Saturday Steyn: Finishing in style

I was hoping Mark Steyn would comment on the Costa Concordia disaster and so he has in his weekend column, No More 'Women and Children First.' Go read it and then come back here.

Okay. This part:

Whenever I write about these subjects, I receive a lot of mail from men along the lines of this correspondent:

"The feminists wanted a gender-neutral society. Now they've got it. So what are you complaining about?"

And so the manly virtues (if you'll forgive a quaint phrase) shrivel away to the so-called "man caves," those sad little redoubts of beer and premium cable sports networks.

We are beyond social norms these days. A woman can be a soldier. A man can be a woman. A 7-year-old cross-dressing boy can join the Girl Scouts in Colorado because he "identifies" as a girl. It all adds to life's rich tapestry, no doubt. But I can't help wondering, when the ship hits the fan, how many of us will still be willing to identify as a man.

That goes into my "best of Steyn" file, as does the part about "finishing in style" from Kipling's "Soldier an' Sailor Too":

We're most of us liars, we're 'arf of us thieves, an' the rest of us rank as can be,
But once in a while we can finish in style (which I 'ope it won't 'appen to me).

According to reports, Capt. Schettino had a different concept of finishing in style, allegedly ordering dinner for himself and a young female companion after the ship ran aground.

See my related posts:
What a difference a century makes
Running out of excuses to buy Girl Scout cookies

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