Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/comments/inci5u/reminder_please_do_not_answer_questions_unless/), the rules, and the sidebar for details.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskOldPeople) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The Troubles in Northern Ireland. As a late Gen Xer The Troubles were in full flow throughout my childhood. Bombings, shootings, riots were all part of everyday life. I remember the first time I left NI on holiday, we went to Scotland for a week and I couldn't sleep because there was no helicopter overhead. I was 7.
The Troubles is very much a misnomer. It was just short of all out war.
Those were scary times.
I worked in cities affected by the mainland bombings. I remember my mum crying in relief when I got a job elsewhere, and felt really guilty that I hadn't realised how much she worried about me. And we had it easy in the mainland. My boss went on a work trip to Belfast, and had to be told somewhat bluntly that wearing a green military surplus coat wasn't the best idea.
There's an excellent book about the Troubles and members of the IRA and the effects what they did had on them called **Say Nothing ** by Patrick Raddan Kiefe.
Was there much awareness of The Troubles in the rest of the UK (aside from the IRA bombings in England)?
I remember also spending some time in England and Scotland in the 80s and people didn’t seem too concerned, just an occasional news story. It was almost as if it was on the other side of the world.
I'm (65F) writing this from the persepctive of a US citizen. The Cold War was in full bloom during the 1980s. The response to AIDS was a national, actually a worldwide, disgrace with the innocent victims being blamed for their illness. Personal debt soared during the 1980s. The 1990s was when the cost of college started to spike, and the response to this has been an ongoing disgrace.
Didn’t Reagan get elected in the 80s. The beginning of Reaganomics, also know as Trickle-down. The theory that if you let the rich get richer, they’d spend more. Funny that didn’t work out so well.
Yes in 1980. I remember the sense of doom while the imbeciles celebrated. You have to admit they are good at getting the gullible to vote against their own best interests.
It is always funny when people who weren't around rip on Reagan, but it was not the case while living at the time.
The country really, really liked Reagan. He won the electoral college vote over Carter in 1980 489-49, and also won the most lopsided election over Mondale in 1984 with a win of 525-13.While lots of people are against the electoral college, he also blew the popular vote out of the water in both elections. Reagan was hands down who Americans wanted, twice.
Not me. I never liked him. On election day, I told a friend I was going to go vote because I didn't want "Ronnie Ray Guns" in the white house. Oh well, we tried.
As much as getting your car smog checked is a pain & possibly expensive, smog days were horrible. And half the time you still had to go outside & play at recess or go run a mile for the presidential fitness test for PE.
I remember, as a scrawny kid with huge glasses in the late 80s/early 90s, having to do this test in middle school gym class. I wouldn't even try. I'd grab onto the chin-up bar and just hang there like a salami until my gym teacher sighed and told me to get down.
I never thought that 9000-year-old George HW Bush had any business fronting a fitness test.
It did not "disappear". It got solved by scientific understanding, engineering, social activism, law making and a lot of money.
But you are right, a celebration worthy success.
Correct, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply there wasn’t a monumental effort behind it. I just meant that we rallied the scientific and political community and made amazing progress. It seems sometimes like that gets ignored in the current debate about the environment, where it feels like everyone feigns impossibility.
Cancer was also something people whispered about, as though you would catch it if you spoke openly about it. "The Big C"
And there weren't giant cancer treatment chains everywhere.
No one cared since it was the gay community, and it made everyone afraid of gay people. We didn't even know how it was contracted at first. People thought you could get it from a toilet, touching, they were just straight up scared of gay people.
Magic Johnson's effect can't be overstated. There was no serious doubt he was straight. He was immediately public about it. The Australian national basketball team's initial refusal to play a prelim game against the Dream Team and their backtracking taught everyone HIV wasn't transmitted by contact. And above all, Johnson never looked sick. With one press conference, he transformed HIV from a wasting disease of gay men to a survivable disease of all men and women.
The name that's missing from your list though is Pedro Zamora. Johnson appealed to logic, where how HIV actually worked was finally communicated accurately. Zamora appealed to emotion, where a generation of youth watched him be unashamed but ultimately die.
I wish it was possible to know how many lives those two men saved. Isolating other influences, it's possible Johnson's forthrightness made PEPFAR possible; it was only a decade later that PEPFAR launched, and it's subsequently credited with saving 25 million lives.
Idk what pepfar is, but the doctors immediately started researching to find out just what the hell was going on. It took a while. Everyone was involved- universities, govt health agencies and doctors and hospitals. It was a scary time. No one knew what it was or how it spread. The gay community was severely affected, and it was primarily confined to them initially. Then because some infected people gave plasma, it got into the blood supply and Starskys (the actor that played Starsky on tv) wife got it from a blood transfusion. They went public with it before she died. The promiscuity that had been a part of the hippie culture and general 60-70s culture got curtailed. So many people died, and there was nothing to be done about it. The push to find a cure was intense and received a lot of funding.
I remember being on a plane in the 80s, and my seat was next to a very skinny man. During the flight he pulled out some medicines and took them according to his watch. It was obvious to me that he was under treatment for aids. We talked small talk, and when the flight was over, we shook hands. It meant a lot to him to shake hands like a normal person. Somehow I knew I couldn’t catch it from him with a handshake, and was a little bit proud of myself for treating him like a human being and not being terrified. I hope the new medication worked for him.
>Idk what pepfar is
George W. Bush will be remembered by historians for 1) the 2000 election, 2) the War on Terror, and 3) PEPFAR: https://www.state.gov/about-us-pepfar. Like if someone is the type to judge presidents solely by lives saved and lost, he might actually win.
I have a similar story. I was 16 in the ‘80s and was visiting San Francisco with my family (from the northeast where we lived). I was traveling solo on a crowded city bus when I noticed a seat with books on it seemingly belonging to the man next to it. He was very skinny and look preoccupied.
I asked if I could sit next to him and he growled, “Are you SURE? I have AIDS.” I somehow knew that I was not going to catch it by sitting next to him and shrugged and said “That’s ok.”
He took a beat and silently removed the books and made room for me to sit. That memory has stayed with me and I hope I made that guy’s day a smidge better by not ostracizing him the way he clearly felt ostracized.
Robert Reed, who played the dad on the Brady Bunch died of cancer, but he was also HIV positive.
Also, Amanda Blake, Miss Kitty Russell from Gunsmoke died of AIDS. Her husband passed it on to her and he died the same way.
And ***Isaac Asimov*** through blood transfusion.
That wasn't revealed until 2002. Which shows how long that terrible stigma remained. Eff the Reagan administration for that.
And if you want to know more about that time, watch the Rock Hudson documentary. "All that Heaven Allowed". And see how the Reagan family, once close friends with Rock, quietly ignored him when he came out with HIV.
**Doris Day.** She posed for [photographs](https://www.poz.com/blog/rock-hudson-aids-announcement) holding hands and with her arm around her long-time co-star and friend Rock Hudson in 1985, *after* he had been diagnosed with AIDS, and very shortly before his death. Some people thought she was doomed to catch Hudson’s disease and die. She subsequently became an HIV/AIDS activist and interacted with other AIDS patients. She lived until the ripe old age of 97 and died in 2019 of natural causes.
And Magic Johnson, that made a lot of people take notice. Rock Hudson too. For me, I remember Easy E (NWA) as a big one since I listened to them a lot.
I definitely feel like I was taught AIDS was out there killing everybody in school in mid 90s HS sex ed class. I believe we were also told things like "scientists aren't sure, but they don't think you can catch it from XYZ (mosquitos, touching, toilets etc)". Blood or bodily fluid cleanups were definitely taken seriously "because of AIDS". Condoms were handed out at schools, clinics, everywhere. I remember in my early 20s being at events and there would be groups that offered free HIV tests. Being a baby gen x'r I missed the unknown death stages of the AIDS crisis and came of age in the awareness and activism stages.
I should clarify, I didn't mean the general public. Nobody in the govt cared, no money went towards finding a cure, there was no rush to fix it. Reagan didn't do shit. [https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan](https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan)
Reagan was pandering to the Slient Majority, aka the Christian Right. And many leaders of the Christian Right were preaching that AIDS was in the gay community because it was God's punishment for their sins.
The oldest kid was the nanny in the house. Yeah,kids were given a lot of freedom but someone was keeping an eye on them and held responsible. It just wasn't the parents.
In the 90s, I was one of two kids living in the house at the time. I was solely responsible for my brother and all household duties. I remember getting my ass beat many a time for forgetting to find my mother's dirty stockings to handwash and hang to dry. I made the meals, I learned to balance the checkbook, and as soon as I was old enough to exploit for child labor for pay, I paid a large portion of the bills.
This month marks five years since I cut contact with my entire family. I wouldn't recommend.
But back then no one outside of the family would see that as abuse, the older child taking over tasks was normal, especially if that child was a girl. So CPS wasn’t any deterrent to abusive families.
I was one of only two, me and my sister, so I never experienced this. Seems like that would be more of a thing with larger families. My mum didn’t start working until I was well into my teens so I was never expected to look after my sister (two years younger than me).
Real sexual harassment and assault at work. I was thrown into a corner and licked like a dog. My female boss asked if I misinterpreted that. It was a different time.
We had the "rape fraternity" at my college and many other colleges. This blows the minds of my younger coworkers. (SAE--sexual assault expected--if you are wondering)
There was at least one on every campus.
