Zonie63
Posts: 2826
Joined: 4/25/2011
From: The Old Pueblo
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quote:
ORIGINAL: njlauren
Interesting discussion, and I think you have to take things in context of their times and not be too certain about the way things were in different periods of time. My dad if he was alive would be in his early 90's (WWII generation) and he had to laugh when he heard about supposedly how different his generation was. I think one of the biggest differences is that today a lot of the veneer has been stripped off to what had been out there, that the idea that 50 years ago men were 'gentleman' was an image, not reality. Watch the tv series Mad Men, and yeah, the Don Drapers and such wear suits, look like 'gentlemen', but their behavior in reality was misognynistic to the Nth degree, and that was not just a tv show.
Yeah, in the old days, people were supposed to save sex for marriage but the first Kinsey reports showed that relatively few people were virgins when they got married. My dad would say the only difference in times was that back in his day, it wasn't talked about, but it went on, because people don't change. Girls got pregnant out of wedlock, abortions went on, but no one talked about it.
People think of Victorian times as being courtly, prim and proper, but when you read history, books like A.N Wright's "The Victorians" you realize how much of that was the veneer. Believe me,, it wasn't a moral time, in the upper classes it was a standard joke who was sleeping with who, whose kid was whose bastard, you name it, and the lower classes had huge problems with out of wedlock births (I saw a number from the 1840's in London, it was staggering, it was almost 50%....).
As far as not hitting women and such, I suggest again be very, very careful. Today, if a husband hits a wife or hurts her, or a guy abuses a girlfriend, there is a strong likelyhood of it being charged (not enough, and not always, but still). If you think there was some mysterious code when my dad was growing up, think again. It is very hard to know exact details, but back in those times spousal abuse was treated as a minor irritation, and the assumption was husband had had a few too many, the wife was an irritant, so if the poor guy belted her, well, she must have deserved it. My dad described things from when he was a teenager and was aware, this in NYC in the 1930's, where some guy would hit his wife, and if a cop came, if they bothered, they would basically tell the guy not to do it again and walk off. If a guy did end up in jail, the local priest would go to the stationhouse and bail the guy out, telling the cops he was under pressure, he was working hard, he didn't mean to do it, etc....and get the guy out. Mostly, though, it wasn't reported. The veneer might have been "a man doesn't hit a woman", but believe me, it went on, and not in small numbers.
Well, I didn't mean to say that those years were any kind of paradise. It was a rather nasty time in our history. I know that. But what I meant was that, at the very least, people knew what the rules were, even if many did not follow those rules. Places like London and NYC - I'd expect just about everything was happening there. My grandparents were mainly from Midwestern farm country, on the north end of the Bible Belt. They weren't from the city, although my father grew up in an area which was gradually encroached upon by the Chicago metro area. His family was so religiously strict that they just didn't do these things. My grandmother was pretty much in charge of the family, while my grandfather mostly puttered around in the garage and basement.
My other grandparents (maternal) came from the South (the other end of the Bible Belt), but they both left home when they were young and eventually met in California, where they stayed the rest of their lives. My maternal grandmother would often pine for the "good old days," especially during the 60s and 70s when things looked like they were changing for the worse in her eyes. Both of my grandmothers were very much "church ladies" to the extreme, with very narrow and bigoted views by today's standards.
My mother was also a rather formidable, headstrong woman, although more in the political sense, since she suffered abuse during her 12 years of Catholic school and was extremely adamant that my brother and I would never ever go to Catholic school, even if we wanted to. She was a rather staunch feminist, but she also had a rather nasty and abusive side as well. A lot of vicious arguments on that side of my family. My father was the polar opposite, very low-key and sedate. My mother's main complaint about him was that he was "weak," but he never hurt anyone in his entire life. I'm not even sure how they ended up together in the first place, since they were really so different from each other. Eventually they got divorced which started my rollercoaster ride through childhood in the late 60s and 1970s.
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As far as the sexes not understanding one another, I think that the feminist era and the sexual revolution helped some, it is true, coming of age in the late 70's, that it could be hard to know what someone was looking for. In my case, my social signals were all screwed up anyway, though I am bi I was oriented towards women mostly (still am), and didn't have even a normal clue, prob because I was/am trans. Even so, it could be hard, and there are things that confuse the hell out of boys and men. Men are told that women want to be treated with respect, yet you have the phenomenon of girls who want the 'bad boys' and the boys who are respectful and such are looked at as 'wimps' or 'nerds' (and it was and is very real. Pick up the adult romances big these days, and often the main male character is not exactly prince charming, and many women eat that up......go figure.
The 1970s was a strange time to be growing up. Whatever "rules" we had in the past (no matter if people followed them or not) were falling by the wayside. Old institutions and traditions were being sharply and zealously challenged. I realized that as I got older and was able to see things from a wider historical perspective, as well as comparing it to subsequent decades.
