I feel fairly certain that in the 50’s schools did not have pregnancy rates of 1 in 8, and that in other schools girls were not having contests between themselves to see who could get pregnant first, and that 2nd-graders were not engaging in oral sex anywhere, much less in their classrooms.
There is no question that in a moral sense and common sense, uh, sense, that things in this country are going to hell in a handbasket. There is absolutely no way that you will convince me or anyone from the 50’s and 60’s era that kids are not engaging in sexual behavior at rates and ages unheard of back than. You can cherry pick some questionable statistics if you want, but the incontrovertible fact is that STD’s, teen pregnancies, and sexual activity among increasingly younger kids is going on a rate now that people from the 50’s would never have believed possible.
And no, the 50’s were not absolute misogynistic shite. Most adult women of the 50’s and early 60’s were quite comfortable and happy with the quid pro quo that existed at that time, and they felt resentment and worry over the changes that had begun to happen, driven mostly by 18 to 22 year-old-girls who’d been whipped up into a lather by their leftie professors and peers during the counterculture revolution. Take a look at some bra-burning photos from that time and you’ll find almost nothing but women in the 18-to-25 year age range. If you think women were miserable and felt oppressed during the 50’s and 60’s, it’s only because you’ve drunk the leftie Kool-Aid about that time. I lived it and I know perfectly well that most women of that time were perfectly content with the way society operated at that time. Mostly the burden of providing for the family was on the man, and women took care of their kids and the family home. That was the commonplace lifestyle then and nobody even questioned it until the drug-addled baby-boomer generation came of age and decided that they knew better than all those uptight adults about how things should be, and now we’ve drug problems and the crime associated with them infesting every part of every town and school. We’ve got millions of kids doomed to substandard lives due to having grown up in single-parent homes. We’ve got kid racing each other to see who can get pregnant first. And elementary school kids muff-diving and giving each other blow jobs at school, no less.
There is absolutely no way that you are ever going to convince anyone that society functions better now, and that’s why you try these lame and factually incorrect portrayals of life in the 50’s as a time when women had yokes around their necks and black people and gays being strung up on every corner streetlamp. All of that is a fiction and anyone who believes it, believes it only because they’ve brainwashed into it by leftie history revisionists.
I have no idea whether teenage girls were having pregnancy “contests” in the 50s, but teen pregnancy rates have declined quite steeply since that decade (cite). It’s true that the proportion of teenage births that are to unmarried mothers has increased, but if that’s an important distinction than it should be made outright. I can’t find any stats offhand for rates of sexual activity in the 50s, but it does appear that such activity has decreased at least since 1988 (cite; for-pay; but age 15-17 virginity rates went from 50% for boys and 63% for girls in 1988 to 70% for both in 2002).
As for second graders having oral sex in classrooms: do you have information that indicates this is not a bizarre and unfortunate anomaly? If I can cite a second grader being beaten by his classmates in the 50s (and I imagine I could find something like that, if I looked) would it indicate a culture of violence from that decade?
Aiee. Well, you can believe what you like, but please at least get the relevant statistics correct.
Curiously, my Mother didn’t reveal the circumstances of my conception 'til I was ~43. Trust me, for her New Year’s Eve 1963 was verrry much still the 50’s. Clearly, the time discrepancy between my birth and the date of her marriage is just proof that I was a preemie.
Also curiously, the only evidence that my Grandmother ever even had sex was those four children. However, I very much doubt that the blow-job was invented at Woodstock.
Of course not. If a girl got pregnant, she dropped out of school. Occasionally she left for a couple of semesters, but mostly, they dropped out of school and didn’t return to finish their schooling. However, girls in that age range in the 50s got pregnant at a much higher rate than they do today. This was due to lack of knowledge (anyone else remember hearing that you couldn’t get pregnant if you “did it” while standing, or you couldn’t get pregnant if it was your first time?), lack of access to contraception (boys had problems even buying condoms), and lack of reliable contraception (a condom that was kept in a boy’s wallet for months or years was liable to break). The most common birth control method back then among that age group was withdrawal…and we all know how well that works. Or doesn’t work.
You DO know that bra burning is a myth, right? Right? Did Feminists Burn Their Bras in Protest at the 1968 Miss America Pageant? | Snopes.com Let’s see some pics. And MOST of the protesters in that era were college students! No matter what the cause. For that matter, in ANY modern era, most of the protesters are gonna be college age students. People in that age range have just come of age, and are mostly unburdened by dependent families, and are very, very passionate about their causes.