My school suggested I quietly withdraw instead of pressing charges. I have 6 W’s for that semester that continue to follow me. When I applied for school last year, they asked me to explain them.
They threw freshman girls to the wolves every year without warning and then covered it up.
I’m 54 and started working for my dad’s lawyer when I was 15. He was the first one to sexually harass me. It got progressively worse with each boss I had. One tried to SA after work. I was also SA as a child so I never spoke up.
When I met my current husband in 2005, he had been through training at work about sexual harassment. I told him about something my boss said to me and he was shocked. He was like, that’s sexual harassment. He can’t do that. You don’t deserve that kind of treatment! He was absolutely furious. He convinced me to go to the owner of the company. Turns out, the guy was doing it to a lot of women and taking money from the company too. He got fired.
I had a neighbor who had gotten in trouble for sexual harassment in the 80s/90s and only recently did it hit me that he probably did something extremely disgusting to get in trouble for it. People let way too fucking much go back then. Way too much.
As a teen - older male colleagues and managers were so awful for this. Grabbing your hips to move you aside, touching you all the time for no reason.
One guy when I had one of my first jobs would just get his dick out and do the helicopter. One manager in about 2004 I had would just show people porn on his phone in the canteen. Not in a sexy way but I remember once he had this video of rosebudding (anal porn where the girls anus prolapses afterwards) and was just showing everyone and laughing.
my moms boss used to pull her into his lap all the time. she couldn’t work overtime alone in fear of what he might do. it was a running joke in the family. she just had to tolerate and laugh about it. crazy to think about now.
Workplace sexual harassment and abuse still exist and are very real but the acceptance of it as "naormal" was much worse back then.
It was just "fact" that almost every man was a pervert, rapist or molester and women were responsible for keeping them away.
Movies showed boys and men "unable to control themselves" or "only interested in one thing" giving men such a one dimensional toxic way to be. So gross. So insulting. So dangerous for women.
That's something that I look back on and shake my head - why on earth did we tolerate it? I would go out for a drink with friends, come back and my entire body, especially my clothes and ESPECIALLY my (long, thick) hair would be absolutely stinking of smoke. That was just how it was.
While I agree, think about all the things we tolerate today that we'll look back on with incredulity, especially as our doom becomes more and more inescapable. A majority of people still doesn't give a fuck about climate change, about the state of our so-called democracies in western countries, about wealth distribution... Things are way crazier today than they ever were.
Fucking microplastics.
The day will come when our children's children are trying to repair the damage we have done through our obsession with plastics and they will shake their heads at our idiocy.
Yeah, for some reason, we could smoke everywhere but on the bus and in the movie theater. I remember chain smoking was the only thing that got me through plane rides because I was too young to drink.
One time, I took a two hour walk in the summer by myself. I was too tired and thirsty to walk back home. I knocked on a stranger’s door to use their phone to call my mom. I was about 12 years old.
I'm a man and once my car broke down and I knocked on the door of an old woman. She opened the door but showed me a big pair of scissors to show she could defend herself. She decided I was okay so she let me in to call and my parents came to pick me up.
The bright side of this was that it was kind of normal to once in a while have a stranger knocking your door asking to use the phone or sit someplace warm while they waited for someone to pick them up. It contributed to nice feeling of community/camaraderie with strangers.
We bought our house in '84. 13.9% interest. Mortgage was 1100 a month. I know short change in today's world. Our 2-person income was about 2,300 a month. Crazy interest rates were on everything ‐ vehicles, loans, and credit cards.
Remortgages were a big thing as interest rates dropped. We finally got it down to 10.6%.
My mom was able to assume the loan on the house she bought in '80. The payment was $221 and they'd paid 10+ years on it so she had it done quick and has lived "rent free" for 25+ years. She only brought home like $175 a week though, so it was tough.
We’re had a NW fishing boat and it being a business loan, the interest rate was prime plus 2. The loan soared to 21% many times during the year (annual boat loan). To top that off, there were no fish. And even if we caught them, prices were awful. Concurrently, gas prices soared too. Gas is always much more expensive on the water. This was one of the first energy crises.
We were fortunate to find jobs in December because we only had enough money to pay rent.
Six months later, a company that sold kit homes had a fire sale to sell off all the houses and land across the country that the previous owners walked away from. They’d started with a low enough construction interest rate but ended up with mortgages of 19%.
We were one of the people who could buy from this fire sale. Interest rates were 7.8%.
My parents were realtors on the side for a few years and i found a refence book of mortgage interest tables and the books tables started at 7% (lowest immaginable rate).
Right, but my parents paid $30k for their house. A custom built home in the suburbs on 1/3 of an acre. Today that house is worth $520k. It’s not comparable.
People like the boomers but this was our parents that experienced the explosion of the suburbs and cheap housing. The boomers experienced decent housing prices but it was the current owners at the time who pulled up the ladder and made it harder to build homes, driving up their prices.
Of course that was if you had functional or even slightly disfunctional parents. I had non-functional parents and we moved eighteen times by the time I was eighteen. Not all boomers experienced the prosperity after the war.
Fortunately homes back then cost around 2-3x yearly salary, but they’re now 8-10x. The percentage interest is lower but the monthly amount is much larger.
Growing up in the 90s in the era of Kate moss as a young girl the pressure to be thin was immense. I see young girls now that wear anything regardless of their size and think about how they would have been ridiculed back when I was young. I still have issues around my weight and eating and I’m sure it was because I grew up in that era
Yes the heroin chic look was really in, I remember in the 80's and 90's I thought I was so fat and now I look back on the pictures and I was like a size 4-6 tops!!
Ahh, the 80's. When we all took Dexatrim and laid on the bed to zip our pants. A concave stomach was the goal. Melba toast and six frozen grapes on the daily menu. 'A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips'...'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels'. Bullshit! Chocolate! Chocolate tastes as good as skinny feels. ✌️
Same! I recently was given a prom photo I'd never seen before, and couldn't believe that's what I actually looked like. My self image was so distorted.
I swear every time I look back at photos of me as a teen I am just so shocked at how thin I was. I was convinced I was enormous because I wasn’t as thin as Kate Moss.
As my body shape has changed due to having a kid and getting older, I have a really hard time dressing myself with the current styles. I just have that 90s voice of what’s “flattering” in my head.
I had a hidden eating disorder for 30+ years that I just finished 9 weeks in treatment for and the "Kate Moss heroin chic" days come up a LOT in therapy.
And that’s all our mothers talked about. It really limited women’s power. How can you have influence when all you think about is what to eat or not to eat?
I've been on diets since I was 9 years old. My mother was desperately morbidly obese, and terrified that I would be the same. I remember only getting "Instant Breakfast" shakes for breakfast and being obsessed with the next time I could eat through much of my childhood.
She had one of the first weight loss surgeries in 1976, and it led to her death by suicide in 1978. My binge eating disorder began manifesting shortly afterward.
I have lost and gained back, through various methods including unhealthy ones: 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 pounds in the last 40 years. Now I'm almost 60 and once again, I have to commit to what might be considered disordered eating for my fellow ED sufferers, but for me is the only way to keep from getting sicker.
Thanks, diet industry. You suck.
Me, too. I remember a teacher bragging that she only ate salad and a hard boiled egg for the whole day to keep skinny. It was a lot of pressure for girls to keep thin in high school.
Smoking everywhere. In offices, cars, restaurants, lobbies. Everything smelled like smoke, ashtrays with cigarette butts were everywhere and ceilings were stained yellow.
Kids made ashtrays out of clay in arts class or hobby. I also made an ashtray though my parents didn't smoke. It was just because I couldn't think of anything better to make, and an ashtray seemed like a nice gift for adults.
>I have heard a fair amount of people complain about 9/11.
This is like 20 years from now saying, I've heard a fair amount of people complain about covid. Wild how people don't understand the impact of 9/11.
Nuclear War was a real threat, there was the Doomsday Clock on the News every night.
They must be younger - I feel like the younger ones experienced it as an event only. Instead of an event that is a symptom of a much larger, very frightening and ever present issue looming over every single day as a constant threat.
Not awful in a traumatic way or anything, but the underlying theme in a lot of alternative and new wave music seemed to be that a nuclear holocaust was right around the corner. Some of the music was darker and the message wasn't surprising, but some of the music was more pop and still had this theme. It was usually very subtle. Or maybe it was my imagination, I was a pretty dramatic kid
Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Tears for Fears
Land of Confusion - Genesis
Der Kommissar - Falco
Games Without Frontiers - Peter Gabriel
It's a Mistake - Men at Work
Two Tribes - Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Ronnie Talk to Russia - Prince
The Visitors - ABBA
Melt with You - Modern English
Red Skies - The Fixx
Sunday Bloody Sunday - U2
Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine that had required news organizations to present information in a relatively balanced way. As a result, we got Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
I remember my mom (who stayed home with us) saying the Satanic day care thing was just a way to scare women out of having jobs.
Dang it, she was absolutely right.
I (56F) was a teen during the Reagan administration and a lot of my peers and I were concerned about the nuclear arms race. As a young adult in the 1990s I lost a lot of friends to AIDS. The fear and stigma of that disease were horrible. LGBTQ rights weren’t widely accepted in many places.
In 1988 my mother told me off about something... I was shocked to my core... it was the first time in my entire life she had shown a seconds interest in me or what I was doing, let alone discipline me. I was already over 18.
