"Courtship, Etiquette and the Adolescent Male"

What do parents have to do with this?  Randall B. Smith has some great insights in his piece from Crisis Magazine.

What’s strange is not so much that the rules of respect have been dispensed with – it’s hard in the best of circumstances to keep a reign on adolescent male hormonal rage. What’s strange is that these rules weren’t done away with by men – even young men – but largely by women.  As for that, I’m not sure what they were thinking.  Did they really believe that by making young men open doors for young women, they were encouraging young men to think that young women couldn’t open doors for themselves?  Do such people imagine that young men in those days thought that young women, upon coming to a door, merely stood there helpless until a man could come along to open the door for her?  I think not.  I remember as a child being told by my rather “old-fashioned” mother that I should hold a door open for a lady.  I thought it strange because I had seen ladies open doors for themselves all the time.  “Why should I? I asked my mother.  “They can open the door for themselves.”  “That’s not the point,” she gently scolded.  “Well I’ll be darned if I can see the point, then,” I remember saying to myself as I skulked away.  At that age, I couldn’t quite see why you shouldn’t punch girls either.  I punched (and got punched by) my guy friends all the time.  What was so different about girls?

Well, as it turned out, there was something different about girls, but I didn’t really get the idea until much later.  

Read it all here.