Question: Is it sexist to ask young women to be ladylike?
It would seem so. Earlier in the week it was reported that a Catholic High School asked its young women to sign a pledge not to curse.
The media descended with its charges of sexism and the school quickly relented and opened the pledge up to boys.
While I am not in favor of either gender cursing, I have no problem with asking young women to be superior to their male counterparts. Even in a coed school (which may or may not be such a great idea) we need to teach our boys to be men and our girls to be ladies. And guess what, ladies don’t curse (much).
I think it is perfectly sensible and reasonable to single out girls for a call to better behavior. Boys will be called to behave like men in their own way, but boys are different than girls. I think that our world and our culture already suffers from the lack of the former benign influence of ladies. Today, we have all too many girls who grow up merely into curvier versions of the vulgar male counterparts.
Bottom line, you cannot make ladies of young women by asking them to be equal parts sugar, spice, slugs, and snails.
The world does not need more women who act like men. We need something better than that, we need ladies. We don’t ,,,
