Actually I hear moms telling their sons to be gentlemen quite a lot. (And dads too I suppose, but I hang out more with moms.) Don’t know if I hear it quite so much with girls and being ladies, but I have nothing against either one.
I don’t know if it’s true that the word “lady” carries more baggage than the word “gentleman.” Certainly it didn’t used to be true ("…if you had behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." Cuts to the quick, that one does!).
I want to hang out with you!
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That being said, I don’t use the term, as I find it archaic, but I woudln’t find anything wrong with using it. I think the folks that are getting their pantaloons in a twist about it are really reaching on the whole idea of “gender equality”.
I agree. I aspire to be a lady. I don’t always succeed, but I try. When I think of a lady or a gentleman, I think of someone who is kind, gracious and thoughtful, regardless of the circumstances. My grandmother didn’t have wealth or family connections, but she was a lady through and through.
My daughter is seriously into princesses right now (she’s 5) so when she does something I disapprove of, I ask her if that’s something a princess would do.
This subtle approach doesn’t work on my two boys. Asking them to be gentlemen or have good manners doesn’t consistently work, so Dad just yells a lot.
A few weeks ago, I was out for a walk and sitting on a bench in a park near my house when I heard someone telling someone else to “Walk like a pretty princess, please”. I look over and determine that the recipient of this plea is a dog.
Look, tell your daughter to act like a princess or like Annie if that’s helpful. Tell her not to talk like the duck in the tv show someone mentioned recently in another thread. But to tell your DOG to act like a princess? I’m not convinced that this is reasonable.
You should have been around when my 19-year old was a child. I admonished him to ‘act like a gentleman’ more times than I can remember. I also used to joke that “I’m gonna turn you into a gentleman - if it kills YOU or if it kills ME!”. Laughingly, of course. But yeah … “A gentleman chews with his mouth closed”. “A gentleman says thank you”. Etc. etc. Sometimes I’d say “A polite person” or “Civilized people”.
I like the economy of the terms. lady=a mature, polite woman. gentleman=a mature, polite man. When using the terms with children, I don’t think you need to go into the zillion overtones of the word. With time, they’ll define them for themselves.
I apologize for misunderstanding Justin’s post above. A few things that the women of today are restricted in:
Married women having lovers on the side.
Single women getting artificially inseminated.
Women killing their husbands for having a mistress, as opposed to married men killing their wives for having lovers.
Abortion is still a very hot topic. Men pressure women into having them, or not having them, against her will.
Many religions restrict a women’s right to lead them. Apparently some religions think having a penis is a requirement for being a priest/minister/rabbi.
Bwahahahaaaa!
There was a woman I used to know who was a P.E. teacher. She wanted her girls to know that they could be smart, funny, yadda…and athletic. Some of the girls didn’t think you could be an athlete and still be perceived by boys as feminine. “You can kick ass and still be a lady,” she’d say.
I like that.
Are you serious? Married people of either gender aren’t supposed to have lovers on the side (unless both partners are cool with it, yada yada yada). Also, murder is illegal for everybody.
I don’t know enough about artificial insemination to know what the requirements and restrictions are.
The only real one you have is that women can’t be priests. And that kinda sucks, I’ll agree. But no one is harmed by that and if you’re not Catholic, why would you care?
I’ve heard this from many men, most of them defending OJ Simpson. “A man can have lovers, a woman shouldn’t. And if she does, killing her is justified.”
Some states do laws that restrict a woman from being inseminated without her husband’s permission. That leads to a lot of self-insemination
Or rabbis or ministers. I care because it’s using religion to discriminate against women. It’s saying that GOD says it’s okay to treat women as lesser than men.
There’s a lot more to gender restrictions than some blanket law saying “Women can’t do this” or “Women must do that.” There are a lot of little ways that women get told that even though legally they CAN do certain things that probably they shouldn’t.
To be fair, men deal with those issues as well. Why, for example, do people assume that men who love hanging out with kids are creepy pervs? Saying that men shouldn’t like spending time with children is at least as destructive as saying that women shouldn’t go out for football.
ETA: I don’t want to derail this into a discussion of which gender has it worse. I’m just saying that men face still face prejudice and discrimination when they want to do traditionally female things.
Like going to a bar alone, for example. 
