I don’t get why sharing a bed with someone is a big deal. I’m even less clear on the double standard of the sexes sharing a bed - two women sharing is just part of a girlie night in after they’ve finished talking about boys and eating ben and jerries, but if two men share a bed then it MUST be because they’re bumping uglies. 
My grandmother was seen as the stereotypical kindly old woman, but once said she didn’t know what the big fuss was about blackface shows. All I can think of in her defence was that she was raised in the middle of Nebraska, born about 1918, where there probably weren’t even any people to be racist against. She probably thought of them as just some show that never hurt anyone.
That was the assumption in high school (Class of ‘03). Every* overnight school trip the chaperones would arrange for cots in the boys’ room, while the girls shared beds. Most of us didn’t even realize until our senior trip when the hotel didn’t have enough cots to go around so nobody got any. There was alot of complaining on the boys’ part, and alot of confusion on the girls’ part (mostly as to why there would be in the first place). End result the mattresses in the boys’ rooms got taken off the boxsprings and the bedding slip up so nobody had to share. Housekeeping must have loved us :rolleyes: (between that and cleaning up beer cans and liquor bottles everynight, oh and incident with the washing machine).
*The exception being when the French club trip to go to Quebec. There were only 4 guys (verses 10 girls) and our French teacher didn’t know she was supposed to order cots for the boys. Ironically we did share the beds, but we were also all gay or bicurious. Oh and boys and girls payed the same price for school trips despite the boys getting cots.
Wasn’t there an issue when they started releasing classic Sesame Street episodes on DVD? I think they had to add a parental advisory, since there’s a scene where a man takes a little girl to his house for milk and cookies or somesuch.
Sesame Street is now rated PG. /sigh
Also, there was the flap over Britney Spears holding her child in her lap in the car and letting the kid steer. Everyone was scandalized, but I remember doing this when I was 5 or 6. Britney was just doing something she had enjoyed as a kid. Dangerous as all hell (I actually steered us off the road at one point!) but heck, she’s just whaht trayash lahk me, and we do that kind of thing.
Let’s see, what else? Kids playing wherever, unsupervised, all day. Hm. Pot of bacon grease kept by the stove to use for cooking (and now that I think on that, the grease on the bottom must have been years old). Does anyone drink from the water hose any more? And so on, and so on…
I’ve learned to temper my outrage nowadays. Lots of stuff people get all upset about, they did without a thought as children.
The second day after I had a C-section (I was in the hospital for almost a week) they wanted me up and walking - so my husband and I (shuffling) walked down to the room at the end of the wing where patients could go to smoke! (this was in the 80’s). Now they don’t allow smoking even outside standing on the street corners near the hospital.
I was in the Amsterdam airport just a few weeks ago, and the blackface “black Peters” where doing their Christmas musical routines. It was tasteful and in no way offensive, but then I’m not black. My black coworker (I only have one here on the road) didn’t take offense.
One could say that it used to be okay to drive big trucks and SUV’s, but now I feel like some environmentalist is going to scream at me whenever I’m in the Expedition. Never mind that they have no idea what else I drive or how else I offset it; it’s just pure evil to ever drive one.
This is popular in Denmark, if I recall the scandal some Danish couple had here in the States leaving their baby outside the store.
He wasn’t encouraged to become a priest. He was told he had no choice in the matter.
There’s definitely been a huge change in how one treats the emotions of children. (And adults as well, but it’s most obvious for children.) Back in ye olden days, if a child in school messed up a simple arithmetic problem or misspelled a basic word or something of that nature, the teacher would probably called them “stupid” in front of the entire class. This still happens in classrooms in many countries. In the United States, however, the self esteem movement has virtually banished criticism of children from schools.
Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips probably wouldn’t go over very well these days either.
I called my parents by their first names. This was in the 70s. It wasn’t widespread then, and there are probably some people who do it now. But am amazed sometimes at the level of “No. Get out! You did what?” that I get from people about that. At the time, we definitely didn’t think we were more than 30 years ahead of the curve.
