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Pentashagon comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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Were they really? Here in France, when you meet a woman you kiss her on the cheek, but when you meet a man you shake his hand; you use different pronouns ("vous" or "tu" - cognates to "you" and "thou" in English) depending on the relative status of your interlocutor (and other things); in many western countries (the US more than France; though it seems) it still seems expected for a man to buy an overpriced piece of rock to the woman he's planning to marry and not the other way around, etc. - we have plenty of rules that depend on gender! (probably more than on class)
I think that what happened is that there was an effort to increase fairness by removing some discriminating rules, which meant those rules became weaker, but also more likely to be tacit: since Victorian society didn't consider gender equality to be a major principle, there wasn't anything wrong with spelling out the norms that regulated gender relations (unless they went against other values of the time). Now nobody wants to sound sexist; so people have to figure the rules out on their own.
Is it a social blunder not to kiss a woman on the cheek when you meet her? On the same level as asking her out in an elevator at 4 AM? To be honest I'm not sure how strict the rules of etiquette were in the old days, but I think there's a distinction between customs and etiquette. Customs are things most people do and are comfortable with and no one really objects. Not following expected etiquette causes discomfort and potentially emotional harm.
I wonder how much influence etiquette has on a man buying a diamond for a woman and how much influence marketing has. In fact, I wonder just how much of our current etiquette (or at least our customs) has been caused directly by marketing and popular entertainment. I suspect we treat each other a lot like we see people being treated on TV and in movies, rather than how they would like to be treated.
As I understand it, the use of diamonds in engagement and wedding rings was the result of an advertising campaign by DeBeers, but I'd say they actually managed to establish a custom-- one which would endure for quite a while even if DeBeers ceased to exist. It might even endure in the highly unlikely event that advertising ceased to exist.
Not really a social blunder, just possibly slightly awkward, depending of the context. When I arrived in France as a little kid I found all that kissing disgusting and recoiled when someone would try to kiss me on the cheek. I later forced myself to suffer the ordeal in order to fit in socially. Now it's pretty much a habit, so I wouldn't be surprised if I eventually accidentally creeped out an American girl by kissing her on the cheek.