Or traveling alone. Heck, I’ve taken advantage over the years of the notion that women can’t change their own tires or carry their own cat litter or cases of pop when pregnant! (Clean, new cat litter, not dirty.)
But I’ve also been screwed over by mechanics who quote me 150% of what they quote my husband for the same part. I’ve been the manager in a store and had customers ask to talk to my male subordinates instead of me, and then talk right over my head to him anyway, when told I’m the manager and he can’t help them. I’ve been told and decided on my own that there are neighborhoods where it just isn’t safe for me to walk alone in, even though men don’t think twice about doing it.
I’ve had wonderful, enlightened male friends arrange a ball game before dinner and not bother to tell any of the women about it, because they assume we wouldn’t be interested. When we protest, they first offered to “let us be the cheerleaders” (WTF?!) and then proposed to divvy us up so we equally “weaken” each team. Fuck them. Gina pitched no hitters in fast-pitch during high school, goddammit, and Rebecca can steal a base from The Flash.
Yes, Justin, you’re right that for the most part, LEGALLY women don’t suffer the great inequalities we’re used to. And even socially, we’re a lot better off than we used to be (and a lot better off than other, actual, minorities*), but it’s not finished. We’ve come a long way, baby…but we’re not there yet.
*There’s an interesting one for you - why are women called a “minority” when there are actually more of us numerically? It’s because we realize that we’re still, on some level, treated as less than men. It’s very subtle, but it’s there.
Talk to any male librarian, he can tell the same story.
Like how? And is this widespread?
I see this comment in threads, usually regarding manners and the like and I am going to have to repeat it here.
I wonder how many of the ladylike/gentlemanly supporters are Southern? Politeness really is a bigger deal down South, no matter what anyone thinks about it. My kids still say “yes ma’am”, “no sir”, etc. and always will. I also aspire to be a lady, though I cannot say that I feel I reach that goal all the time. I think being a lady is something all young girls should try to be. I have told my girls to be ladylike, I have told my son to be a gentleman. I have tried to show my kids what these descriptors mean to me. I can understand why someone might take the term “ladylike” as an oppressive remark but I don’t agree with it. Being a lady isn’t about being oppressed, to me. It’s about having good manners, being charitable, presentable, capable of carrying on an intelligent conversation, being learned about the world and current events and being the kind of person who could sit at the king’s table or in a poor man’s home and behave graciously. Maybe my definition is silly to some, maybe it’s antiquated to others but I see nothing wrong with striving to be the person I described above.
Well, yeah, as WhyNot pointed out, women get told all the time not to walk in certain areas after dark or maybe that wearing certain clothes are a bad idea…or that if they’re not thin and totally focused on appearance that there’s something wrong with them…I mean, not to harp on it, but if you’re female, there’s about a thousand different messages coming at you that you dont’ get if you’re a guy.
Though other posters have pointed out, very rightly, that there are male gender restrictions as well. There was a thread on girls/boys toys, where someone pointed out that in Australia (or New Zealand?), a girl who played with a toy truck or a boy who played with a doll would probably get called a dyke or a poof, respectively, so these attitudes do still exist. I guess I’d agree–gender restrictions are, in general, still a pretty big deal. As WhyNot said, we’re not there just yet.
beanpod, I have every intention of using that excuse next time someone wants me to do any manual labour. 
Submitted for perusal - there are as many expectations and restrictions for gentlemen as there are for ladies, and I personally like to think of myself as a lady and the men I hang out with as gentlemen. I see no problem with other people raising their children to be gentlemen and ladies, as long as they’re not using some outdated definition that ridiculously limits behaviour; a little restriction of bad behaviour goes a long way, in my opinion (and I’m the geographical opposite of a Southerner ).
It is a widely known and well documented phenomenon. Here are two academic books on the topic:
Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequality by Deborah L. Rhode published by Harvard University Press.
Subtle Sexism: Current Practice and Prospects for Change by Nijole V. Benokraitis, Editor, published by Sage Publications
This is by no means the only literature on the topic, but should serve as some indication that the women of the Dope are not making this up.
This is not to deny that there are subtle and unsubtle gendered expectations of men. There’s a literature on that, too. Based on things like the considerably higher proportion of women in poverty, some people feel such expectations have been more damaging to women. However, things like the higher proportion of men in prison may indicate damage from gendered expectations of men. But proof of sexism against men doesn’t disprove or diminish the relevance of sexism against women.