Tony Porter Ted talk; A call to men.

[Warren DeMontague]

24. I'm curious as to the actual specifics of the incident or incidents you are talking about.

You say you are in Texas. I suspect that there is a big difference between, say, Texas and urban areas in Northern California or the Pacific NW, for instance.

But "the mom gets the comments from men"... what comments? What are the specifics of the incidents that lead you to feel you have a window into how other people are raising their kids?

I'm racking my brain to come up with anything resembling anything like that in our experience.. Only two incidents come to mind. One was before the birth of our son, during one of those childbirthing classes.. at one point the class discussion turned to circumcision; there was some good back and forth, and then one guy, a younger guy with a military crew cut, said "Ahhhhh, just cut him".

FWIW, we did NOT "just cut him". After our son was born both my wife and I, who for reasons of Jewish heritage mostly, had gone back and forth about it- decided not to do it.

The other incident took place at an airport, while we were waiting for a flight. Our son was maybe one yr. old, and he was climbing on my wife's lap, trying to get into a bag of pretzles or something.. not doing anything too disruptive, but for whatever reason there was a crotchety old guy sitting next to us, and he got all pissed off and looked at us and said something like "If I had done that when I was that age, I would have gotten a 'hot bottom'"... which we thought was weird for several reasons.

It was worth noting that he was on a different flight, I think to Idaho (but it may very well have been Texas)