"Young men might best be steadied."
Margaret Meade somewhere discusses a difference between American and British ideas about sexual relationships; she wrote about relationships between American soldiers and British women in one of the world wars. She says that Americans assumed that women were responsible for making sure that the relalationship didn't go beyond socially acceptable bounds, but that in Britain, men were. When American men and British women paired up, according to Meade's findings, no one had the cultural job of preventing the relationship from becoming sexualized. That is, British women had the cultural expectation that men would slow things down, and the American men expected the women to do it.
We see here this idea that Meade identified: it's the men who need to be constrained from flirting. It's left up to Yum-Yum to do it later when the two meet alone.
This definition is based on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which requires a little explanation.
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Last update: 12 April 1998.