# Help me understand the way these girls thought **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 5, 2011, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459 "2011-01-05T04:51:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/21 "2011-01-05T19:36:07Z")
Wait, weren’t those “confirmed old bachelors” Henry and Pickering gay? That’s what “confirmed bachelor” meant in those days, anyway. I only know the movie. Is there anything in the play to settle that either way? ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/22 "2011-01-05T19:38:15Z")
Funny, when we watched **My Fair Lady** in high school (9 yrs ago) the girls mostly though Higgins was an ass and the boys though he and Pickering were gay. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/23 "2011-01-05T19:39:49Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Wait, weren’t those “confirmed old bachelors” Henry and Pickering gay? That’s what “confirmed bachelor” meant in those days, anyway. when they’re wondering why a woman can’t be more like a man, it _does_ make you wonder… ---
**Author:** ![Nobody](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/94ad74/32.png) [@Nobody](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nobody)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/24 "2011-01-05T19:41:57Z")
I don’t remember any of us thinking that Henry and Pickering were gay, I just remember that we (boys) thought that Eliza was stupid to come back while the girls were arguing that it was romantic. Edit, although **BrainGlutton** ’s and\*\* Ludovic\*\*'s posts make me wonder now too. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/25 "2011-01-05T19:45:13Z")
> [@](#): > > Wait, weren’t those “confirmed old bachelors” Henry and Pickering gay? That’s what “confirmed bachelor” meant in those days, anyway. Only if you think all of those Victorian two-man teams were gay, like Holmes and Watson, or Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie, or Moriarty and Moran. Or, retroactively, Solar Pons and Dr. Weston. They can’t _all_ have been gay. Heck, Watson married. Several times, by some accounts. ---
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/26 "2011-01-05T19:50:09Z")
> [@Lust4Life](#): > > I read that when it was originally released Shaw very daringly called it Ruddigore. > Which I always took to be rhyming slang for Bloody Whore. Isn’t Ruddigore a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera? ---
**Author:** ![amarinth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@amarinth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarinth)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/27 "2011-01-05T19:54:48Z")
> [@Snickers](#): > > So at least one teen girl didn’t have that opinion after watching it. You weren’t alone. I like some of the music and the movie has a lot of pretty clothes (the Ascot costuming alone is to die for). But the end of the story made me want to throw my slippers at the screen. Pygmalion just isn’t romantic. It’s creepy at best and trying to turn it into something romantic also ends up being just creepy (e.g., Pretty Woman, Mannequin, My Fair Lady with a “happy” ending). ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/28 "2011-01-05T20:11:20Z")
> [@amarinth](#): > > Pygmalion just isn’t romantic. It’s creepy at best and trying to turn it into something romantic also ends up being just creepy (e.g., Pretty Woman, Mannequin, My Fair Lady with a “happy” ending). How **else** ya gonna make a musical out of it?! ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/29 "2011-01-05T20:36:11Z")
> [@Freudian\_Slit](#): > > Isn’t Ruddigore a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera? Yes. And its original title was _Ruddygore_–which had to be changed because “ruddy” could mean “bloody.” Still a shocking word back then–as Eliza discovered. ([TVtropes](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Ruddigore) has expanded to cover Gilbert & Sullivan!) ---
**Author:** ![Baal\_Houtham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baal_houtham/32/13604_2.png) [@Baal\_Houtham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baal_Houtham)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2011, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/30 "2011-01-05T20:41:19Z")
Heh. My daughter (now 17) loves the movie and loves Audrey Hepburn. I like the movie, but mostly for Rex Harrison. I haven’t seen the plays, but assume most of Harrison’s good lines are from Shaw. The man loves science, is a supremely happy camper, and does not tolerate fools. Ultimately he makes a few tentative steps outside his happy campground. Henry painfully experiences infatuation and the world beyond pure intellect; Liza sees what’s beyond her social circle… and can’t go back. That’s the drama. They aren’t a good match, but at the end they need each other and some arrangement will need to be made. My guess as to why the relationship is touching to some women is that Liza opens Henry’s eyes to the emotional/romantic world. I don’t think my daughter expects Henry and Eliza to get married, but I’ll have to ask her to be sure. There is a line in the film–Eliza saying that she doesn’t want Henry to “make love to her” (i.e romance her). She just wants her humanity and worth acknowledged. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/31 "2011-01-06T01:21:54Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Only if you think all of those Victorian two-man teams were gay, like Holmes and Watson, or Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie, or Moriarty and Moran. Or, retroactively, Solar Pons and Dr. Weston. They can’t _all_ have been gay. Heck, Watson married. Several times, by some accounts. Even Watson could be . . . Denial ran **deep** back then. It probably confused matters further that there was hardly an upper-class Brit who had **never** had a cock in him, as they were all educated at all-male boarding schools. Another Shavian character is Octavius in _Man and Superman._ His character is defined by being romantic, artistic, and in love with Ann Whitefield, who for her part has her cap set for the arrogant, intellectual Jack Tanner, who is avowedly marriage-averse and hopes Octavius will marry her and put him out of danger. You might think that makes Jack the gay one . . . but, as Ann points out to him when he asks why she won’t marry Octavius: > [@](#): > > TANNER. Why don’t you marry Tavy? He is willing. Can you not be satisfied unless your prey struggles? > > ANN. [turning to him as if to let him into a secret] Tavy will never marry. Haven’t you noticed that that sort of man never marries? > > TANNER. What! a man who idolizes women, who sees nothing in nature but romantic scenery for love duets! Tavy, the chivalrous, the faithful, the tenderhearted and true! Tavy never marry! Why, he was born to be swept up by the first pair of blue eyes he meets in the street. > > ANN. Yes, I know. All the same, Jack, men like that always live in comfortable bachelor lodgings with broken hearts, and are adored by their landladies, and never get married. Men like you always get married. > > TANNER. [Smiting his brow] How frightfully, horribly true! It has been staring me in the face all my life; and I never saw it before. > > ANN. Oh, it’s the same with women. The poetic temperament’s a very nice temperament, very amiable, very harmless and poetic, I daresay; but it’s an old maid’s temperament. > > TANNER. Barren. The Life Force passes it by. > > ANN. If that’s what you mean by the Life Force, yes. Sooo . . . ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/32 "2011-01-06T01:41:59Z")
BrainGlutton writes: \> It probably confused matters further that there was hardly an upper-class Brit \> who had never had a cock in him, as they were all educated at all-male \> boarding schools. Cite? My impression was that this was the rumor among those who hated public schools (i.e., the all-male private schools), which included both those who went to state schools and those who went to public school and hated them, but it was a vast exaggeration. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/33 "2011-01-06T01:54:58Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > BrainGlutton writes: > > \> It probably confused matters further that there was hardly an upper-class Brit > \> who had never had a cock in him, as they were all educated at all-male > \> boarding schools. > > Cite? My impression was that this was the rumor among those who hated public schools (i.e., the all-male private schools), which included both those who went to state schools and those who went to public school and hated them, but it was a vast exaggeration. Orwell mentioned in his 1940s essay [“Boys Weeklies”](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part9) that at [Billy Bunter’s](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bunter) school, Greyfriars: > [@](#): > > Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real public school. They run in cycles of rather differing types, but in general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type of story, with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging roasters, fights, canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly recurring story is one in which a boy is accused of some misdeed committed by another and is too much of a sportsman to reveal the truth. The ‘good’ boys are ‘good’ in the clean-living Englishman tradition–they keep in hard training, wash behind their ears, never hit below the belt etc., etc.,–and by way of contrast there is a series of ‘bad’ boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others, whose badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting public-houses. All these boys are constantly on the verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of personnel if any boy were actually expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence. Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a motif. Sex is completely taboo, **especially in the form in which it actually arises at public schools.