This comment was by Elle on the post I’m a Man With a Theatre Degree and I Take Baths by Steve Nazarian
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There seems to be an enormous number of truly odd ‘rules’ people have to live by! Not so long ago a man wasn’t considered a ‘real man’ if he wasn’t courtly. Educated, well presented, hygienic, responsible, patronly, exceptional manners, wealthy, respectable; all this and more were once highly valued. In our haste to dump Victorian values, we seem to have ‘thrown out the baby with the bathwater’. I can totally understand wanting to ditch the pomposity, vulgar judgments, cruelty, intolerance & suffocating codes that people were forced to live by, but we’ve thrown out some of the truly commendable developments in social interactions that were developed over a long history of growing populations and the need to live in harmony with a vast number of people in day-to-day lives.
It seems to me that we now revere the complete polar opposite of the Victorian gentleman. We now hold high the violent, the pushy, the threatening, domineering and callous in our society. I would love to see a resurgence of well-mannered people, both male, and female. I’m not advocating for a return to Victorian values, merely, take what has been learned and let the best inspire us to be the best we can be,
Those rules developed out of a real need for individual people to be able to cope as best as possible with an unnaturally high population.
Bring on the ‘new gentleman & genteel woman’. I think our world would be a much better place.
PS. What on earth is odd about a man taking a bath? That’s so weird!
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