IN THIS PREVIOUS POST, a reader argued that women mature more quickly. But is this true today? The evidence is overwhelmingly against it. Here is an excellent 2008 piece by Thomas F. Bertonneau, looking at the mature girl of yesterday and the creature of vanity and mindlessness of today.

He includes this vignette:

In the crush of students we find ourselves walking next to a female undergraduate engaged, like eighty percent of other students, in a peripatetic cell phone conversation. The young lady is well dressed—in the female equivalent of “junior executive.” She walks briskly, oblivious of anyone’s co-presence in the public space. Her dialogue grows excited. She is complaining to a sympathetic listener about one of her instructors, who has apparently assigned what she believes to be too much reading and who grades, as she sees it, harshly. “He f—ing thinks nobody’s got other things to do,” she says loudly. “Well, I’m f—ing not going to let him push me around. I’m f—ing going to report this f—er to the dean.” In three sentences, she has inserted sailor-talk into her speech four times. At the second usage of the Anglo-Saxonism, I give her a disapproving glance. At the fourth I say loudly, “Thank you for sharing that with my twelve-year-old.” She drops back, looking more irritated than ashamed, avoiding my eyes.

                     — Comments —

Lisa writes:

As I watched the dress rehearsal for a choral presentation at a local university, the co-eds’ behavior was extremely out-of-place with their costumes from the 1860’s. The director, an older man, was trying to explain the negative effect their modern behavior was having on the atmosphere of their presentation. Finally, he simply said, “Listen, I know this program is set a very long time ago, and they wouldn’t do anything you normally do… just don’t do anything normal.” Sadly, everyone laughed. One of the girls in a long skirt bemoaned loudly to a friend, “I look like a virgin!”

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