Eulogy for courting

Leon Kass, professor at the University of Chicago and former chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, says that courting in America is dead. In his essay, "The End of Courtship," Kass reports that courting customs in this country have gone the way of the dodo. Although I don't agree with his politics, I think the man has a point.

He begins by tracing the decline of courtship in the early part of the 20th century. Until that time, courting was a female-controlled activity. Young men came to call at a lady's house, where her mother and grandmother, aunts and sisters supervised the visit, often over refreshments and piano playing in the parlor. A generation later, this practice yielded to the popularity of the "date," and the private activity of courting moved into the public sphere. Young couples left the house for evenings out, and gentlemen — who provided the funding for dinner and dancing - began to set the terms for the exchange.

In her book "From Front Porch to Back Seat," author Beth L. Bailey relates a joke from the early 1920s. A young man asks a city girl if he might call on her. When he arrives at her home, expecting to be received by her family, she "has her hat on." The punch line: the girl was ready for a date (at his expense). "Dating moved courtship into the public world, relocating it from family parlors and community events to restaurants, theaters, and dance halls," Bailey writes.

Dating norms held steady for the next 40 years until the advent of the feminist movement. This is where Kass' theories turn dicey. He lays a large part of the blame at the manicured feet of feminism: "That the cause of courtship has been severely damaged by feminist ideology and attitudes goes almost without saying." Personally, I can't trust a man whorefers to homemaking as "the vanishing art" (yikes).

Kass, who was charged with stacking the bioethics council in favor of his neocon philosophies, claims that there are still good men out there. Unfortunately, it's women who push them away with their "need to deny all womanly dependence and the kind of vulnerability that calls for the protection of strong and loving men, protection such men were once — and would still be — willing to provide."

Just when this sort of misogynydisguised as-didacticism gets out of hand, a new voice enters into the "death of courting" diatribe. Michael Kimmel's newly released "Guyland" has been making the rounds of big-name book reviews, from the New York Times to Newsweek. He

agrees with Kass that dating — and, long before it, courting — have disappeared from the American youth scene. Although he counts women as participants in the now prevalent "hookup culture," he points an accusatory finger at the prolonged adolescence of American men. Guys in the modern era fail to hold steady jobs, get married, or raise families. Instead, Kimmel says, they turn their attention to binge drinking and perusing pornography, preferring friends with benefits to the old standby of going steady.

He makes a good argument that men are to blame, in the way that Kass develops a solid case against women. In the end, we all share some responsibility.

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