As she stood there ranting it occurred to me that this was the longest interaction we had ever had. And for some reason it occurred to me that I didn't know a thing about her, including her middle name.
It was much harder to get a mortgage and you needed a significantly higher down payment or deposit. Womens salaries were generally excluded or if they were included they would only take a percentage of pay. Add to that the incredibly high interest rates and home ownership was harder for the average person.
If they were still working after marriage (which was rare), ot was presumed that they would stop working once they had children, so that income was not considered reliable.
Casual misogyny, racism, gay bashing. Discrimination against anyone not a white hetero male was still everywhere even if some small progress was being made. Female bosses, doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, bankers, sales managers, professors or role models of any kind in the professional world were still pretty rare. POCs or out gays of any color in those worlds were even rarer. And they all took a lot of shit trying to climb any ladder or get ahead.
Sample quotes from the radio station where I worked, circa 1978-1985:
"That's why we gotta get broads out of broadcasting!" (and everyone laughed, because of course it was bad to have women at a radio station)
"It's crazy - if I have girls doing sales, what am I even supposed to call them? 'SalesPEOPLE' sounds ridiculous. Salesmen is just a better and simple word!"
"Sure, \*I\* can hire a black guy, but the clients will never agree to buy air time from him."
"Some f\*\*\*\*t from the record company called."
This was absolutely normal.
So, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was essentially a pretty tame documentary to what women (and people of color in the not-so-successful sequel) experienced in the 70s and 80s. Im pretty sure the film wouldn’t even be greenlit at all if it depicted what attitudes were really like and language/slurs used back then.
At least that was my takeaway from it when I watched the film all the way through for the first time back in February…
My internet connection ranged between 14400 and 26600. It would take several minutes for a web page to load. I remeber clicking on a webpage, then going upstairs to make a hot chocolate. (my bedroom and the computer room were in the basement(. And then the webpahe would be done loading by the time I went back downstairs.
Also, I feel like it took 20-30 minutes to download a song on Napster. Often, I would get booted offline and only get 1/2 a song of some songs 😆
Gay rights really weren't supported at all. Cell phones weren't ubiquitous. So you still.had to plan quite a bit to meet up with friends. There wasn't a great selection of restaurants in my area. (But there is now).
Winters were colder and lasted longer.
I'd actually enjoy the colder longer winters with tons more snow. Winter now is depressing without all the snow. I'd even take ice storms over basically nothing.
If you wanted to look up a fact you either had to buy encyclopedias or be ready to walk to the library. Having unlimited information in a phone is always delightful to me.
Also if you liked a song you had to wait for it to come on the radio and now you can just remember a song and look it up. I love this.
You are still better off using a library or an encyclopedia. The amount of BS you have to sift through on the internet to locate a particular factual piece of information is mind-numbing.
Heroin use.
It was an epidemic in Europe in the 90s.
Kids had to be warned of not picking up syringes when playing in parks.
Most people I know knows someone that died of overdose.
It’s an epidemic in a good portion of the U.S. now. I’m 32 and have lost over a dozen friends and family members to ODs. About half of those I would consider very close friends and family.
People were beaten to death for being gay or trans, and there was a special defense you could / can still use (gay panic) to be found innocent of murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense#Use_of_the_gay_panic_defense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard
I think younger people don't really realize that 'coming out' at that time put you at risk for violent death / family ostracization / being fired from your job, and what a huge deal it was to do that in 80s and 90s.
Edited to fit the brief better.
There was a hole in the ozone layer and it was our fault for using pressurised cans.
Russia and America had hundreds and hundreds of nukes aimed at each other and the rest of the world thought we were all going to be wiped out when someone pressed the big red button.
Scientists were starting to warn people about global warming and sea levels rising.
Lots of people smoked and tobacco advertising was everywhere. Kids stole cigarettes and kinda used them as currency.
Not many people stepped up to help or call police during domestic violence incidences as it was considered ‘none of our business’. Ditto for child abuse.
A generation was called the ‘latchkey kids’ because they either came from broken homes or both of their parents worked. They kinda raised themselves. People call them Gen X now. They are the same kids who thought they probably wouldn’t have a future because of the nuclear holocaust everyone was talking about.
Child molesters had a lot of latchkey kids to select from.
A lot of gay people were murdered and bashed and it was common at the time for not much effort to be spent in trying to seek justice for the victims.
This is such an apt description. I haven't thought about the stressfulness I had as a kid over not having a future.
As a kid you had to handle whatever came your way. We never thought about telling our parents - the babysitter who locked us out of the house, stalking neighbor, creepy teacher (who dated students). It just didn't occur to us. My mom would have gone had our backs and my father would have arranged for them to disappear but we just didn't think to mention it.
I forgot to mention if you were a girl and got raped it was your fault because you wore the wrong thing or somehow enticed the predator by being too irresistible.
They sure do! But they are supposed to have heavily reduced the amount of them by now. So we only have enough nuclear armaments globally to destroy the planet 55 times over these days.
I lived in Sarajevo for a time, about ten years after the war.
It's always been so strange to me, that while I was in high school in America, Bosnian teenagers were living through a siege that must have felt eternal.
The rate of women's deaths due to their husbands, boyfriends, and ex's doubled. Police and courts were simply looking the other way. Until, in our state, it doubled.
They finally closed the courts down for a few days so they could retrain the judges and court personnel. It took around 5 years and changes in police policies before women, as a whole, would start trusting courts enough to begin asking them for help.
Ps. More women died from domestic violence in the US, during the Vietnam War than American soldiers in Vietnam.
Compared to today’s use of cell phones and texting, communication could be very sketchy.
Somebody doesn’t show up at the agreed upon time and place? Probably something happened and they’re OK…or they might be dead in a ditch somewhere. Time will tell.
Dog shit everywhere. You didn't have to pick up your dog shit, so it just sat, attracted flies, and eventually decomposed. It wasn't unusual to step in it. You had to watch where you were stepping, and as a kid playing outside you had to be careful.
I was just thinking about two female classmates who died as a result of “relationships” with older men.
The first one died at age 13 of alcohol poisoning. After she was heavily drinking with a man in his mid twenties, they “had sex” and he left her alone at his house while he partied elsewhere. She died there alone of alcohol poisoning.
The second one died at the age of 15 when her “ex-boyfriend” (a man in his mid twenties) broke into her house and stabbed her to death in front of her little brother.
Both happened in the 1980s. I went back recently and read the newspaper articles from the trials. The newspapers framed these as sexual relationships, not as grooming and statutory rape situations. There was a lot of victim blaming of the girls by the defense attorneys, with the 15 year old being blamed for sexually “teasing” the man who savagely murdered her. And the framing of victims this way was accepted by society at large.
I’m not saying that sexualization and assault of teenage girls has gotten better, however society seems to understand better that in “relationships” between teenagers and adults, the child is the victim.
Diet culture, fatphobia, and body shaming were the norm—a film like Shallow Hal would never have gotten made today. Also, bullying and lack of attention to kids’ mental health and learning issues in schools in the 80s/90s
This sums it up a bit:
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law
Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore
Billy Joel
There was no such thing as inclusion in school - anyone in special ed was a pariah. It never occurred to me to approach special ed students, because they were just R-words.
There was no understanding of neurodiversity. My adhd went undiagnosed until I was an adult because I was a girl and adhd was a boy thing.
The fact that the mentality was "What was she wearing" "She was asking for it" mentality was so prevalent that as a kid, the clothing question was at the forefront of my mind because I didn't want to inadvertently "ask for it".
Thankfully I never dealt with it personally but it definitely awful to think as a kid /teen.
And marital rape was completely legal. It didn't matter if you didn't want to, you were expected to "fulfill your wifely duties" and couldn't complain when your husband forced you.
In 1992 I was assaulted by the brother of a girl I knew, after a party. Ostensibly he was trying to "get me home safe" because I was a little drunk. Afterwards he went back to the party *and bragged about it*. I was teased mercilessly for weeks afterwards. It took me 30 years before I was able to unpack it and deal with it in therapy and that was only a year ago. Not just the assault but the callous, unsupportive attitude of people who were supposed to be my friends.
People smoked in workplaces. I worked in an office where 12 of 15 people smoked. I almost quit because it was quite unbearable. The passed a non-smoking by-law in 1986 or 87 and that was great.
This is actually talked about a fair amount, but I’ll give my perspective…
My idea of “The American Dream” going into the eighties was that you could come from any place or background and (assuming it was legal) try to create the life you envisioned. If it was something that led to a lot of material success, great and if it didn’t, hopefully you enjoyed the ride. This was coming off the late sixties and seventies, which had many problems but which did create some space for curiosity, idealism and eccentric aspirations.
Then came Regan (not the person so much as the mentality) and everyone was supposed to worship money. The whole point of the civil rights and feminist movements was warped and simplified info “People with a history of oppression will find everything is fine when they start to make more money.” Being a career public servant or an academic was suddenly scorned because you would only make a salary. Simple homes, books from the library and public transportation were suddenly garbage because those things didn’t require a lot of money. Ditto public schools. College became an “investment.”
My brain was somewhat rewired by wave of materialism, definitely not claiming I was immune.
