NONFIC: the end of men

On the Riviera last summer there were English girls who still believed in men – you could tell by the deliberate outdoor swagger of their walk, by what they laughed at so heartily, as if they were still apologizing for having been born girls, and were being “good chaps” for critical elder brothers. But as for the others—you could only tell the Americans from the French because they were pretty – the negligence with which they obviously took their men was almost shocking. Outside of material matters man’s highest and most approved incarnation was as “a good old horse,” be he fiancé, husband, or lover. The merely masculine was considered by turns stuffy, dull, tyrannical or merely ludicrous. I remember a girl responding to a desirable middle-aged party’s inquiry as to whether he could smoke a cigar with: “Please do. There’s nothing I like so much as a good cigar.” – and I remember the suppressed roar of hilarity that circled the table. It was the voice of another age—it was burlesque. Naturally one wanted and needed men, but wanting to please them, positively coddling them in that fashion—that was another matter.
The Prince, the Hero, no longer exists, or rather fails to put in an appearance, for society with its confusion and its wide-open doors no longer offers the stability of thirty years ago. In New York it has been difficult for years to arrange a numerical superiority of men over women at debutante balls. All the young girl can be sure of when she comes out into “the world” is that she will meet plenty of males competent to stimulate her biological urges—for the heterogeneous stag-line can do that if nothing more.
Her current attitude toward moral questions is that of the country at large—in other words the identification of virtue with chastity no longer exists among girls over twenty, and to pretend it does is just one of those things you are welcome to do if it gives you comfort. There are those of an older and purer generation who would have liked the present observer to have devoted his entire article to this phenomenon—and at the end virtuously thrown the magazine out the window. For America is composed not of two sorts of people, but of two frames of mind—the first engaged in doing what it would like to do, the second pretending that such things do not exist.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Girls Believe in Girls," pp 103-104.