boys.

For instance, to make ends meet, during the Depression, my grandmother decided to write an etiquette book.

Among other useful tips, Nonny told readers that soup should be spooned away from you (please note dear readers that ice cream, however, should be eaten toward you); that ice in tea should be stirred sparingly to avoid “annoyance to others;” and that the only proper way to consume an olive was via knife and fork.

Nonny’s etiquette guide included rules for behavior as well. When sitting down at table, men were required to enter their chairs from the right. But ladies were required to enter their seats from the left.

While I vaguely understood that my grandmother was trying to help my brothers and sister and me become proper members of society, to win a station in life via our manners, the left rule never sat well with me. By the time the chair rule was required of me, I had already learned that left was associated with sinister things, wicked people, and deviance. And, along the way, I had also learned that “Arabs” (a composite term used to describe all unfathomably and somewhat repulsively different people back then) use their left hands to wipe their bums.

Yuck. Who wanted to be connected with that kind of stuff?

While I have given up the habit of entering my seat from the left (most nights, I’m more likely to climb over the back of my couch and settle in with my bowl dinner in front of a baseball game or a novel), what I have never lost sight of are the fundamental lessons the chair rule taught me. First, my grandmother’s rule taught me that there is something inherently bad, even evil, about women. Second, I learned that there was something very “other” about women, as with the “Arabs.”