The virtues of gentle misogyny

But there'll be times (your bartender should have told you) when you must steel yourself up to mix up one of those fluffy, multi-colored abominations  which, for some mysterious reason related to iron insides and paralyzed palates, the "ladies" insist upon downing.

That's from the 1949 Hand Book for Hosts from Esquire. It, along with four vintage fly reels, was a gift from the Serpentine One this Christmas. I don't post this merely so others will feel like they have been cheated by life.

Here we can see the decline in our culture. It's inconceivable that anyone writing in today's Esquire could construct such an elegant compound sentence as that.

That didn't surprise me.

What surprised me was how easy to swallow the gentle misogyny that permeates the classic Esquire period is. I started to think that maybe this misogyny wasn't just tolerable but that there might be, unpalatable as this might seem to our time, something right about it. I know, I konw, but bear with me.

Let me start with an example of intolerable gentle misogyny (any non-gentle misogyny is intolerable). When I was a kid, adult males used to make jokes about women's driving skills.  This was probably a left-over from their youth when women driving was a rare thing. What makes this intolerable? It's not just that it is factually nonsensical—statistics establish beyond any reasonable doubt that, as a group, women are better drivers than men. No, the real problem is that this attitude was meant to exclude women from driving or, at the very least, make them feel like intruders when they did.

The good kind is the kind that encourages rivalry. For rivalry between the sexes is an indispensable thing.

It also reminds men that they are supposed to be men, that we have specific set of roles to play. That remains as true today as it was in 1949.