The use of phrase "I treat you like a lady" is hypocritical in the modern western society

Pro said: "What do people want? I argue, that they want to:-be proper, thus acting in accordance with societal conditioning which devides everything into proper and improper, acceptable and not acceptable - just as their parents told them to do when they were kids. Yes indeed. There is good and bad behavior, with its subtle insistence on hierarchy and status. I wouldn't say that this is hypocritical unless people are insisting that there is no class difference. However, using words such as "lady" seems to recognize these distinctions, which is not then hypocritical. -using the term "lady" also elevates them into a setting where they consider themselves "a lady" or "a gentleman", thus psychologically raising their status in their eyes (even if the status is anachronistic)I disagree with this. I don't think that saying you are treating someone "like a lady" is implying that you, the speaker, are a lady. Or even that they are a lady. Rather, that you are treating them in a way that a lady would be treated. Consider the phrase, "she treated me like a dog". There is no implication that "she" is a dog herself or even that the speaker is a dog - only that he was treated in a manner that is usually reserved for dogs. It's a comparison, and a description. That's why it doesn't really matter if society has moved on from the days of ladies and gentlemen. Companies can treat employees like serfs. Men can have chest hair like woolly mammoths. It's the idea that matters. -get certain results and favours from the person who they refer to as "a lady". Be it sexual favours, a feeling of guilt, or a feeling of being obliged for all of the "treating like lady". "I don't know enough about social history to know if people treated ladies well in the olden days because they wanted something from them. It seems highly likely though, especially the middle and lower classes who probably wanted her patronage, cachet and money. Therefore, I don't think it's necessarily hypocritical to say you're treating someone like a lady when you want something from her. Pro argues that treating someone "like a lady" is manipulative. This may be so. Most of our social actions are intended to affect others and to elicit responses from them. This is different from being hypocritical, which means pretending to be something you are not, especially pretending to have virtues that you don't have. It would be hypocritical to say you treated someone like a lady if you obliged her to sit on a dirty floor and eat meat with her bare hands, for example. One might argue - as early feminists did - that society itself was manipulating higher class women to be too dependent and refined and thereby was reducing their scope of activity and influence. Therefore, it is entirely consistent to be treating someone like a lady in order to gain influence over them in some way. SummaryWe know what it means to treat someone "like a lady". It means to treat a woman in a polite, respectful way that it suitable for a high status woman. That is the idea, and as words are used to communicate ideas, it is not hypocritical to use those words if that is what you mean.