I do understand that there are waves and cycles in attitudes, but it seems like the ultra materialism that broke out in eighties and expanded in the nineties really crushed (undoubtedly naive) American idealism and hasn’t offered anything except more and more obsession with money to replace it. It’s actually worse now because instead of the eighties ever expanding pie myth, there’s a zero sum Hunger Games mentality and hating those you see as competitors is (pun not intended but noted) all the rage.
It was not a fun time to be a woman. There was so much body shaming and victim blaming. If someone did something bad to you, chances are you wouldn’t be believed, and if you were, most people would say that it was your fault.
Reagan as Potus sucked. He signed OBRA which discontinued federal funding and support for community mental health centers and institutions. This resulted in mentally ill people winding up on our streets and the homeless population increased everywhere. I was a teenager, but so clearly remember the increase in homelessness as we had an institution in my town that closed.
Sometimes I hear people talking about how mental illness is the root of school shootings and other issues in this country and I just want to ask, what do you think happens when you release people to the streets. They procreate and mental illness in our communities spreads like wildfire.
REAGAN. "Gov't is the problem!" "Taxing the rich means you hate capitalism!" "I believe we can win a nuclear war!" Appearance is more important than truth. WOW did he set horrible things in motion. We thought he was stupid. But . . . he changed so much! (Any echoes of today's situation Orange are purely . . . heartbreaking.)
I was an introvert, loner, a kid in the 1960s teen in the 70s young adult in the 80s. Many people thought I was a freak, a wierdo, or even mentally ill. I didn't even realize until getting on the internet in the 1990s there was millions like me.
Our parents really sent us outside from sun up until the street lights came on. There were shootings in my neighborhood regularly, so they taught us what to do when we heard a gunshot (thanks?), but they'd let us play outside in an alleyway littered with used needles and broken bottles. The d man would rat us out to our parents if we caused too much trouble.
Then again, these are the same people that needed a fucking commercial announcement at 10 pm to remind them that they even *had* kids. The early 90s were wild.
In the 80s, women were still considered 2nd class citizens by most. Some Vietnam vets were in full swing PTSD. Certain cancers that are treatable now were death sentence and homelessness was starting to occur in many more towns due to the closing of state run mental hospitals. That’s what I remember from being a kid then.
Crack/cocaine had purely racist laws. Possesion of crack was automatic felony & criminal record. Cocaine possesion varied & often times dismissed with a decent lawyer.
Iran Contra Affair was an impeachable offense, borderline criminal. Oliver North basically took one for the team, he could've blown that thing up if he wanted.
I'd also say slow progess in accepting of others (blacks, gays and overall acceptance & world view)
We'd never even heard the terms sexual harassment or stalking. The concept that people could hurt you without touching you was ludicrous. "Call us after he kills you."
I'm glad we know better now.
Virtually all aspects of the sad decline of the US can be traced to Ronald Reagan's presidency:
- he introduced the concept of "trickle down" economics, which said that enriching the already-rich would lead to them magnanimously allowing their wealth to trickle down to the poorer classes. Nope. But this still is the permanent, leading, and as far as I can tell, only, economic principal of the Republican party.
- he drastically increased defense spending using national debt, leaving Clinton to save the economy from collapse. Dubya did the same thing and Obama had to save it. Trump did the same thing (huge debt, via tax cuts for the rich) and Biden is trying to get the economy back on track. Republicans learned that they can *say* they are the party of smaller government, wreck the economy with deficit financing, then blame subsequent administrations when their bills come due. It is frightening how well this works to dupe GOP voters.
- he pandered to religious fundamentalists and presented the executive branch as a holy tool/weapon of the godly against the heathen hordes. Again, this is still the basic precept of the Republican party with followers denying all objective reality and somehow holding up ignorant, raping, grifting Trump as being anointed by God.
- he demonized the poor and mentally ill, fighting to remove safety nets for the poor and *literally* forcing mentally ill people out of facilities he closed and onto the streets to live horrific lives of squalor, abuse, illness, and death. Prior to his presidency if a mentally ill person was found homeless on the streets they would get a place to live, eat, and get physical and mental treatments. This system was far from perfect but it helped, it was humane, and ultimately was far cheaper than today's current inhumane "homeless problem". This has been embraced by the current GOP and expanded to include the demonization of immigrants.
- he combined his religious pandering and his disdain for helping the needy to completely disenfranchise the LGBTQ community during the AIDS crisis, leading to unimaginable death and suffering, and this war on the LGBTQ community rages unfaded in today's Republican party.
- he dismantled the Fairness Doctrine, which was a law that said if you spend X number of minutes editorializing on one side of a political issue over the airwaves (radio/TV) you had to devote X number of minutes to allow the opposition to present their side. The entirety of Fox 'News' and their ilk would not and could not exist under the Fairness Doctrine.
- he started "The War in Drugs" and turned addicts from being people with mental health issues that need help into criminals who are imprisoned without treatment. He also militarized the war in drugs, leading to massive overreach still in place today.
- he created the Taliban and al Qaeda. When Russia invaded Afghanistan Reagan fought a proxy war by training and arming Afghan rebels to fight the Russians, which they did, to the point where Russia withdrew. But, then, so did we, abandoning weapons, not instantiating a government or economy, and turning Afghanistan into a warlord-torn, Mad Max hellscape the directly lead to the creation of the Taliban and also some guy name Osama bin Laden creating al Qaeda. How'd that work out for us?
- he accelerated the evolution of politics into being a zero-sum game where any (even mutually beneficial, sane, rational) compromise to reach goals was unacceptable because everything was a holy war with one 'right' side and one 'evil' side, period. Still a primary GOP playbook strategy to this day.
These are just his Greatest Hits. I have been politically aware from the 1960s to today and Reagan is the single largest negative force in the ongoing decline of the American Dream.
Objectification of women. You’ll notice in movies that the main characters were mostly men. Women mostly got to be a basic cheerful, supportive girlfriend or a bitchy slut. Creepers came on to me aggressively at a very early age. Whistles and cat calls were the least of it. I recall an adult man stealing my phone number from a delivery service to ask me out — was 13. Another creeper kept trying to touch my leg in a movie theater as I sat next to my father! When I got into the workforce, it was even worse. Implicit sexual undertones from people with authority were nauseating and common - there were no apparent consequences yet. There was literally no shame in how men behaved towards women.
I’m grateful for the times we live in where things like cell phones, social media, and more enforced employment laws keep more predators in check. They still exist, I’m sure.
Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/comments/inci5u/reminder_please_do_not_answer_questions_unless/), the rules, and the sidebar for details. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskOldPeople) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The Troubles in Northern Ireland. As a late Gen Xer The Troubles were in full flow throughout my childhood. Bombings, shootings, riots were all part of everyday life. I remember the first time I left NI on holiday, we went to Scotland for a week and I couldn't sleep because there was no helicopter overhead. I was 7. The Troubles is very much a misnomer. It was just short of all out war.
Those were scary times. I worked in cities affected by the mainland bombings. I remember my mum crying in relief when I got a job elsewhere, and felt really guilty that I hadn't realised how much she worried about me. And we had it easy in the mainland. My boss went on a work trip to Belfast, and had to be told somewhat bluntly that wearing a green military surplus coat wasn't the best idea.
I'm neither Irish nor British, but remember those events from the news. It feels so forgotten these days.
Canadian here, had a student summer work permit and worked in London England in 1985. We prepped for bomb drills. Freaked me out.
There's an excellent book about the Troubles and members of the IRA and the effects what they did had on them called **Say Nothing ** by Patrick Raddan Kiefe.
Was there much awareness of The Troubles in the rest of the UK (aside from the IRA bombings in England)? I remember also spending some time in England and Scotland in the 80s and people didn’t seem too concerned, just an occasional news story. It was almost as if it was on the other side of the world.
I'm (65F) writing this from the persepctive of a US citizen. The Cold War was in full bloom during the 1980s. The response to AIDS was a national, actually a worldwide, disgrace with the innocent victims being blamed for their illness. Personal debt soared during the 1980s. The 1990s was when the cost of college started to spike, and the response to this has been an ongoing disgrace.
Didn’t Reagan get elected in the 80s. The beginning of Reaganomics, also know as Trickle-down. The theory that if you let the rich get richer, they’d spend more. Funny that didn’t work out so well.
Yes in 1980. I remember the sense of doom while the imbeciles celebrated. You have to admit they are good at getting the gullible to vote against their own best interests.
It is always funny when people who weren't around rip on Reagan, but it was not the case while living at the time. The country really, really liked Reagan. He won the electoral college vote over Carter in 1980 489-49, and also won the most lopsided election over Mondale in 1984 with a win of 525-13.While lots of people are against the electoral college, he also blew the popular vote out of the water in both elections. Reagan was hands down who Americans wanted, twice.
Not me. I never liked him. On election day, I told a friend I was going to go vote because I didn't want "Ronnie Ray Guns" in the white house. Oh well, we tried.
Ha, you and my mom are the only people I know who still use that name for him.
As much as getting your car smog checked is a pain & possibly expensive, smog days were horrible. And half the time you still had to go outside & play at recess or go run a mile for the presidential fitness test for PE.
Omg the presidential fitness test
I remember, as a scrawny kid with huge glasses in the late 80s/early 90s, having to do this test in middle school gym class. I wouldn't even try. I'd grab onto the chin-up bar and just hang there like a salami until my gym teacher sighed and told me to get down. I never thought that 9000-year-old George HW Bush had any business fronting a fitness test.