But at the time, I just figured that was how it was. It was also a bad time to be a little kid. Compared to every other decade that I'm aware of, the 1970s was probably the most "anti-child" as any of them. The narcissistic Baby Boomers were the center of attention and had zero use for "little kids," at least until the 80s when they started having kids and everything changed in that regard. I remember when my mother was trying to find an apartment for us in L.A. after her divorce from my father, and it was extremely difficult since so many apartment buildings had the "no children" rule (something that's since been made illegal). I was a "latchkey kid" before the term even came into existence.
It was a time when the "Battle of the Sexes" seemed prevalent in popular culture (although even then, there seemed to be a greater sense that men and women were still on the same side than in later decades). Ideas of role reversal were discussed openly, and movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show developed a very strong cult following (something I never could understand). (Oddly enough, I think Tim Curry has since expressed regret over his role in that movie and gets irritated by fans who keep reminding him of it.) There was also a brief 50s revival, exemplified by movies such as American Graffiti and TV shows like "Happy Days." The character of Fonzie was a heroic role model to all the pre-teen boys, while Richie and Potsie were the nerds. There was no "political correctness" either, which is something that the younger folks today find difficult to comprehend since they didn't live during that era.
But it was the time of the "sensitive male" (aka "wimp" in today's parlance), with Alan Alda and Phil Donahue being the typical examples. One of the trademarks of the Phil Donahue was to occasionally bring on male dancers, while the mostly female audience hooted and hollered. This is also when Playgirl magazine also got started, so it shouldn't be surprising that some men were led to believe that this might be what women wanted. When a couple NFL stars posed nude in Playgirl, it was said that female interest in them exploded.
No doubt countless guys got out their Polaroids and took pictures of themselves (and certain body parts), thinking that it would be a great way to get dates and be popular with the ladies. This probably seemed logical in the minds of men, since they knew that men enjoyed pictures of naked women, so they assumed that women would enjoy pictures of naked men, all in the spirit of gender equality. (This might explain the phenomenon of "cock shots" that show up in male profiles here. I have no doubt that a lot of these guys honestly believe that that's what women want.)
During the Reagan era, the old traditions and institutions were trying to make a comeback, as the country started to shift in a more conservative direction (although a bit twisted in that cocaine-fueled era and far more sexualized than the 70s were, especially once Madonna came on the scene). I looked back at my old yearbook pictures, and what struck me was that the boys and girls back then used to dress almost exactly alike - usually t-shirt and jeans. Boys typically wore long hair (often longer than the girls), while the crew-cut/skinhead look was practically taboo. But the 80s were far more ostentatious and materialistic than the 70s were. America entered a kind of illusionary "fantasyland" which formed a cultural and economic bubble which has only recently been burst. This is probably where much of the confusion and current gender divides seem to emanate from.
So, my point is that, as a society, we might have been on the right track in the 1970s - culturally, politically, economically, and socially. If we had stayed the course, things might have been much different today. But the 1980s threw a monkey wrench into the works. Whatever went "wrong," it seems to emanate from there, not so much from previous eras (such as the 50s and earlier). The 1990s and 2000s were merely just the logical results of that direction we took in the 1980s, which was a sharp rejection of the 1960s and 70s. Feminism also started to change drastically with the culture, going in a different direction than one might have expected from looking at the 60s and 70s. There was a still strong movement towards "equality," but that started to mean different things to different people.
What seemed like an era of hope for unity and equality fell by the wayside, and in the 1980s, we started to draw the cultural battle lines, along with class and factional dissension which has reached a crescendo in the past few years. It seems like we haven't a learned a damn thing in the past 40 years, but it's somewhat understandable considering the amount of misinformation we've gotten and how overly insular our culture, politics, and economy have been during these past decades.
But now that the drugs are wearing off and reality is setting in, people are wondering just what the hell has gone wrong. It's easy for me to figure out, only because I spend much of my time in deep philosophical meditation.  I've reached a point of acceptance and inner peace that nothing really fazes me much anymore.
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My take, fwiw, is that all you can do is be honest about yourself, who you are, and hope to find someone who is attracted to that. Part of the problem IMO is that like men, many women don't know what they want, either, it is kind of like the guy torn between the image of the really attractive woman who is a bitch and the less technically attractive one who is kind and nice..which would the man choose? No different than the nice guy/bad boy dynamic:).
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think most everyone has had a slew of ex-boyfriends/ex-girlfriends who were the "wrong ones." All the emotional baggage that carries undoubtedly made a lot of people rather jaded and antagonistic towards the opposite sex. Men and women seemingly know less about each other than in previous eras. It's almost as if the tearing down of traditions and institutions has led us to a more "primitive" state. Singles bars are commonly known as "meat markets," with the image of people reduced to primitive, animal lust, doing what "feels good" without thinking about the consequences or using any real logical or reasoned analysis of the situation.
Do you ever notice how many times terms like "alpha male" come into discussions like this, as if human social interactions have regressed to that of a wolf pack? Then there are books like "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." I remember a time when men and women were still from Earth, but now, we come from completely different planets. How the heck did that happen?
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