Bringing Back Gentlemen

As I was looking for an article to write about for this blog when I came across a story in the Huffington Post called 'Where Have All the Gentlemen Gone?'  In this article the writer talks about how she went to a conference in Dublin where they were debating on if porn was destructive or harmless.  The writer takes the stand that porn is causing men to be obsessed with the sexuality of women and therefore are not gaining the respect for women that they should be.  In the article the author interviews a women on who had given up on the idea of finding a good man and getting married.  She claims that the men in Dublin had been conditioned to treat women as sexual objects and that the women played along by going out in skimpy outfits on the weekends and doing whatever the men wanted them to do.  The author goes on to talk about how in the Western world we do not teach our men to grow up and respect women and this causes them to do things such as cheat on a women and blame it on the women for not satisfying them enough.  She goes on to say how even some of the most loyal wives get cheated on and the man still somehow finds a way to blame her.  She ends the article by talking about how it is society’s fault that men act like this.  We glorify sexual humor and athletes who may not be morally perfect.  We glorify the hookup culture and the guys who ‘get laid’ the most are looked up to as idols.  With ideals like this there is no way we could ever bring back the true gentlemen to society.

When I read this article it made me thing back to Blackwood’s article about women and their intimate friendships.  In a part of the article it talks about a tribe in southern Africa that used to make their young women have mentors called ‘mummies.’  The mummies were older girls who the younger girls (called babies) would go to if they had a problem with anything and needed advice.  The mummies would teach and answer all the younger girls questions about sex and ward off any boys who were to aggressive towards them.  I think that society today would benefit from a system sort of like this except for the men get mentors instead of the women.  As a boy growing up I had a great dad but I always felt to nervous or to awkward to ever talk to my dad about so the only way I could really learn about them is thru the internet which is a problem a lot of other young boys probably had too.  I feel that if we used this sort of mentor system young boys would be able to learn the right way to treat women instead of learning through social media which usually portrays the way women should not be treated.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-shmuley-boteach/where-have-all-the-gentle_b_128220.html