The Code of Man
Love Courage Pride Family Country
Chapter OneLove
A recent study of boys in junior high school showed that, the day after watching professional wrestling on television, they called girls "hos" and "bitches" much more frequently than on other days of the week. It's one more item in the avalanche of evidence of the coarsening of eros and the decline of a vocabulary of refinement between men and women -- and how it begins at a depressingly early age. Throughout the cultures of mass entertainment, popular music, and fashion, the expression of delicate sentiments, courtesy, or heartfelt feeling between men and women is frequently derided as embarrassing and uncool, to the point where it has almost vanished. Open the pages of Vanity Fair or Details, and you see sleek, glossy young people who look like celebrities, draped in Calvin or Tommy or Mondavi, but always sullen and unsmiling as they glare at you through their sunglasses from the Hamptons or the Upper East Side. The message is: You too can be a celebrity, as long as you know the hip things to buy and always have a snarl at the ready. The approved cultural style is one of detachment, narcissism, and casual, unfeeling sex. As the poet Phyllis Gotlieb pu ... read full excerpt from: The Code of Man ebook