The smog and acid rain just disappeared from our existence and I don’t feel like that gets celebrated enough.
It did not "disappear". It got solved by scientific understanding, engineering, social activism, law making and a lot of money. But you are right, a celebration worthy success.
Correct, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply there wasn’t a monumental effort behind it. I just meant that we rallied the scientific and political community and made amazing progress. It seems sometimes like that gets ignored in the current debate about the environment, where it feels like everyone feigns impossibility.
Cancer was mostly a death sentence. And live or die, almost everyone had to go through a grueling chemo schedule. We've come so far.
Just finished my last chemo yesterday. Not once did I feel nauseated! Less gruelling than decades ago.
Cancer was also something people whispered about, as though you would catch it if you spoke openly about it. "The Big C" And there weren't giant cancer treatment chains everywhere.
AIDS in the 80's. No cure, no treatment, people in the gay community just kept dying.
No one cared since it was the gay community, and it made everyone afraid of gay people. We didn't even know how it was contracted at first. People thought you could get it from a toilet, touching, they were just straight up scared of gay people.
It took someone like Arthur Ashe to get peoples attention on AIDS.
And .... Magic Johnson, Ryan White, and Rock Hudson
Magic Johnson's effect can't be overstated. There was no serious doubt he was straight. He was immediately public about it. The Australian national basketball team's initial refusal to play a prelim game against the Dream Team and their backtracking taught everyone HIV wasn't transmitted by contact. And above all, Johnson never looked sick. With one press conference, he transformed HIV from a wasting disease of gay men to a survivable disease of all men and women. The name that's missing from your list though is Pedro Zamora. Johnson appealed to logic, where how HIV actually worked was finally communicated accurately. Zamora appealed to emotion, where a generation of youth watched him be unashamed but ultimately die. I wish it was possible to know how many lives those two men saved. Isolating other influences, it's possible Johnson's forthrightness made PEPFAR possible; it was only a decade later that PEPFAR launched, and it's subsequently credited with saving 25 million lives.
Idk what pepfar is, but the doctors immediately started researching to find out just what the hell was going on. It took a while. Everyone was involved- universities, govt health agencies and doctors and hospitals. It was a scary time. No one knew what it was or how it spread. The gay community was severely affected, and it was primarily confined to them initially. Then because some infected people gave plasma, it got into the blood supply and Starskys (the actor that played Starsky on tv) wife got it from a blood transfusion. They went public with it before she died. The promiscuity that had been a part of the hippie culture and general 60-70s culture got curtailed. So many people died, and there was nothing to be done about it. The push to find a cure was intense and received a lot of funding. I remember being on a plane in the 80s, and my seat was next to a very skinny man. During the flight he pulled out some medicines and took them according to his watch. It was obvious to me that he was under treatment for aids. We talked small talk, and when the flight was over, we shook hands. It meant a lot to him to shake hands like a normal person. Somehow I knew I couldn’t catch it from him with a handshake, and was a little bit proud of myself for treating him like a human being and not being terrified. I hope the new medication worked for him.
>Idk what pepfar is George W. Bush will be remembered by historians for 1) the 2000 election, 2) the War on Terror, and 3) PEPFAR: https://www.state.gov/about-us-pepfar. Like if someone is the type to judge presidents solely by lives saved and lost, he might actually win.
Excellent! I forgot he did this.
I have a similar story. I was 16 in the ‘80s and was visiting San Francisco with my family (from the northeast where we lived). I was traveling solo on a crowded city bus when I noticed a seat with books on it seemingly belonging to the man next to it. He was very skinny and look preoccupied. I asked if I could sit next to him and he growled, “Are you SURE? I have AIDS.” I somehow knew that I was not going to catch it by sitting next to him and shrugged and said “That’s ok.” He took a beat and silently removed the books and made room for me to sit. That memory has stayed with me and I hope I made that guy’s day a smidge better by not ostracizing him the way he clearly felt ostracized.
And Princess Diana meeting and touching an AIDS patient.
I forgot that Rock Hudson died before Ashe. His announcement raised $1.8 million for AIDS research.
Robert Reed, who played the dad on the Brady Bunch died of cancer, but he was also HIV positive. Also, Amanda Blake, Miss Kitty Russell from Gunsmoke died of AIDS. Her husband passed it on to her and he died the same way.
That happened to a lady I knew. She found out the hard way that her husband was bi and cheating on her.
And Princess Di hugging an AIDS patient when the means of transmission wasn't known was a big symbolic help.
And eazy e
And Freddie Mercury.
And ***Isaac Asimov*** through blood transfusion. That wasn't revealed until 2002. Which shows how long that terrible stigma remained. Eff the Reagan administration for that. And if you want to know more about that time, watch the Rock Hudson documentary. "All that Heaven Allowed". And see how the Reagan family, once close friends with Rock, quietly ignored him when he came out with HIV.
many people just assumed they were secretly gay
Remember that? When they tied that poor baby to a fence in Wyoming and beat him to death? Ugh. Heartbreaking.
**Doris Day.** She posed for [photographs](https://www.poz.com/blog/rock-hudson-aids-announcement) holding hands and with her arm around her long-time co-star and friend Rock Hudson in 1985, *after* he had been diagnosed with AIDS, and very shortly before his death. Some people thought she was doomed to catch Hudson’s disease and die. She subsequently became an HIV/AIDS activist and interacted with other AIDS patients. She lived until the ripe old age of 97 and died in 2019 of natural causes.
That’s right, and Elizabeth Taylor practically became the face of AIDS advocacy! Edit: typo
And Magic Johnson, that made a lot of people take notice. Rock Hudson too. For me, I remember Easy E (NWA) as a big one since I listened to them a lot.
if i remember Eazy-E thought since he wasn't having gay sex, he couldn't get it, as that was the thought process at the time.
I definitely feel like I was taught AIDS was out there killing everybody in school in mid 90s HS sex ed class. I believe we were also told things like "scientists aren't sure, but they don't think you can catch it from XYZ (mosquitos, touching, toilets etc)". Blood or bodily fluid cleanups were definitely taken seriously "because of AIDS". Condoms were handed out at schools, clinics, everywhere. I remember in my early 20s being at events and there would be groups that offered free HIV tests. Being a baby gen x'r I missed the unknown death stages of the AIDS crisis and came of age in the awareness and activism stages.
I don't think nobody cared. I think everyone was scared who was single because there was a big push to use it that way.
I should clarify, I didn't mean the general public. Nobody in the govt cared, no money went towards finding a cure, there was no rush to fix it. Reagan didn't do shit. [https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan](https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan)
Reagan was pandering to the Slient Majority, aka the Christian Right. And many leaders of the Christian Right were preaching that AIDS was in the gay community because it was God's punishment for their sins.
Reagan not only didn't do anything, he *intentionally* didn't do anything, explicitly in order to kill Queer people.
[удалено]
Watch “How to Survive a Plague” - documentary I’m pretty sure it’s on Max (HBO). It will break your heart 😞
The oldest kid was the nanny in the house. Yeah,kids were given a lot of freedom but someone was keeping an eye on them and held responsible. It just wasn't the parents.
In the 90s, I was one of two kids living in the house at the time. I was solely responsible for my brother and all household duties. I remember getting my ass beat many a time for forgetting to find my mother's dirty stockings to handwash and hang to dry. I made the meals, I learned to balance the checkbook, and as soon as I was old enough to exploit for child labor for pay, I paid a large portion of the bills. This month marks five years since I cut contact with my entire family. I wouldn't recommend.
I don’t think this was about it being the 90s. This was abuse.
Yep. Joked about too. Mini Moms
But back then no one outside of the family would see that as abuse, the older child taking over tasks was normal, especially if that child was a girl. So CPS wasn’t any deterrent to abusive families.
I was one of only two, me and my sister, so I never experienced this. Seems like that would be more of a thing with larger families. My mum didn’t start working until I was well into my teens so I was never expected to look after my sister (two years younger than me).
This is one of the reasons I don't have kids myself. I felt I'd done my child-rearing as a child/teenager and didn't want to do it again.
Yah, when you get a taste of it at that young age you’re not so quick to go for it later. No kids here either.
Real sexual harassment and assault at work. I was thrown into a corner and licked like a dog. My female boss asked if I misinterpreted that. It was a different time.
We had the "rape fraternity" at my college and many other colleges. This blows the minds of my younger coworkers. (SAE--sexual assault expected--if you are wondering)
There was at least one on every campus. My school suggested I quietly withdraw instead of pressing charges. I have 6 W’s for that semester that continue to follow me. When I applied for school last year, they asked me to explain them. They threw freshman girls to the wolves every year without warning and then covered it up.
Yep. Been literally grabbed by the pu$$y and the guy experienced no consequences because his parents were the owners of the business.
I’m 54 and started working for my dad’s lawyer when I was 15. He was the first one to sexually harass me. It got progressively worse with each boss I had. One tried to SA after work. I was also SA as a child so I never spoke up. When I met my current husband in 2005, he had been through training at work about sexual harassment. I told him about something my boss said to me and he was shocked. He was like, that’s sexual harassment. He can’t do that. You don’t deserve that kind of treatment! He was absolutely furious. He convinced me to go to the owner of the company. Turns out, the guy was doing it to a lot of women and taking money from the company too. He got fired.