** Occasionally girls enter into the stories, and very rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together–that is all it ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as ‘soppy’. Even the bad boys are presumed to be completely sexless. When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In the nineties the BOYS’ OWN PAPER, for instance, used to have its correspondence columns full of terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like ST WINIFRED’S and TOM BROWN’S SCHOOL-DAYS were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the authors were not fully aware of it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex simply does not exist as a problem. Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years’ issue of the two papers the word ‘God’ probably does not occur, except in ‘God save the King’. On the other hand, there has always been a very strong ‘temperance’ strain. Drinking and, by association, smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful even in an adult (‘shady’ is the usual word), but at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for sex. In their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a great deal in common with the Boy Scout movement, which started at about the same time. And Orwell was an Etonian, and speaks of this as an “everybody-knows” sort of thing that nevertheless can’t be more explicitly mentioned in print, even as late as 1940. Which doesn’t mean it can’t be an exaggeration of the truth, I suppose. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 8:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/34 "2011-01-06T08:49:23Z")
Still, it’s a vast exaggeration to say: \> . . . there was hardly an upper-class Brit who had never had a cock in him . . . From the things that I’ve read, homosexual sex was much more talked about than actually happened. Public schools were full of mean-spirited nastiness, with older boys allowed to bully younger ones. Some of this resulted in the older boys forcing themselves on the younger ones. My only point is that you’re exaggerating when you claim that almost everyone there was having homosexual sex. ---
**Author:** ![a35362](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3da27b/32.png) [@a35362](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/a35362)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/35 "2011-01-06T12:30:11Z")
So you’re saying it was more of a power thing than a gay sex thing, then? Like in prisons, I suppose, and very much exaggerated there too. **BrainGlutton** , your passage from Shaw is interesting. Are these confirmed bachelors closeted gays or is it just a matter of the romantic idealist who never marries because no real-life woman is ever good enough for him, I wonder? Not that that’s what Shaw was saying, necessarily. ---
**Author:** ![HazelNutCoffee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ac91a4/32.png) [@HazelNutCoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HazelNutCoffee)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/36 "2011-01-06T12:47:20Z")
I think a lot of girls are attracted to charming but arrogant jerks with a “heart of gold,” at least on screen. Korean dramas are full of handsome male protagonists who are absolute assholes but every so often will do something that shows he really does love the heroine, so that makes it okay. Many girls think it’s hot. Not all, but enough that these shows are immensely popular. ---
**Author:** ![don\_t\_ask](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/37 "2011-01-06T12:53:05Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > No proble. Very clever pos. ---
**Author:** ![Skara\_Brae](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f0a364/32.png) [@Skara\_Brae](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skara_Brae)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/38 "2011-01-06T13:40:31Z")
> [@Lust4Life](#): > > I read that when it was originally released Shaw very daringly called it Ruddigore. > Which I always took to be rhyming slang for Bloody Whore. > > If I’m correct in this then the "flower seller " role was a bit of a euphanism for prostitute, so that the class difference was a lot more extreme then is generally recognised. > > Perhaps thats why they didn’t get it together in the original. > > It could also be a dig that upper class women were no better really then women of ill repute. I always thought one of the most poignant lines in the musical was Eliza’s “I sold flowers, but I never sold myself. Now that you have made a \*lady \*of me, that’s all I am fit to sell…” ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/39 "2011-01-06T13:48:23Z")
Wasn’t Rex Harrison in _My Fair Lady_ the inspiration for the voice of Stewie on _Family Guy_? That right there kind of marks it as creepy. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459/40 "2011-01-06T13:49:59Z")
> [@Skara\_Brae](#): > > I always thought one of the most poignant lines in the musical was Eliza’s “I sold flowers, but I never sold myself. Now that you have made a \*lady \*of me, that’s all I am fit to sell…” Indeed. When Shaw wrote about prostitution, he was [more direct](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Warren's_Profession). And I haven’t seen any proof that Shaw would have tried to name his play after one of Gilbert & Sullivan’s confections… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-understand-the-way-these-girls-thought/566459.md?page=3)