What was objectively better "back in the day?"

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Those "scare stories" about sex that the adults told us back in the day (1960s - 1970s) may have done more for contraception than a truckload of condoms.

^Yes i agree with Fnord. In countries like Japan for example high school girls getting pregnant is almost unheard of because it's still regarded as such a taboo in their culture. It used to be for Americans but now it has tragically become an accepted part of our own culture along with drugs and school shootings.

Actually, teen pregnancy has decreased significantly in the past 30 years. This is probably due to sex education and access to birth control.

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/08/11477372 ... l%20states.

Hmm maybe you're right. I guess things were different when I was a teenager. I'm getting old.

Neighbours knew one another and formed supportive communities.
Women had their morning coffees together on someone's front porch.
Everyone knew everyone else's children and kept an eye on them.
People didn't feel so isolated or alone.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2 ... e-falling/

My grandmother was a teen mom. She had 2 kids when she was 18. Due in part to her parents pushing, she married my grandfather who was an evil monster - he committed multigenerational abuse. I have an uncle who is serving a life sentence for child abuse. I don't think I was involved in any of that but who knows.

My other grandmother got married to an abusive man when she got pregnant, but she was in her 20s. My grandmothers were friends and bonded over this shared experience which is how my parents met. My mom and dad are both broken in their own way.

I think that people tend to view the past with nostalgia, buying into the Leave it to Beaver stuff, but I don't think the past was any better in terms of marriage and relationships.

Japan is the same country where grown men paying high school girls for sexual favours is a thing that happens openly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JK_business

It was for a few generations, but the rate is lower now. It'd be lower still if access to prevention was made easier, but part of the problem is social conservatives working to interfere with allowing society to respond to cultural changes.

It harms their own communities, when it's their kids getting pregnant; but it also hurts everyone when they vote for bad policies.

Why can't things just go back to the not-so-good ol' days isn't a solution when you remember what the details of that era were like, even just on this specific issue. It's how nostalgia works, all the negative details get blurred out while the positives are remembered.

Last edited by funeralxempire on 05 Mar 2023, 9:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The era where beating your wife was a killer punchline. Bearing in mind how not-edgy was the comedic style of the time.

One of these days Alice, bang, zoom, straight to the moon.



Get it, he's gonna slug her a good one.

<awkward silence>

Yeah, I don't think you could pay me to go back and live in that time period. I realize that my family situation is extreme, but the truth is that domestic violence and child abuse were happening; people were just less likely to hear/talk about it.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 05 Mar 2023, 9:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Agreed. DV and date rape weren't taken seriously. There was a lot of alcoholism and infidelity. Gender roles were difficult for men, women, and everyone in between.

My grandmother fell pregnant on her first date with my granddad at age 19. I don't know for sure if it was rape / date rape, because the family didn't talk about it, but it's pretty safe to say it was. Her wealthy family completely disowned her for the rest of her life. She married my granddad and they had an extremely unhappy relationship by all accounts, living in near poverty while my granddad suffered depression and social phobia. He became reclusive and vanished when I was little. It broke my grandmother's heart to put 40 years of her life into a marriage and be abandoned in an unsolved mystery as the brunt of speculation. He eventually resurfaced but only after she had died, and he killed himself on my 16th birthday.

Fun times? Not.

I shudder to think what people went through in the past without birth control, sex education, abortion, divorce, women's rights, gay / trans rights, and mental health or DV awareness.

When my 16 year old grandmother went to her parents for help, they said: "You made your bed, now lie in it." Nice people.

That sounds like the treatment my mom's mom got, almost to the word (as my mom has recounted it). Except Doris was 15.

I just can't even imagine such horrific, wicked behavior.

My auntie got pregnant at 16.

My grandfather (other side of the family from previous story) told her 18 year old boyfriend he had to marry her, or else he'd never see her again - and never meet the baby.

They got married.

Lucky for them they're still together 53 years later. They've had their share of bad times and hardship. I'm sure other teens were given the same ultimatums and ended up in very abusive situations.

When I was in 8th grade a girl in my class got pregnant. The parents made the boy move into their home and help raise the child, and the plan was they'd be forced to get married at 16. I have no idea what happened with that.

From what I've heard her mom started having kids young too, only without the coerced marriage and probably viewed her daughter's bed as an upgrade.

It's nuts when I think of what was the norm on my matrilineal line.