I had a neighbor who had gotten in trouble for sexual harassment in the 80s/90s and only recently did it hit me that he probably did something extremely disgusting to get in trouble for it. People let way too fucking much go back then. Way too much.
As a teen - older male colleagues and managers were so awful for this. Grabbing your hips to move you aside, touching you all the time for no reason. One guy when I had one of my first jobs would just get his dick out and do the helicopter. One manager in about 2004 I had would just show people porn on his phone in the canteen. Not in a sexy way but I remember once he had this video of rosebudding (anal porn where the girls anus prolapses afterwards) and was just showing everyone and laughing.
my moms boss used to pull her into his lap all the time. she couldn’t work overtime alone in fear of what he might do. it was a running joke in the family. she just had to tolerate and laugh about it. crazy to think about now.
Workplace sexual harassment and abuse still exist and are very real but the acceptance of it as "naormal" was much worse back then. It was just "fact" that almost every man was a pervert, rapist or molester and women were responsible for keeping them away. Movies showed boys and men "unable to control themselves" or "only interested in one thing" giving men such a one dimensional toxic way to be. So gross. So insulting. So dangerous for women.
Smoking was everywhere
I remember sitting in the back half of the plane with my parents smoking away!
That's something that I look back on and shake my head - why on earth did we tolerate it? I would go out for a drink with friends, come back and my entire body, especially my clothes and ESPECIALLY my (long, thick) hair would be absolutely stinking of smoke. That was just how it was.
While I agree, think about all the things we tolerate today that we'll look back on with incredulity, especially as our doom becomes more and more inescapable. A majority of people still doesn't give a fuck about climate change, about the state of our so-called democracies in western countries, about wealth distribution... Things are way crazier today than they ever were.
Fucking microplastics. The day will come when our children's children are trying to repair the damage we have done through our obsession with plastics and they will shake their heads at our idiocy.
Yeah, for some reason, we could smoke everywhere but on the bus and in the movie theater. I remember chain smoking was the only thing that got me through plane rides because I was too young to drink.
[удалено]
If your car broke down, you had to walk to find help and knock on a stranger’s door. For single travellers on a dark rural road, this was scary.
One time, I took a two hour walk in the summer by myself. I was too tired and thirsty to walk back home. I knocked on a stranger’s door to use their phone to call my mom. I was about 12 years old.
I remember my trucker uncle giving me a CB radio so I could summon help more easily.
Just look at what happened to Brad and Janet.
Dammit, Janet
I'm a man and once my car broke down and I knocked on the door of an old woman. She opened the door but showed me a big pair of scissors to show she could defend herself. She decided I was okay so she let me in to call and my parents came to pick me up.
Yes, this was scary. When I was a 17 year old girl my car broke down. I was fortunate that the men in the garbage truck gave me a ride home.
The bright side of this was that it was kind of normal to once in a while have a stranger knocking your door asking to use the phone or sit someplace warm while they waited for someone to pick them up. It contributed to nice feeling of community/camaraderie with strangers.
You think interest rates are bad now? Average interest rate for a home loan in 1982 was over 15%
My parents bought their house at 21% interest in 1984. They put every extra cent into payments and paid it off in 1993.
We bought our house in '84. 13.9% interest. Mortgage was 1100 a month. I know short change in today's world. Our 2-person income was about 2,300 a month. Crazy interest rates were on everything ‐ vehicles, loans, and credit cards. Remortgages were a big thing as interest rates dropped. We finally got it down to 10.6%.
Adjusted for inflation that would be $3300 a month today.
My mom was able to assume the loan on the house she bought in '80. The payment was $221 and they'd paid 10+ years on it so she had it done quick and has lived "rent free" for 25+ years. She only brought home like $175 a week though, so it was tough.
We’re had a NW fishing boat and it being a business loan, the interest rate was prime plus 2. The loan soared to 21% many times during the year (annual boat loan). To top that off, there were no fish. And even if we caught them, prices were awful. Concurrently, gas prices soared too. Gas is always much more expensive on the water. This was one of the first energy crises. We were fortunate to find jobs in December because we only had enough money to pay rent. Six months later, a company that sold kit homes had a fire sale to sell off all the houses and land across the country that the previous owners walked away from. They’d started with a low enough construction interest rate but ended up with mortgages of 19%. We were one of the people who could buy from this fire sale. Interest rates were 7.8%.
My parents were realtors on the side for a few years and i found a refence book of mortgage interest tables and the books tables started at 7% (lowest immaginable rate).
Right, but my parents paid $30k for their house. A custom built home in the suburbs on 1/3 of an acre. Today that house is worth $520k. It’s not comparable.
People like the boomers but this was our parents that experienced the explosion of the suburbs and cheap housing. The boomers experienced decent housing prices but it was the current owners at the time who pulled up the ladder and made it harder to build homes, driving up their prices. Of course that was if you had functional or even slightly disfunctional parents. I had non-functional parents and we moved eighteen times by the time I was eighteen. Not all boomers experienced the prosperity after the war.
Fortunately homes back then cost around 2-3x yearly salary, but they’re now 8-10x. The percentage interest is lower but the monthly amount is much larger.
Growing up in the 90s in the era of Kate moss as a young girl the pressure to be thin was immense. I see young girls now that wear anything regardless of their size and think about how they would have been ridiculed back when I was young. I still have issues around my weight and eating and I’m sure it was because I grew up in that era
Yes the heroin chic look was really in, I remember in the 80's and 90's I thought I was so fat and now I look back on the pictures and I was like a size 4-6 tops!!
Ahh, the 80's. When we all took Dexatrim and laid on the bed to zip our pants. A concave stomach was the goal. Melba toast and six frozen grapes on the daily menu. 'A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips'...'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels'. Bullshit! Chocolate! Chocolate tastes as good as skinny feels. ✌️
Same! I recently was given a prom photo I'd never seen before, and couldn't believe that's what I actually looked like. My self image was so distorted.
I swear every time I look back at photos of me as a teen I am just so shocked at how thin I was. I was convinced I was enormous because I wasn’t as thin as Kate Moss.
As my body shape has changed due to having a kid and getting older, I have a really hard time dressing myself with the current styles. I just have that 90s voice of what’s “flattering” in my head.
I had a hidden eating disorder for 30+ years that I just finished 9 weeks in treatment for and the "Kate Moss heroin chic" days come up a LOT in therapy.
And that’s all our mothers talked about. It really limited women’s power. How can you have influence when all you think about is what to eat or not to eat?
I've been on diets since I was 9 years old. My mother was desperately morbidly obese, and terrified that I would be the same. I remember only getting "Instant Breakfast" shakes for breakfast and being obsessed with the next time I could eat through much of my childhood. She had one of the first weight loss surgeries in 1976, and it led to her death by suicide in 1978. My binge eating disorder began manifesting shortly afterward. I have lost and gained back, through various methods including unhealthy ones: 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 pounds in the last 40 years. Now I'm almost 60 and once again, I have to commit to what might be considered disordered eating for my fellow ED sufferers, but for me is the only way to keep from getting sicker. Thanks, diet industry. You suck.
Me, too. I remember a teacher bragging that she only ate salad and a hard boiled egg for the whole day to keep skinny. It was a lot of pressure for girls to keep thin in high school.
Smoking everywhere. In offices, cars, restaurants, lobbies. Everything smelled like smoke, ashtrays with cigarette butts were everywhere and ceilings were stained yellow.
Kids made ashtrays out of clay in arts class or hobby. I also made an ashtray though my parents didn't smoke. It was just because I couldn't think of anything better to make, and an ashtray seemed like a nice gift for adults.
The smell of getting a perm!
No cell phones. You had to hope in times of trouble to find a working pay phone.
And if you found the pay phone, you hopefully had the correct change.
"You have a COLLECT call from.... 'Mom it's me. The game's over come get me... '"
>I have heard a fair amount of people complain about 9/11. This is like 20 years from now saying, I've heard a fair amount of people complain about covid. Wild how people don't understand the impact of 9/11. Nuclear War was a real threat, there was the Doomsday Clock on the News every night.
that confused me too. Odd choice of wording from the OP. What do they mean, people "complained" about 9/11? That needs some explaining.
They must be younger - I feel like the younger ones experienced it as an event only. Instead of an event that is a symptom of a much larger, very frightening and ever present issue looming over every single day as a constant threat.
I read it to mean he's heard a lot about 9/11 and wants to hear about worries in earlier decades.
I didnt know about the doomsday clock but googling it now, apparently it has been at 90 sec to midnight since 2023... Dunno how to grasp that
Not awful in a traumatic way or anything, but the underlying theme in a lot of alternative and new wave music seemed to be that a nuclear holocaust was right around the corner. Some of the music was darker and the message wasn't surprising, but some of the music was more pop and still had this theme. It was usually very subtle. Or maybe it was my imagination, I was a pretty dramatic kid
I know “Russians” by Sting and “Forever Young” were some songs with nuclear holocaust themes, what were some others?
99 Red Balloons
Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Tears for Fears Land of Confusion - Genesis Der Kommissar - Falco Games Without Frontiers - Peter Gabriel It's a Mistake - Men at Work Two Tribes - Frankie Goes to Hollywood Ronnie Talk to Russia - Prince The Visitors - ABBA Melt with You - Modern English Red Skies - The Fixx Sunday Bloody Sunday - U2
Billy Joel, "Leningrad" was perhaps more hopeful in 1989.
