Gosh, sometimes I loath Facebook. It doesn’t do anything to make me like some of my friends any better.
Let’s just not mention that I am surrounded by a gazillion seemingly illiterate people. I am here to complain about something else.
Some of my friends from back of the days when I was in the university have finally reached old fartdon before they turned 40. I am talking about the people that oudrank me, and outpartied me for years and have suddenly become the biggest prudes on earth.
What the hell is going on? Do I have a weird mutation that has allowed me to be a mother and raise a child without becoming Mrs. Lovejoy?
The straw that broke the camel’s back was one of my friends, who by all accounts had what I think was a healthy sex life before she was legally an adult (17) now complaining about sex education and efforts to get young people to use condoms. She is now advocating that parents tell their children to “just say no”. I couldn’t help but tell her that was insane, and will not work. I almost asked her if she was suffering from memory loss, she’s the friend who told me her mom was convinced she was a virgin when she was far from it. In the end I offered to show her that the statistics prove that abstinence only education does not work. I doubt it will make a dent on her “ideas”.
What the fuck happened? Am I am condemned to start ranting about all the “inmoral” stuff on TV (how about you control what your child watches?), explicit lyrics (we had explicit lyrics in the 80s), violent videos (don’t buy them) and teenagers having sex (they always did). Please, please tell me I can avoid this fate. Or at least postpone it until I am in my 60s.
Sorry for the typo. I am sure there are a few more there.
I didn’t think they were particularly stupid when they were young. But all of a sudden the world has turned into a scary place full of immorality. And I just can’t see it.
Quift. (I say that because I can’t pronounce “QFT”.)
IMO, it’s not so much stupidity per se as an early and persistent habit of not thinking things through.
If when you were young you did what a lot of people your age did without really thinking deeply about your personal choices and principles, then when you get older you’re likely to do what a lot of people your age do without really thinking deeply about your personal choices and principles. Consistency and sustained fact-based reasoning won’t be important to you at that point simply because they’ve never really been important to you.
People don’t generally start out principled and become hypocrites later in life; it’s just that it takes a while for them to pass through sufficiently varied circumstances to allow their innate hypocrisy to become plainly visible.
I’ve witnessed the same from many of my friends.
A lot of us did stupid things when we were young that turned out ok only through dumb luck. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case with your friend. Maybe there wasn’t a condom involved every time, or maybe there was a pregnancy that got “taken care of”. Then there are things like driving drunk and just generally reckless driving that also give these friends night sweats.
Now that they are parents and confronting the possibility of their own child making the same bad decisions and not being “lucky”, they advocate to take the decision making out of their kids hands by promoting abstinence. Unwittingly leaving all our children less prepared to make good choices, less likely to “get lucky”.
There is definitely some of that, but what about this need to control the whole world? I loved Ozzie when I was a teenager and was really into heavy metal (shut up!); but that never made me want to try drugs. In fact I didn’t even drink a whole lot in my college years, I was drunk once and didn’t like it. I have never been drunk since. I don’t believe that bending the world to your standards and cover it in bubblewrap is a good substitute for “parental discretion”.
I don’t care if comedians swear on Comedy Central because my child does not watch it. In fact I don’t mind adult language. For all I care they could have shows that consisted of “fuck, fuckity fuck fuck” for an entire hour (it will probably sound like “beep, beeeeep beep beep”). I don’t care if there are video games where people are shot and whatnot, my child is not allowed to play video games. I don’t care that there is adult language in lyrics nowadays (there was in the 80s), my child listen to music from our iPod.
It frightens me that one of these days I will wake up thinking that Lady Gaga is the devil or something (anyone remembers Madonna?).
Sort of what Hbns said. People who have kids remember all the stupid and self destructive things they did when they were young (getting drunk all the time, sleeping around, not studying in school, whatever), and they decide that they don’t want their kid acting as dumb as they did. So, they crack down on the kid, trying to save them from their own stupidity. It’s a large part of what maturing is.
The difference being that Mighty_Girl is trying to control her child’s behaviour.
The people she’s talking about on facebook appear to be trying to control everyone else’s behaviour.
I do believe the entire crux of Mighty_Girl’s argument is not inherently that these people want to stop their children from doing the things they did as idiot teens, but that they want everyone around them to stop doing anything at all, for fear their precious wittle packages might get corrupted by the immorality around them.
Kimstu, that does indeed sound like a more diplomatic and thorough explanation of what I was getting at. Then again, let’s be honest, anyone who doesn’t think things through does tend to called stupid. At least once they reach adulthood and start spouting complete bullshit.
I find myself constantly reminding people who are in my age group or who went to school with me that some of the things going on aren’t that new and that they seem to have a selective memory. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one.
The two big things I have problems with are:
[ol]
[li] A lot of my friends were very … let’s say promiscuous (and that’s an understatement) in high school and college. I was actually Miss Goodie Two Shoes and then moved onto keeping my actions to myself. Most of my friends however have seem to forgotten that they could be described as wanton sluts*, ahem I mean comfortable with their sexuality and their actions.[/li][li] Guns in schools. Our high school opened in 1985. At the end of September of that year an Assistant Principal was shot in the school and a ricochet injured a student. This was before I attended the school and it was considered the chi chi school in the district. It even had the nick name Country Club High. It was built with metal detectors in some of the main door areas. While we were in school we (my friends, acquaintances and I) would worry about guns or someone going postal. There were a few lock downs. Once, in 1992 when I was not at the school, but had friends who were, a teacher was murdered by her estranged husband who then turned the gun on himself. Fun times and safety!![/li][/ol]
So when I hear people, especially those who went to school with me talking about the scary guns at school today, I want to smack them with a wet trout since they’ve obviously forgotten about the events that actually made the news and certainly don’t remember the events that were hushed up.
I have heard a Comedy Central show where it was full of fuck fuck fuckity fucks. It was a Katt Williams show and I watched all of 2 minutes before the beeps started to give me a migraine (plus what came through didn’t make any sense). They were either beeping the crap out of his show, or they were simultaneously broadcasting the show in Morse code.
*This is a total joke, I figure as long as the parties involved are cool with their actions then its all good.
Hmm… all of our “woman” positions are filled at this time, but we have some nice openings for “bumblebee” and “lemur” if you’d like to try for those. If not, I know a guy looking for some er… “contract work” that may free up a few of those slots for you.
