America's New Manners

1. Eight men and one woman from the same office are riding the elevator back to work after lunch. The woman, naturally, is in the back of the elevator, since the men all stood aside to allow her to enter first. When the elevator door opens on the eighth floor:

a)The men all inhale deeply and, rolling their eyes to the ceiling and fluttering their hands in the vicinity of their heads, attempt to crowd aside so that the one woman, in the fragility of her gender, may exit first, followed by eight men and their dense exhalation of martini fumes. b) Since the sex of the passengers is irrelevant here, everyone leaves the elevator in the most efficient and logical order, the men nearest the door departing first. As some people of both sexes are still uncomfortable with such uncourtly procedures, a man may put them at their ease by making a suggestive remark about the woman 's figure. c) All passengers tumble out at once, landing in a heap before the eighth-floor receptionist.

2. At a friend's Sunday brunch, a woman uses an Anglo-Saxon barnyard expression. A polite male will:

a) Push half a grapefruit in the woman' s face.

b) Respond with a barrage ofscatology to make her feel more at ease talking filth.

c) Ignore her and turn to the hostess, exclaiming, "I'll just die if I don 't get this recipe!"

3. A woman is discussing business with a male colleague over lunch at an expensive Italian restaurant. She invited him. When the check comes:

a) She excuses herself and goes to the ladies' room ("I'll just freshen up my war paint"), not returning until the man has settled the bill. b) She offers the man a cigar, quarrels with the waiter's addition, pays the check from a roll of 50s and makes a knowledgeable remark about the vicissitudes of the Baltimore Colts. c) She extracts from her ice cream dish a fragment of broken glass brought along for just this purpose. She and her companion complain loudly about foreign objects in the food, and both exit in a huff, leaving the check unpaid on the table.

Who can sort out these social mysteries? It has become extremely complicated to be polite in America. There was a time when the upwardly mobile and socially inecure believed as fervently as The Four Hundred that there existed somewhere—in the mind of God, perhaps, or the graven tablets of Emily Post—an absolute standard of The Correct. All contingencies were covered in this elaborate system of law, as refined as the Talmud and sometimes as difficult to interpret. But trying to cultivate manners today is like buying a house in Grosse Pointe and discovering that the previous tenants were the Symbionese Liberation Army: the place is a mess. The old fixtures don't work; the walls are smeared with ego; the foundation is crumbling and practically gone.

The grand punctilio of high-bosomed dreadnoughts like Emily Post had been unraveling for years, of course. But to many of the young in the '60s, the laid-back luftmenschen of the counterculture, manners were as superfluous as flatware at McDonald's (the late 20th century's reversion to its fingers) or linen napkins at the Donner Pass. To this last half-generation, manners were sexist, hypocritical,