On the Death of Manners

You will all be thrilled to know that Pretty Lady has Submitted her Application, and thus may disentangle her brain from the sort of verbiage which torments her soul, and renders her unfit for human companionship.

(Actually, Pretty Lady's normal verbal self may render her unfit for most human companionship, but she appears to have attracted a quorum of masochistic freaks, and for this she is humbly grateful.)

Having decided to celebrate the pressing of the "Send" button with a shot of tequila, or two, or the rest of the bottle, Pretty Lady has now recklessly decided to be Indiscreet. She shall now offer her Deep Insight of the Week, hang the consequences. To wit: How to Fend Off --well, Pretty Lady can't be that indiscreet. She has the familial integrity of a friend to consider.

The fact is, Pretty Lady was a tad bit too well brought-up. She was trained to be Respectful to her Seniors; she was taught to be Trusting, Polite, and to Smile Gracefully at Inane Platitudes, particularly when these platitudes were declaimed from On High by a senior member of the Patriarchy.

This training has gotten her into endless amounts of trouble. For the scurrilous truth is, that not every Older Man is as morally upright and unblemished as Pretty Lady's Daddy, and Granddaddy, and on upwards into ever-expanding latitudes of Great Granddaddy-ness. Pretty Lady comes from a pretty exceptional family, it seems; sometimes, indeed, it seems as though Pretty Lady's forbears were a different species of animal from the seniors, biologically unrelated to Pretty Lady, who infest the modern landscape.

For Pretty Lady has had a way with her of attracting a certain sort of paternal attention from grey-haired Patriarchs, ever since she turned eighteen, and entered the Larger World with clear-eyed naïveté and optimism. These fellows--professors, shopkeepers, carpenters, parents of college friends--have approached her with Idealistic and Caring rhetoric. They evince concern for Pretty Lady, all alone in the Terrible World. They wish only to Protect her Innocence.

Then they pounce.

Pretty Lady, every single time, is shocked. She cannot believe that such an upright, upstanding, married older gentleman could stoop to such base maneuvers. She is certain there has been Some Mistake. She is certain that her signals have been grossly misinterpreted; she is sure the gentleman forgets himself. But after a time, she begins to notice a pattern, no matter how much she wishes to notice otherwise.

The pattern is this: when a gentleman begins to subject her earnest ears to a torrent of inane platitudes, such as 'such Deep Blue Eyes you have, my dear;' 'ah! you are a Fighter;' 'we are all, within us, the Same;' Pretty Lady begins to smell a rat.

For surely the gentleman is boring himself with such twaddle. He is certainly boring Pretty Lady. Trained, as she was, to smile and nod agreeably, Pretty Lady finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the appropriate standard of courtesy. Strangely, the boring gentleman in question seems inattentive to the increasingly strained and perfunctory nature of Pretty Lady's polite responses; indeed, on the occasions when she is goaded into a Sharp Retort, he seems positively encouraged. It comes to appear as though any possible response on Pretty Lady's part will be received with overflowing, over-the-top enthusiasm.

For indeed, the gentleman has worked himself into such a pitch of protective idealism as to be utterly deaf to the sense of any mere rational language, issuing from Pretty Lady's captivating lips. Such phrases as 'this situation is wholly inappropriate' seem to pass as so much wind in the eaves. Forceful language such as 'I'm not particularly comfortable with this, as I am sure you can imagine' may as well not have been communicated.

No, after decades of regrettable Life Experience, Pretty Lady has come to the conclusion that in such extreme conditions, only one bald word will penetrate the consciousness of such a self-forgetting, inappropriately besotted patriarch. That word is, NO.

Even when the utterance of this word appears to be horrifically Rude. Especially so. Once Pretty Lady has smelled such a rat as that, even such an innocent request as "Will you attend the symphony with me next week?" must be responded to with a resounding, unequivocal, unadorned NO. No explanations, no lectures, no thanks, no excuses. NO. No, no, no, no, no.

Pretty Lady is feeling pretty desperate, to consider passing this information along. Ordinarily, she is a staunch champion of Manners, as the only reliable method of Saving the World. But in this circumstance, the necessity of complete clarity transcends all other considerations. It is a terrible pity, but a measure of her deep certitude, that it has taken her twenty years to come to this conclusion.