Respectable

Older television is enlightening. It reveals a little of our culture of the past.

"The Man From U.N.C.L.E" was a series my husband enjoyed as a boy. He endured the show that came before, "Please Don't Eat the Daisies", just because he knew Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin would soon appear on the screen.

We bought a portion of this series to enjoy with our own children. During one of the episodes, Napoleon asks the villain, "Is this the way you show your respect of women?". Later in the same episode the villain says of women, "They are noble creatures; they will give everything to preserve the ones they love". Later the villain asserts, "I told you never to lay a hand on a woman!"

Funny, but these lines were written before the women's movement became widely accepted, before respect was being demanded.

Flash forward to our current age, and just watch a little bit of TV on any given evening.

Women are not respected in our culture, because they are not respectable. On the small screen, they are hard, capable, and mean. They leave nothing to the imagination, and they sleep around like the horrid males women complained about in the 60's. They are no longer "noble", because they are all for one-self is more important than baby or husband or anyone else.

I grew up in a culture on the cusp of great "change". I was told that what came before didn't matter; that things were always bad, that we shouldn't hope for anything better, that it wasn't possible. Nuclear war was inevitable, old ways didn't work out, there was something new coming, something better. I didn't know any different, I was a child and looked up to those at school and in the media. The generations before had somehow lost the ability to articulate and inculcate the values that made our society free and great, so my parents and grandparents were without reasons not to scrap the whole thing and start over.

Hemlines went up, necklines went down. P*rnography went main-stream and there was even a special variety produced exclusively for women. The pill made it possible for women to fornicate without having to worry about getting pregnant--and so it was the beginning of the end for propriety and virtue, at least in the culture at large.

But what the feminist movement promised, that women would be more "respected" and have better lives, has yet to manifest itself.

From where I sit, women have been made more slaves than ever. Duped into believing we can "have it all", we sign up for government education loans by the millions. Then, after the sheepskin is obtained, we realize our foremothers traded in one ball-and-chain for another, less-fulfilling one.

And men do not care for women as they used to. Men don't mind that women are "liberated", it keeps them from having to grow up. They don't have to get married in order to have their physical needs met, and even if they do marry, they can sit back and enjoy staying juveniles, with their wives as the responsible "mothers", for the rest of their lives, hence chidlren are a noisy, messy, and costly nuisance to them.

Instead of men stepping up to the bar to take care of an expectant mother and her baby, men and women alike cry, "Why didn't she use protection?" Everyone expects that women will sleep around, in and out of marriage, this is not considered irresponsible, unless she does not use contraception, only then does she experience social sanctioning.

But in the heart of every man there is a yearning for virtue, a yearning to find a woman "spotless and unblemished". In fact, I believe there is an unmet need for virtuous womanhood among men at large, but they have lost hope at ever finding it.

Women have become notorious for complaining there are no "heroes" left, but heroes need to have damsels in order to display their knightly characteristics. If the damsels are all out slaying their own dragons, the knights would just as soon return to the castle and down a few frothy beers. If the damsels are just as filthy, unkempt and uncaring as the local scoundrel, why do they merit saving?