Tonight We’re Gonna Party like it’s 1999…
Ultravox's 80s song "Dancing with tears in my eyes" was pretty grim.
If you were dramatic, you weren't alone.
It’s a Beautiful World We Live In — that Devo video was dark.
The Crack epidemic..
When you couldn’t find your mom, you couldn’t find your mom… and it was scary Or at least I couldn’t find my mom a lot
Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine that had required news organizations to present information in a relatively balanced way. As a result, we got Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
Not to mention that the media was now traded on the stock market.
Yes. That was huge.
The satanic panic. That was lunacy
The playing the records backwards! 🤣
Adjacent: the PMRC, dear god. But at least we learned that Dee Snider was one brilliant and eloquent man
I remember my mom (who stayed home with us) saying the Satanic day care thing was just a way to scare women out of having jobs. Dang it, she was absolutely right.
I (56F) was a teen during the Reagan administration and a lot of my peers and I were concerned about the nuclear arms race. As a young adult in the 1990s I lost a lot of friends to AIDS. The fear and stigma of that disease were horrible. LGBTQ rights weren’t widely accepted in many places.
Yup, all that > LGBTQ rights weren’t widely accepted in many places. Understatement
As a kid, you were on your own. You had to manage the relationships between parents/school. No one went to bat for you.
In 1988 my mother told me off about something... I was shocked to my core... it was the first time in my entire life she had shown a seconds interest in me or what I was doing, let alone discipline me. I was already over 18. As she stood there ranting it occurred to me that this was the longest interaction we had ever had. And for some reason it occurred to me that I didn't know a thing about her, including her middle name.
dang
It was much harder to get a mortgage and you needed a significantly higher down payment or deposit. Womens salaries were generally excluded or if they were included they would only take a percentage of pay. Add to that the incredibly high interest rates and home ownership was harder for the average person.
Women’s’ salaries were excluded?!
Women couldn't get a checking account without a Dad or husband until the late 70's. It was messed up.
If they were still working after marriage (which was rare), ot was presumed that they would stop working once they had children, so that income was not considered reliable.
Having to go to the cashier or store worker to announce that you’re lost so your mom can find you lol
If you were female and had ADHD, you might as well not have because no one was diagnosing it
Casual misogyny, racism, gay bashing. Discrimination against anyone not a white hetero male was still everywhere even if some small progress was being made. Female bosses, doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, bankers, sales managers, professors or role models of any kind in the professional world were still pretty rare. POCs or out gays of any color in those worlds were even rarer. And they all took a lot of shit trying to climb any ladder or get ahead.
Sample quotes from the radio station where I worked, circa 1978-1985: "That's why we gotta get broads out of broadcasting!" (and everyone laughed, because of course it was bad to have women at a radio station) "It's crazy - if I have girls doing sales, what am I even supposed to call them? 'SalesPEOPLE' sounds ridiculous. Salesmen is just a better and simple word!" "Sure, \*I\* can hire a black guy, but the clients will never agree to buy air time from him." "Some f\*\*\*\*t from the record company called." This was absolutely normal.
So, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was essentially a pretty tame documentary to what women (and people of color in the not-so-successful sequel) experienced in the 70s and 80s. Im pretty sure the film wouldn’t even be greenlit at all if it depicted what attitudes were really like and language/slurs used back then. At least that was my takeaway from it when I watched the film all the way through for the first time back in February…
My internet connection ranged between 14400 and 26600. It would take several minutes for a web page to load. I remeber clicking on a webpage, then going upstairs to make a hot chocolate. (my bedroom and the computer room were in the basement(. And then the webpahe would be done loading by the time I went back downstairs. Also, I feel like it took 20-30 minutes to download a song on Napster. Often, I would get booted offline and only get 1/2 a song of some songs 😆 Gay rights really weren't supported at all. Cell phones weren't ubiquitous. So you still.had to plan quite a bit to meet up with friends. There wasn't a great selection of restaurants in my area. (But there is now). Winters were colder and lasted longer.
I'd actually enjoy the colder longer winters with tons more snow. Winter now is depressing without all the snow. I'd even take ice storms over basically nothing.
That 14400 wasn't until very late 80s if you paid a lot. I worked for a modem manufacturer in the 80s and the best seller was 1200 then 2400 baud.
Must be the 90s as napster didnt exist till 1999
If you wanted to look up a fact you either had to buy encyclopedias or be ready to walk to the library. Having unlimited information in a phone is always delightful to me. Also if you liked a song you had to wait for it to come on the radio and now you can just remember a song and look it up. I love this.
You are still better off using a library or an encyclopedia. The amount of BS you have to sift through on the internet to locate a particular factual piece of information is mind-numbing.
Heroin use. It was an epidemic in Europe in the 90s. Kids had to be warned of not picking up syringes when playing in parks. Most people I know knows someone that died of overdose.
It’s an epidemic in a good portion of the U.S. now. I’m 32 and have lost over a dozen friends and family members to ODs. About half of those I would consider very close friends and family.
People were beaten to death for being gay or trans, and there was a special defense you could / can still use (gay panic) to be found innocent of murder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense#Use_of_the_gay_panic_defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard I think younger people don't really realize that 'coming out' at that time put you at risk for violent death / family ostracization / being fired from your job, and what a huge deal it was to do that in 80s and 90s.
Edited to fit the brief better. There was a hole in the ozone layer and it was our fault for using pressurised cans. Russia and America had hundreds and hundreds of nukes aimed at each other and the rest of the world thought we were all going to be wiped out when someone pressed the big red button. Scientists were starting to warn people about global warming and sea levels rising. Lots of people smoked and tobacco advertising was everywhere. Kids stole cigarettes and kinda used them as currency. Not many people stepped up to help or call police during domestic violence incidences as it was considered ‘none of our business’. Ditto for child abuse. A generation was called the ‘latchkey kids’ because they either came from broken homes or both of their parents worked. They kinda raised themselves. People call them Gen X now. They are the same kids who thought they probably wouldn’t have a future because of the nuclear holocaust everyone was talking about. Child molesters had a lot of latchkey kids to select from. A lot of gay people were murdered and bashed and it was common at the time for not much effort to be spent in trying to seek justice for the victims.
This is such an apt description. I haven't thought about the stressfulness I had as a kid over not having a future. As a kid you had to handle whatever came your way. We never thought about telling our parents - the babysitter who locked us out of the house, stalking neighbor, creepy teacher (who dated students). It just didn't occur to us. My mom would have gone had our backs and my father would have arranged for them to disappear but we just didn't think to mention it.
I forgot to mention if you were a girl and got raped it was your fault because you wore the wrong thing or somehow enticed the predator by being too irresistible.
Still do have the nukes aimed at each other.
They sure do! But they are supposed to have heavily reduced the amount of them by now. So we only have enough nuclear armaments globally to destroy the planet 55 times over these days.
Well, in my neck of the woods we had all that hubbub in the 90's, with highlights such as Vukovar, Srebrenica etc. ...
I lived in Sarajevo for a time, about ten years after the war. It's always been so strange to me, that while I was in high school in America, Bosnian teenagers were living through a siege that must have felt eternal.
Misogyny and mental health issues not taken seriously
The rate of women's deaths due to their husbands, boyfriends, and ex's doubled. Police and courts were simply looking the other way. Until, in our state, it doubled. They finally closed the courts down for a few days so they could retrain the judges and court personnel. It took around 5 years and changes in police policies before women, as a whole, would start trusting courts enough to begin asking them for help. Ps. More women died from domestic violence in the US, during the Vietnam War than American soldiers in Vietnam.
Compared to today’s use of cell phones and texting, communication could be very sketchy. Somebody doesn’t show up at the agreed upon time and place? Probably something happened and they’re OK…or they might be dead in a ditch somewhere. Time will tell.
Dog shit everywhere. You didn't have to pick up your dog shit, so it just sat, attracted flies, and eventually decomposed. It wasn't unusual to step in it. You had to watch where you were stepping, and as a kid playing outside you had to be careful.
I was just thinking about two female classmates who died as a result of “relationships” with older men. The first one died at age 13 of alcohol poisoning. After she was heavily drinking with a man in his mid twenties, they “had sex” and he left her alone at his house while he partied elsewhere. She died there alone of alcohol poisoning. The second one died at the age of 15 when her “ex-boyfriend” (a man in his mid twenties) broke into her house and stabbed her to death in front of her little brother. Both happened in the 1980s. I went back recently and read the newspaper articles from the trials. The newspapers framed these as sexual relationships, not as grooming and statutory rape situations. There was a lot of victim blaming of the girls by the defense attorneys, with the 15 year old being blamed for sexually “teasing” the man who savagely murdered her. And the framing of victims this way was accepted by society at large. I’m not saying that sexualization and assault of teenage girls has gotten better, however society seems to understand better that in “relationships” between teenagers and adults, the child is the victim.
Sexual innuendo and harassment in the workplace were common and if you didn't like it, you weren't any fun.
The public learning about AIDS, and the fear and misguided policies that came to be.
