“Years ago you knew who the bad girls were,” a woman close to me once noted. “Now you know who the good girls are.” For this we can thank the virtue destroyers, and they’ve just struck again, pressuring a Texas school into removing from a wall a quotation encouraging girls to be ladies.
“‘The more you act like a lady, the more he’ll act like a gentleman,’ the quote read, according to a tweet posted by Lisa Beckman on Friday,” reports USA Today.
“Beckman said the quote was found at Gregory-Lincoln Middle School in Houston Independent School District. Students in kindergarten through 8th grade attend the school, according to its website,” the paper continued (Beckman’s tweet below).
The quotation is attributed to Sydney Biddle Barrows, a controversial businesswoman dubbed the “Mayflower Madam” and convicted of promoting prostitution in 1985 after being accused of running an escort service. But it wasn’t the dubious reputation of the line’s author that raised ire; rather, the quotation was slammed on social media for being “sexist,” misogynistic, for shaming girls, and for telling them they’re responsible for boys’ behavior
Unfortunately, it didn’t take the school long to fold like a cheap tent. Hours after Beckman’s tweet began making waves, the school removed the quotation. It issued the following statement according to KHOU 11 News: “Please be advised that the quote on the wall of Gregory Lincoln PK-5 Education Center has been removed. Overnight, the wall decal letters were taken down, the wall was floated out, and new slab of drywall was installed and painted.” And the cultural revolution rolls on.
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As is standard today, people busied themselves characterizing the quotation with all the fashionable “ists,” but didn’t ask the only relevant question: Is it true?
In reality, we all influence others’ behavior with our own. “Laughter is contagious,” as is said, and so are other behaviors. Rudeness usually begets rudeness and kindness often begets kindness. Virtues are caught more than they’re taught, which is why the examples we set matter. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer is supposed to be “Yes.”
One Twitter respondent opined that the quotation should read, “The more you teach boys to respect girls, the more he’ll act like a gentleman.” This misses the point. Of course, boys should be thus instructed, but it’s not a one-way street.
Consider: Children should be taught to respect their elders, in particular their parents and authority figures. But will respect ultimately be shown if those adults act like boorish oafs, being lewd, crude, and vulgar?
The rule is simple: To command respect you must be respectable. This goes for everyone — parents, children, boys, and girls — and this was part of the wisdom behind the maligned quotation. Each sex encourages gentility in the other by displaying the quality itself.
Okay, but then why, as some critics complained, did the quotation focus only on girls? First, different messages are directed at different groups, and boys get their messages, too (though, lamentably, they’re not always the right ones today). There’s something even more significant, however, and it’s a testimonial to our intellectual degradation that it even need be said.
Boys and girls are different.
Very different.
And the truth is that if girls don’t put the brakes on sexual behavior — insofar as adults aren’t doing it (e.g., chaperoning) — there’ll be no brakes at all.
It’s tiring explaining the obvious (like arguing with people who insist 2+2=5), but sex drive is related to testosterone levels, which are approximately 20 times higher in men than in women. Moreover, a male’s levels are greatest between the ages of 14 and 17. The point?
Adolescent boys’ libidos are sky high, dwarfing those of girls. If girls are sexually available, boys will respond. It’s that simple, and denying this truth is dangerous willful ignorance.
It’s also why the illegitimacy rate has skyrocketed from approximately four percent in the 1940s to 40 percent today. It’s why the pregnancy rate on naval vessels, where young men and women live in close quarters, is so high that they’ve been dubbed “love boats.” So how is that libertine denial of reality working for us?
Add to this that only girls get pregnant and that the emotional/psychological consequences of being sexually used tend to hit them harder, and it’s understandable why being “ladylike” was once encouraged.
Speaking of which, the sexual devolutionaries complain about this supposed burden being placed on girls; as usual, though, they appear to have it backwards. Today, gentlemanliness likely is stressed more with boys than being a lady is with girls — precisely because doing the latter sparks uproars such as the one in question here.
Another gripe is that encouraging ladylike behavior limits girls.
Well, yes, that’s the whole idea.
Note also that encouraging gentlemanliness limits boys. Any good behavior model limits you to just that: good behavior. Unlimited means unrestrained. Do we want a society of animals, limited only by raw instinct?
The truth also is that, contrary to complaints, the principle behind the lady quotation empowers girls; it’s saying that by exercising virtue, they can influence boys’ behavior. Of course, again, we all have the chance to exercise this power.
There was a time when children would practice their handwriting by copying proverbs, little snippets of Truth, in their copybooks. Rudyard Kipling lamented this wisdom’s loss in his 1919 poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” Now we’re further down the rabbit hole, where anything that threatens to teach actual virtue is purged, as good is called bad.
The result is that now a school may not teach girls to be ladies but, amidst the “gender” confusion, may teach them they can be gentlemen.
