Show I 1 growing pains of the nAge by JEAN NEWTON you please tell me writes a reader hy so many people pretend to be worse than they are we can readily understand why people should pretend to be better than they are it brings them the admiration and respect paid to respectability ability and virtue and if they can get away with their hypocrisy they can eat their cake and have it too they can get credit for quail ties which they do not practice or possess but what Is in it for the person who pretends to be worse than he Is I 1 say he because you find men more than women degrading themselves in this way what do they get out of it what fun can it be to be blamed and looked down on for faults and vices of which they are not guilty and so cannot even enjoy I 1 do not agree with the idea that men more than women are guilty of the juvenile foolishness of putting an vices and weaknesses which are not really theirs and it Is not a new form of silliness but one man tested by adolescent youth as an accompaniment compani ment for growing pains so children have always done it but on the part of adults who don t have to profess grown up vices to demonstrate that they are of age its something else again with them it Is also an accompaniment to growing pains though not their own they are the growing pains of this modern age the passion to be modern the secret and it Is one by no means lacking in female support witness the women who up to a short time ago wore their skirts hard ly to their knees in cases where the revelation was by no means flattering and the exposure outraged all their sense of beauty and line and good taste they were afraid to cast doubt upon their modernism to be conald ered back numbers and oft color stories women to whom these are no more welcome than having to poke their noses into garbage cans will laugh at them un til the tears come to their eyes why it Is modern not to be shocked ab corrence hor rence of such things may hae been the thing in our mother s day and that Is just about bow it would label us now above all we must be mod eral so in pretending dear reader not only to have but to like to have all the petty vices and weaknesses in professing a passion for commonness and vulgarity and even a wink at am morality these people are merely trying to be modern in the only way they know how they are of course simply displaying their childishness and manifesting the growing pains of their modern age CE by the bell syndicate inc service |