Feral Cats

     My school is recovering much of the Catholic heritage it had allowed to slip away -- not that we had ever lost it entirely.  But we suffer a setback now and then.  This spring, the new president issued a warning to the students that there would be no undue "celebrating" the evening before finals: no brawling, no drunkenness, and no public nudity.  I don't know whether his disciplinarians are now working overtime, but apparently, along with the traditional primeval roar, there were some fifty or so students running about campus last night, in our pleasant forty degree New England thaw, stark naked.

     Sure, I would laugh at a streaker -- it is constitutionally impossible for an Italian to do otherwise, I think.  And I'd slap a hefty fine and an overcoat on the offender.  But there was something odd about this bout of doltishness, something that reminded me of a few recent scenes my family has either witnessed or been informed of by friends:

     A few summers ago I took my family to a nearby lake, at an unsupervised but pleasant state park.  It's usually quiet there: a couple of fishermen and a family or two with small children.  But as we trudged out to the beach with our folding chairs and towels we heard raucous laughter carrying from one end of the lake to the other.  It came from three teenagers in the water, talking loudly about a sex act in the shower, and other things I didn't want my daughter or my small son to hear.  When I rebuked them for it (and I must confess, "rebuke" is a mild word), what followed was a ten-minute volley of obscenities and crudities, the single filthiest and most shameless spree I'd ever heard in my life.  No locker room boasting and ribbing could come close.

     A good friend of mine would sympathize.  She had to remove her daughter from the local neighborhood Catholic school -- and we are not talking about the inner city here -- because of an incident in her eighth grade class.  The teacher left the children unpatrolled for an hour, during which time two of the students decided to strip below the waist and simulate sex acts -- or, for all I know, perform them; my friend was too modest to describe the worst of it -- accompanying their gestures with the appropriate nouns and verbs.  When my friend's daughter, scandalized, told her mother about it and word got around, naturally the students in question humiliated her so badly that she could not remain in the school.

     Or there's the day last summer when I took my family to a doughnut shop and we had to listen as several teenagers at the next table were describing the naked buttocks of a classmate of theirs, with derision and crude specificity.  Or the teenager laughing and spraying foul language and complaining about the mosquitoes, as we stood in a pack of about thirty people, among whom was a Catholic priest in our company, watching fireworks.

     I could go on adding examples, and maybe you've guessed by now the cause of my dismay and astonishment.  Most of the streakers, and every single one of the other teenagers I have mentioned, were girls.  They have liberated themselves, it seems, by clapping on their wrists the vices that beset their brothers; they have not adopted the virtues of their brothers, nor have they freed themselves from vices that are predominantly their own.  Yes, now they are foulmouthed, drunken, boorish, and lewd; but not frank, not comradely, not farsighted, and not brave.  Nor have they given up gossip, cattiness, manipulativeness, touchiness, and guile.  It is a distressing sight; they do not know how sadly they have distorted the surpassing beauty of their sex.  I spend most of the year teaching medieval and Renaissance poetry, including praises of women that our drab age can hardly fathom.  How I miss sometimes, not the company of females, but the company of women!

     A word to the Modern American Woman, if I may.  Do you think you might take a little time out from smashing The Citadel, emasculating the YMCA, preaching the damnable lie that kids without their fathers will be fine, just fine, holding your families hostage to your own fulfillment, infantilizing schools and churches and helping to pave (along with a road crew from Gehenna) that great broad highway that brings Washington right into every living room and kitchen in the country -- do you think, I say, that you might take a break playing Evita Peron to teach your daughters to be decent women?  I can deal with the boys -- if y'all would occasionally, just occasionally, clear out of the way.  You deal with the girls.  That, after all, is your business: "Older women should be reverent in their behavior, not slanderers, not addicted to drink, teaching what is good, so that they may train younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, chaste, good homemakers, under the guidance of their husbands, that the word of God may not be discredited" (Tt. 2:3-5).  Could you kindly mind that business, so that before I die I may be able to read the love poetry of Spenser and Dante and not think that I have been deposited on the wrong planet?