I don’t want this to become too political, but I want to talk about social changes that have happened since your early adulthood that would have been unthinkable then. I am in my later 30s and came of age in the early 90s. I’ll start:
And I think the most obvious: SSM. Only the most hardcore liberals believed in it when I came of age. The idea that two men could marry each other was absurd, even among Democratic politicians. (And again, I don’t submit this for debate, just for the truth of attitude changes in society).
That I used to be able to smoke a cigarette in a bar, but not carry a gun and now I can carry a gun in a bar but not smoke a cigarette. Again, no political commentary needed, but a real reversal of priorities there.
Kids cursing their teachers or parents. When I was a kid, paddling was still an option (and again, not a debate on corporal punishment! ) I never heard a kid curse his parents or teachers. Today it happens, well at above a non-zero level. I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying a curse word, let alone directing them at my parents or teachers.
Police involvement in relationships. Used to be if two people wanted to slap each other bloody, that was their own business, and so long as each party wanted to stay, they could continue and be the trashy family on the block. Now a shove involves the courts and restraining orders and counseling.
Drunk in public. It used to be a very serious offense that would land you in jail. Now unless you are drunk in public and throwing rocks at streetlights, nothing will happen except a night in an alcohol counseling center…
I’m only in my 30s, I don’t have as long a history to go on.
Marijuana acceptance has picked up. It used to be seen as a fringe opinion among libertarians and dopers, now 50% of the public support it in some polls. Same with SSM, as was mentioned in the OP.
The debate over contraception and abortion seems to have picked up about whether people should have access to them, I assumed those things were settled in the 90s. Same with the welfare state with regards to social security, minimum wage, medicare, etc. I thought those things were settled in the 90s and now people want a serious debate on if these things should exist.
I thought police involvement in relationships went back further than the 90s and started in the 60s and 70s. I wonder when police involvement evolved to the point where it stopped being so misandristic and started addressing and taking seriously domestic violence by women too.
Another issue that seems to have changed is statutory rape. Back in the 90s the idea of an 18 year old and a 15 year old together was weird, but not considered a life ending evil the way it is now.
I was a kid in the 1950s and 60s, and a lot has changed since then.
Back when I was a kid, drunkeness and alcoholism weren’t taken nearly as seriously as they are now. A public drunk might get tossed in the drunk tank overnight with little further consequence, but was otherwise ignored unless he was loud. The “funny lush” was a standard humorous convention, like Otis on the Andy Griffith show. Drunk driving was a minor peccadillo rather than something that would cost you your license.
Attitudes about underage sex were much more casual in general. The Stones and the Grateful Dead sang about sex with fourteen and fifteen year old girls (Stray Cat Blues, Mexicali Blues) with little outrage.
Another one: Attitudes about safety. Back when I was a kid bicycle helmets, baseball helmets, and seatbelts were unknown. Now there’s a much greater awareness of safety issues.
Islam replacing Communism as America’s top bugaboo; although I understand that’s a return to the past and that when Communism started being promoted as the enemy of America, it was originally demonized by comparing it to Islam.
Non-embarrassing multi-ethnic/gender ensembles in entertainment. I recall when I was a kid, it would be a collection of stereotypical tokens; “the Black Guy”; “the Indian Guy”; “the Asian Guy”; “the Woman”.
The Internet. It shocks me a bit sometimes to think back at how fast it’s gone from something for a relatively small number of tech-savvy people, to this all-encompassing, pervasive cultural phenomenon. And just how crippling it feels to not have Internet access these days, when not so many years ago I lived just fine without it.
Tattoos. When I grew up in the 1970’s, tattoos were comedic fodder if you wanted to stereotype somebody as a drunken stevedore. Mike Royko (Cub fan) used to stereotype White Sox fans as having tattoos. I worked with a guy during the 1980’s who considered it the height of comedy to walk into a swank hotel and ask the concierge if she could recommend a good tattoo parlor.