Keeping slaves, having sex with them against their will, and selling the children would probably be poorly received today.
But isn’t that just, you know, incorrect? Or is he unaware that we no longer live in a time when your parents get to decree what you’ll do with your life?
A real fur coat was a status symbol for many women until perhaps the 70’s. Full length furs could cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Stoles were popular with those who couldn’t afford the high ticket coats. The trend pretty much died out when a certain very vocal element began ambushing the fur wearers with paint or blood, destroying the garment. You rarely see anyone wearing a genuine mink or chinchilla today.
Uh, no, the kid wasn’t steering, he was an infant who wasn’t even a year old at the time, and Britney was driving on a busy L.A. street at a fairly high rate of speed. This was not an instance of “come on junior, mama will let you drive” by any stretch of the imagination.
Who said that they decreed? The mother made a pact with God. If you’re raised to believe that one’s pacts with the supreme being of the universe must be fulfilled even if the obligation is on you for someone else’s pact, because it’s with God and you cannot dishonor God then you do it.
You do if you go to the rarely publicized private events of the most rarefied and moneyed segments of society, people who are on the boards of big, old charities or major museums or the like. Older (70+) women with money still love and wear their fur unrepentently.
Not everyone who is raised religious turns out that way. Also bring raised with the understanding that your religion has decided your future career for you might count towards you wanting to break away from it.
Anyway, I don’t know do I? I don’t know the guy.
When I was in third grade (1984) I volunteered to solve a long division problem on the black board. When I failed to get the correct answer the teacher called me stupid and said several other unpleasant things in front of the entire class and nearly reduced me to tears. A teacher calling a student stupid isn’t constructive criticism it’s simply cruel.
When I was in 5th grade (1999) I remember the teacher calling one girl stupid. Or at least she intimated that what the girl had said was stupid. That teacher was a bitch.
I moved from one school system, where students learned multiplication and division in 4th grade. To one where they learned it in 3d grade. See a problem starting here?
SO, while everybody else in the room was reviewing math skills that may have been lost over the summer, by the teacher passing out sheets full of multiplication and division problems. All I saw when I looked at the pages were math problems with funny signs that I did not recognize. So I ask the kid sitting next to me what I was supposed to do. I got yelled at for talking in class. So I sit there adding and subtracting, as I had no clue what those funny signs were. Needless to say, all the answers were wrong. So I get yelled at in class and sent to the punishment corner for refusing to do my classwork.
So, I go home, carrying the little nastygram from my teacher to my mother. It included the page of classwork in question. My mom, having no idea what the problem is actually takes 30 seconds to listen to me explain that I had no idea what the little symbols were and had no idea what I was supposed to do. So, the next day she takes me to school instead of letting me walk the mile [gasp] to school, and went in to chew the school admin a new asshole while I went off to class. Luckily, she had taken 30 seconds to actually explain to me what the symbols meant, and help me work through the first few problems and made sure that I could now actually multiply and divide … so I didn’t have to actually go to the retard class for remedial math.
If the fucking asshole bitch of a teacher had bothered to listen to me for 30 seconds, and understand that I literally never did multiplication or division, take 5 minutes and show me how, the whole issue could have been avoided.
Unfortunately the fucking bitch has left me with a serious intense dislike of math that actually hinders me from being comfortable with math, so learning anything is a major struggle for me. All because she wanted to go off for a cigarette in the teachers lounge while we spent the first day of class ‘reviewing’.
Heh! Try visiting the Computer History Museum some time…you’ll be amazed at the amount of sophisticated computer setups that had built-in ashtrays and *cigarette lighters*.
I think you have a spelling error, it’s “remedial” and not “retard.”
[hijack]Yep, and I grew up with retard too, but one tends to change when one’s own child has “special needs.” [/hijack]