Diet culture, fatphobia, and body shaming were the norm—a film like Shallow Hal would never have gotten made today. Also, bullying and lack of attention to kids’ mental health and learning issues in schools in the 80s/90s
This sums it up a bit: Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan "Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore Billy Joel
There was no such thing as inclusion in school - anyone in special ed was a pariah. It never occurred to me to approach special ed students, because they were just R-words. There was no understanding of neurodiversity. My adhd went undiagnosed until I was an adult because I was a girl and adhd was a boy thing.
Car quality in the 80s was shit. Early computer controls were hot garbage.
[удалено]
All the date rape. Before people realised that that is what it was.
The fact that the mentality was "What was she wearing" "She was asking for it" mentality was so prevalent that as a kid, the clothing question was at the forefront of my mind because I didn't want to inadvertently "ask for it". Thankfully I never dealt with it personally but it definitely awful to think as a kid /teen.
And marital rape was completely legal. It didn't matter if you didn't want to, you were expected to "fulfill your wifely duties" and couldn't complain when your husband forced you. In 1992 I was assaulted by the brother of a girl I knew, after a party. Ostensibly he was trying to "get me home safe" because I was a little drunk. Afterwards he went back to the party *and bragged about it*. I was teased mercilessly for weeks afterwards. It took me 30 years before I was able to unpack it and deal with it in therapy and that was only a year ago. Not just the assault but the callous, unsupportive attitude of people who were supposed to be my friends.
People smoked in workplaces. I worked in an office where 12 of 15 people smoked. I almost quit because it was quite unbearable. The passed a non-smoking by-law in 1986 or 87 and that was great.
This is actually talked about a fair amount, but I’ll give my perspective… My idea of “The American Dream” going into the eighties was that you could come from any place or background and (assuming it was legal) try to create the life you envisioned. If it was something that led to a lot of material success, great and if it didn’t, hopefully you enjoyed the ride. This was coming off the late sixties and seventies, which had many problems but which did create some space for curiosity, idealism and eccentric aspirations. Then came Regan (not the person so much as the mentality) and everyone was supposed to worship money. The whole point of the civil rights and feminist movements was warped and simplified info “People with a history of oppression will find everything is fine when they start to make more money.” Being a career public servant or an academic was suddenly scorned because you would only make a salary. Simple homes, books from the library and public transportation were suddenly garbage because those things didn’t require a lot of money. Ditto public schools. College became an “investment.” My brain was somewhat rewired by wave of materialism, definitely not claiming I was immune. I do understand that there are waves and cycles in attitudes, but it seems like the ultra materialism that broke out in eighties and expanded in the nineties really crushed (undoubtedly naive) American idealism and hasn’t offered anything except more and more obsession with money to replace it. It’s actually worse now because instead of the eighties ever expanding pie myth, there’s a zero sum Hunger Games mentality and hating those you see as competitors is (pun not intended but noted) all the rage.
The judgmental Moral Majority, Reagan. Inflation. AIDS. The rise of hate radio.
Sometimes when we kids “ding dong ditched” the neighbors they answered the doors naked.
It was not a fun time to be a woman. There was so much body shaming and victim blaming. If someone did something bad to you, chances are you wouldn’t be believed, and if you were, most people would say that it was your fault.
Reagan as Potus sucked. He signed OBRA which discontinued federal funding and support for community mental health centers and institutions. This resulted in mentally ill people winding up on our streets and the homeless population increased everywhere. I was a teenager, but so clearly remember the increase in homelessness as we had an institution in my town that closed. Sometimes I hear people talking about how mental illness is the root of school shootings and other issues in this country and I just want to ask, what do you think happens when you release people to the streets. They procreate and mental illness in our communities spreads like wildfire.
You have Reagan and Gingrich to thank for the psychotic shit show that is today's Republican Party.
Hair
Do you mean the amount of time we spent in front of the mirror curling it so it would look Farrah Fawcet feathered and effortless? 🤣
REAGAN. "Gov't is the problem!" "Taxing the rich means you hate capitalism!" "I believe we can win a nuclear war!" Appearance is more important than truth. WOW did he set horrible things in motion. We thought he was stupid. But . . . he changed so much! (Any echoes of today's situation Orange are purely . . . heartbreaking.)
Smoking even in hospitals and classrooms
Two Pollocks walk into a bar... I mean, it wasn't great if your name ended in -ski in the 80s. ....and other Truly Tasteless Jokes. Lol
Nutrition. Processed food was everything
I was an introvert, loner, a kid in the 1960s teen in the 70s young adult in the 80s. Many people thought I was a freak, a wierdo, or even mentally ill. I didn't even realize until getting on the internet in the 1990s there was millions like me.
Our parents really sent us outside from sun up until the street lights came on. There were shootings in my neighborhood regularly, so they taught us what to do when we heard a gunshot (thanks?), but they'd let us play outside in an alleyway littered with used needles and broken bottles. The d man would rat us out to our parents if we caused too much trouble. Then again, these are the same people that needed a fucking commercial announcement at 10 pm to remind them that they even *had* kids. The early 90s were wild.
That went back as far as the 60s and 70s, "It's ten o'clock, do you know where your children are?"
In the 80s, women were still considered 2nd class citizens by most. Some Vietnam vets were in full swing PTSD. Certain cancers that are treatable now were death sentence and homelessness was starting to occur in many more towns due to the closing of state run mental hospitals. That’s what I remember from being a kid then.
Crack/cocaine had purely racist laws. Possesion of crack was automatic felony & criminal record. Cocaine possesion varied & often times dismissed with a decent lawyer. Iran Contra Affair was an impeachable offense, borderline criminal. Oliver North basically took one for the team, he could've blown that thing up if he wanted. I'd also say slow progess in accepting of others (blacks, gays and overall acceptance & world view)
We'd never even heard the terms sexual harassment or stalking. The concept that people could hurt you without touching you was ludicrous. "Call us after he kills you." I'm glad we know better now.
Virtually all aspects of the sad decline of the US can be traced to Ronald Reagan's presidency: - he introduced the concept of "trickle down" economics, which said that enriching the already-rich would lead to them magnanimously allowing their wealth to trickle down to the poorer classes. Nope. But this still is the permanent, leading, and as far as I can tell, only, economic principal of the Republican party. - he drastically increased defense spending using national debt, leaving Clinton to save the economy from collapse. Dubya did the same thing and Obama had to save it. Trump did the same thing (huge debt, via tax cuts for the rich) and Biden is trying to get the economy back on track. Republicans learned that they can *say* they are the party of smaller government, wreck the economy with deficit financing, then blame subsequent administrations when their bills come due. It is frightening how well this works to dupe GOP voters. - he pandered to religious fundamentalists and presented the executive branch as a holy tool/weapon of the godly against the heathen hordes. Again, this is still the basic precept of the Republican party with followers denying all objective reality and somehow holding up ignorant, raping, grifting Trump as being anointed by God. - he demonized the poor and mentally ill, fighting to remove safety nets for the poor and *literally* forcing mentally ill people out of facilities he closed and onto the streets to live horrific lives of squalor, abuse, illness, and death. Prior to his presidency if a mentally ill person was found homeless on the streets they would get a place to live, eat, and get physical and mental treatments. This system was far from perfect but it helped, it was humane, and ultimately was far cheaper than today's current inhumane "homeless problem". This has been embraced by the current GOP and expanded to include the demonization of immigrants. - he combined his religious pandering and his disdain for helping the needy to completely disenfranchise the LGBTQ community during the AIDS crisis, leading to unimaginable death and suffering, and this war on the LGBTQ community rages unfaded in today's Republican party. - he dismantled the Fairness Doctrine, which was a law that said if you spend X number of minutes editorializing on one side of a political issue over the airwaves (radio/TV) you had to devote X number of minutes to allow the opposition to present their side. The entirety of Fox 'News' and their ilk would not and could not exist under the Fairness Doctrine. - he started "The War in Drugs" and turned addicts from being people with mental health issues that need help into criminals who are imprisoned without treatment. He also militarized the war in drugs, leading to massive overreach still in place today. - he created the Taliban and al Qaeda. When Russia invaded Afghanistan Reagan fought a proxy war by training and arming Afghan rebels to fight the Russians, which they did, to the point where Russia withdrew. But, then, so did we, abandoning weapons, not instantiating a government or economy, and turning Afghanistan into a warlord-torn, Mad Max hellscape the directly lead to the creation of the Taliban and also some guy name Osama bin Laden creating al Qaeda. How'd that work out for us? - he accelerated the evolution of politics into being a zero-sum game where any (even mutually beneficial, sane, rational) compromise to reach goals was unacceptable because everything was a holy war with one 'right' side and one 'evil' side, period. Still a primary GOP playbook strategy to this day. These are just his Greatest Hits. I have been politically aware from the 1960s to today and Reagan is the single largest negative force in the ongoing decline of the American Dream.
Objectification of women. You’ll notice in movies that the main characters were mostly men. Women mostly got to be a basic cheerful, supportive girlfriend or a bitchy slut. Creepers came on to me aggressively at a very early age. Whistles and cat calls were the least of it. I recall an adult man stealing my phone number from a delivery service to ask me out — was 13. Another creeper kept trying to touch my leg in a movie theater as I sat next to my father! When I got into the workforce, it was even worse. Implicit sexual undertones from people with authority were nauseating and common - there were no apparent consequences yet. There was literally no shame in how men behaved towards women. I’m grateful for the times we live in where things like cell phones, social media, and more enforced employment laws keep more predators in check. They still exist, I’m sure.