As for women being happy…I strongly doubt it. Most healthy adults don’t ENJOY being treated as sub-adults, as perpetual children. And legally and socially, that’s how women were treated. Oh, sure, SOME women enjoyed never having to be an adult, but I think that most chafed under the legal and social restrictions. Hell, I was a kid back in the 50s and 60s, and I HATED being told that I couldn’t do this because I was a girl, and that young ladies didn’t do that. It’s unhealthy for an adult to have to act like a child. And there was tremendous pressure on the boys and men to always be macho, too.
Now that you mention it, I don’t think my parents ever had sex, ever. EVER. LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.
Things were just different in their times. None of that shameful promiscuous nonsense. They politely asked Mr. Stork and that was that.
“Quoted for truth”, as the kids say. We shouldn’t generally expect protestors to be anything other than young adults. To what you said, I’ll add that older women simply had more to lose; they had invested in the system as it was, and were accustomed to it in the sense of the devil-you-know. There’s a GD thread going on now in which has arisen the issue of female genital mutilation, a custom administered and in no small part continued by women. I should hope that Starving Artist wouldn’t use that as a pro-FGM argument.
Suggesting that prostitutes are all liberals! So, if the dems focused on creating an echo-chamber of left wing talking points among the prostitutes…
Anyway, Obama is going to present a spending plan this week. We’ll see if he is ready to stand up to the pubs this time or not. The article does mention cuts to defense, but no specifics as yet.
It’s been made clear in the past that he’s talking only about unmarried teen mothers–if you got married and then had a kid, you’re perfectly fine.
So I repeat my questions from upthread: Which would you rather do, reduce the teen pregnancy/STD rate with pragmatic, proven-to-work programs regarding education and condom use/availability and health care availability; or stick to your principles even though they have been shown to result in a higher STD and pregnancy rate for un/underinformed teenagers?
It’s effectively proven that merely osmosing the risks of sexual activity from societal example doesn’t make teens have less sex. There’s equally no doubt in my mind that a cultural change would be necessary in order to reduce teen sexual activity, STD rates, and pregnancy rates. The question for you is this: do you honestly believe that removing sex education and sexual health providers, in the absence of a cultural change, is going to accomplish anything but make it worse?
Or if you got knocked up by your boyfriend, and were subsequently guilted into marrying him - whether or not this was a good idea - this was also perfectly fine.
Well, then he must contend with the facts, first, that the premarital virginity rate is about the same now as it was in the mid-50s (although it dipped in the intervening years); and, second, that the increase in the proportion of unwed teenage births is very steeply mitigated by the overall reduction in the rate of teenage births. (I also suspect that many of the births to married teenage mothers followed the path of premarital sex -> pregnancy -> marriage -> birth.)
Ah, here’s an interesting statistic: the rate of births to 10-14 (15-19) year olds is down from 0.9 (80.6) in 1950 to 0.6 (41.7) in 2008 (cite). It does not appear to be the case that teenagers are becoming pregnant at earlier and earlier ages.
This is the most literal example of “LA LA LA MY FINGERS ARE IN MY EARS I CAN’T HEAR YOU OR YOUR ‘FACTS’!!” I’ve ever seen in my life. You should be ashamed.
Hmm. I wonder if the commonness of pregnant women smoking during the '50s and early '60s was a strategy to have low birth-weight babies and make the “preemie” cover story more plausible…
Yeah, like so many conservative women who achieve prominence, what do they run on? The idea that they’rehot and sexy, while those liberal bitches are hairy legged man hating lesbians. Palin called feminists ‘a cackle of rads’—WTF?—and Coulter’s got a long history of attacking liberal women while preening—rather a bit too desperately-----that she’s hot. I saw her on some morning show wearing a cocktail dress, for Pete’s sake. Coulter especially gives off the impression that she just loathes other women, thinks she’s special because she’s one of the guys, and not just because she’s publicly stated she think the vote should be taken away from women. What, including herself? Bachman’s said so many downright upside down–in terms of truth–things that there’s too many to go through.
Bottom line is, there are some women who think they’re one of the guys, they buy into sexism because they don’t think it applies to them–they’re special!----and so they go around and say things like, “But me and my pretty girl allies…'the hirsute pie wagons Dems call women…”