There are Democrats today who are conservative but can’t stand the Republicans for some specific reason. I strongly suspect a lot of Latinos fall into this group.
I really don’t know what you mean here, and I doubt you’ll get a lot of agreement from others. The existence of snarky review websites and so on does not mean that Twilight can’t become popular, for example.
More to the point, the mainstreaming of a variety of quality food. Back in The Day, you had bad food shipped in from elsewhere, which was bound to be bad because preservation technology was for shit, and a tiny variety of good food limited to what could be gotten locally, if you were lucky. These days, preservation technology has improved to the point I can eat sushi in Montana, and want to, and, yes, there’s been enough of a cultural shift away from things like apples that taste like wet sand to support more farmers’ markets and other locally-sourced foods.
Colorado legalized marijuana. Now, I was born in the 1980s, so I’m not old enough to have lived through the Demon Weed era of the 1930s, but I doubt anyone back when Reagan was winning his second term would have imagined state-level legalization would happpen.
I expected this to be a political rather than social thread. and I’m going to toss in what I think are the two greatest events of the 20th Century. One was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the the new found freedoms of hundreds of millions. The other was the peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa. Not only did it free millions of South African blacks, the way reconciliation was managed was a shining example to the rest of the world.
The relatively peaceful collapse of the USSR, which was almost as surprising.
Which brings up something else I just thought of (and the fact I didn’t think of it earlier demonstrates just how much has changed); global nuclear war going from an ever present specter, to a remote possibility.
Northern Ireland being an almost normal and stable society. There are still problems but nothing on the scale of what they were before.
If you had told someone twenty years ago that Martin McGuinness would be pictured shaking hands with the Queen or that he would be BFF with Ian Paisley people would think you were smoking something…
On that note, the bottled water industry. When I was kid, people would have been astonished by the idea that people would pay money to drink water. Water was something you could get for free.
I was watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show recently and it reminded me of this. There was a scene where Frank asked Brad if he has any tattoos and he says no. Then Frank turns and ask Janet if she has any. It was a big laugh at the time because the idea of a woman having a tattoo was so unlikely.
Similar to tattoos, shaved heads. When I was in grad school just 20 years ago, my white, male officemate had a shaved head (decided why fight the premature hair loss) and wore a black leather jacket. He got lots of wrong assumptions that he was some kind of skinhead.
After Michael Jordan popularized it and it spread out to white people, no one looks twice at a shaved-bald guy. I know doctors who shave their heads.
And the change in masculine behaviour because of it. I’ve come to realize that I came of age in an time that was pretty much the nadir of guys having anything more than the shallowest friendship with other guys being seen as “gay”, and teenage boys interpersonal relationships really suffered for it. It was after the time when homosexuality entered the public consciousness, but before it was “acceptable” so guys were doing everything they could to avoid being seen as gay.
But the most important social change is the acceptance of “white” as the appropriate colour for cheddar cheese, instead of that day-glo orange colour it used to be dyed.
OK, there are all sorts, I know. But the overarching one right now is:
Holy fuck, the President is black!
I still have that roll over me every now and again. I was born in 1967 and am a political animal and ten years ago I wouldn’t have bet that would happen. I’d have put money down that a woman or a Jew would pull it off, first. But no, the world surprised me. And I ain’t complaining.
oh! here’s another happy one:
When I was young, it used to be unthinkable that…
the entire banking system could collapse and destroy western civilization.
“Men with earrings and women with tattoos! What’s the world coming to?”
Changing hair styles has been mentioned. It used to be that a crew cut, long hair, or a shaved head were statements about your political or cultural views. Now what kind of hair style you choose is largely irrelevant. Right wingers or left wingers may each have long hair or shaved heads.
) I never heard a kid curse his parents or teachers. Today it happens, well at above a non-zero level. I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying a curse word, let alone directing them at my parents or teachers.
