Learning how to be a real man
Many years ago, I committed an off ence f or which famous men are now being publicly, and rightly, shamed. I patted an office secretary on her behind. I won’t offer the usual lame defence that I didn’t know my advance was unwanted or that social attitudes were different back then.
My only excuse is that at the time of the incident I was about seven years old.
I remember the moment because of what happened immediately after. The secretary, who worked at my father’s business in Mexico City, turned around and slammed a heavy stack of papers on my head. I marched indignantly over to my dad’s office to report her behaviour — only so he could march me over to her desk and have me apologize. He followed that up with a stern warning never to do anything of the sort again.
I don’t remember the secretary’s name. But what a service she did me by giving me a knock I’ ll never forget, one that took courage and self- respect considering I was her boss’s son. What a service, too, that my dad defended her and gave me the talking-to he did. It’s a lesson every boy should get — loud, clear, and early — from a male role model.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I owe my late father. Living in Mexico, he was keen that his kids should never behave in the manner of los niños bien — the entitled and often abusive princelings of the upper class. A family acquaintance once said he intended to raise children who would “know how to command the servants.” My dad would sometimes mention this to us as one of the most atrocious things he ever heard.
His own way of being was shaped by a phrase he used often and in an expansive sense: “Give with a warm hand.” Don’t wait until you’re dead to give your money away. Be exceptionally considerate of those depending on you, most of all those born with a lot less. Be present. Be generous with your time and energy.
Oh, and be tender. Most kids endure a sex talk with a parent. Mine with him, on a winter’s evening drive when I was 12, was light on the mechanical issues but heavy on the subjects of gentleness, respect and love. I sat through it in mortified silence. But I remember it vividly as I attempt to pass along the same wisdom to the next generation.
All of this is to say that my father was a gentleman. It’s a word that gets a bad rap. The New York City subway system announced last week it was dropping the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” from its P. A. system, partly out of concerns for gender neutrality. To the extent that the word implies a code of conduct for men and a corresponding one for women, it is wrapped up in notions of patriarchy, social class, male privilege and subservient femininity.
Maybe. But as one revelation of bad male behaviour has followed another, the questions I keep asking are: Who raised these guys? Where did they get their ideas of sexual manoeuvre — the open- bathrobe move, for instance? And why did so many of the women they abused feel so helpless in the face of their grotesque advances?
The usual answer is power — what it allows men to think they can get away with, and why women feel powerless to stop it. Up to a point that’s undoubtedly true, especially when it’s power joined to the possibility of violence.
But another part of the answer is not enough men are getting the lesson I was lucky to get from my father. Our culture could sorely use a common set of ideas about male decorum and restraint in the 21st century, along with role models for those ideas. How do men steer a path between the anachronistic prudery of a Mike Pence ( who will not dine alone with a woman other than his wife) and the naked lechery of a Louis C.K., both of which share the premise that the central consideration in any interaction between a man and a woman must involve the prospect of sex?
There’s a long history for such ideas, dating at least to the 16th century with Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. But most books published today on the subject of gentlemanliness are about how to dress, not how to behave. And the cultural signals young men get on the subject of sex alternate confusingly between moral license and legal stricture.
Other than the advice columnists at Maxim magazine, who are today’s male authorities on the subjects of consideration, modesty and respect? Who, in the age of Trump, is teaching boys why not to grope — even when they can, even when “you can do anything?”
The good news is, thanks to some brave women, we are at a moment when a great many men are privately re-examining past behaviour and wondering how to do better. We’re thinking about how we might act as gentlemen. For now, it’s an impulse based largely on fear. In time, it should become one based on hope — the hope of real romantic fulfilment through the creation of trust, the practice of courtship, the intimacy of love and genuine partnership.
If there’s something for which all men might be grateful, that’s it. For those of us lucky enough to have had fathers to show us how, so much the more.
BE PRESENT. BE GENEROUS WITH YOUR TIME AND ENERGY. — BRET STEPHENS WHO RAISED THESE GUYS?