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Did people smoke marijuana, what other drugs were popular then, was sex and drinking popular with teens then? Did they have cliques like there were today? Were the girls who were slutty like now? How did people dress and what music was popular? What are similarities and differences of a high school in the 1990s and 2010s besides cell phones and did schools in the early-mid 90s have computers? Any other information would be greatly appreciated.
Don't know about the 90's, but the 80's were just like that, but sluttier and druggier, and with lousy computers.
Did people smoke marijuana, what other drugs were popular then, was sex and drinking popular with teens then?
Based off what my mother said (late 1980s/early 1990s) there was a rave scene, she stayed away from it because "LOL RAPE". From what others told me you could drive out in the countryside and eventually find some lights strobing in the air and find a rave because there were so many. Think that was mainly Britain/Europe though (guy who told me this was a Scot).
EDIT: MDMA was popular until people kepy dying from overdosing and not drinking water, that caused a 'drop' then it grew again......
The most honest movies of my era included Fast Times at Ridgemount High and The Breakfast Club. Sure, Fast Times had some over the top moments (it was a comedy after all), but it had some very real moments not normally talked about on movies or TV and done in an honest way like the girl's first time not being anything like what she expected. Breakfast Club had a representative of five general cliques in school in those days. I'm willing to bet that if you show this movie to a high school senior today, he or she will know of someone similar to each student in the movie.
I was a high school student from 1991-1995, and a college student from 1995-1999. Where you were growing up at this time mattered, in terms of what was commonplace and what wasn't. Different regions, different socioeconomics at work, different cultures, etc.
I lived in the Midwest, and my high school was in a small town of 7,000 people. The nearest major city was a little over 100 miles away and of no day-to-day influence. My high school was a consolidated high school, many tiny farming towns of a couple hundred people whose little schools had closed fed into the district.
Did people smoke weed? Sure, but I was never confronted with it. It was the kind of thing where there were always kids who did it, and people knew they did it, but it wasn't huge or pervasive. It was probably the most common substance after booze and tobacco, because it was the middle of farming country, and very easy to grow undetected. Due to there having been WWII-era rope factories in the vicinity, a lot of rope-grade hemp still grew wild. Not great to smoke, I'm told, but if it's there, people will smoke it.
More people drank than smoked weed...it was just easier to come by. Drinking was a HUGE thing for teens in a rural area where "there is nothing else to do." I didn't drink underage, but almost every single peer I remember did. Other drugs were not as common, mostly because there wasn't much of a supply, since we were way out in the boonies. Now there is meth, but that wasn't a big thing there in the 90s. E was a big party drug, but we didn't have raves or clubs or club kid culture, because that was an urban thing, and not part of our world. Even the handful of cool art school wannabe kids who all knew "a cousin in Chicago" who could get them into raves didn't really do E. It really just came down to weed and booze...it's still like that in many rural places, with the possible addition of meth.
Sex popular? Sure. Wasn't it always? We had a pregnant girls/single moms in my class, and had a couple of girls and guys get married while they were in HS. One of my best friends at the time got married the day after we graduated...she was four or five months pregnant at the time. All the social stuff...cliques, kids being promiscuous, etc....is just the same as it ever has been. It's always been a part of life. Small towns do the marry young thing, in general.
Attire...we were far from big urban-suburban shopping malls, so our stuff wasn't very cutting edge or trendy, it was pretty basic. We did have a small mall about 15 miles away, in the next, bigger town, and it had maybe one or two clothing shops that were slightly trendy chains, vs. the anchor tenants like JC Penney and Sears and Montgomery Ward. Like, girls who dressed "nicely" shopped at Maurices or The Limited. Guys who dressed "nicely" shopped at The Buckle. Looks that were in style started out fairly preppy in the early 90s (silk button up shirts were popular with both genders), and by the mid-90s, our Midwestern version of grunge (mostly Docs or work boots, ripped denim, layered flannel, babydoll dresses of crushed velvet and choker necklaces) was big. Some kids did a skater look, just baggy clothes, wallet chains, flat-soled sneakers. Because we were soooo not urban, hip hop fashion didn't have the same influence it did other places.
As far as tech, we were a small school, not so much funding. The internet wasn't commonplace there yet in the first half of the decade...We had a lab of IBM PCs and a lab of Macintosh Classics, and most teachers had one or the other in their classroom for their own use. Our only real tech classes were basically typing classes (two sections of "keyboarding."), because kids did, at that time,get to high school not knowing how to type. Our papers weren't required to be typed, and most people did it on a word processor. I got a Smith Corona Word Processor for graduation, to take to college with me, in '95. It looked like a big typewriter with a monitor connected to it by cable. When internet did come, like in all rural areas at the time, it was dialup. Dialup was pervasive there into the early 2000s, actually. Chatrooms were just starting to be really commonplace just as I was graduating, and thank God they didn't any earlier, or I wouldn't have graduated with the honors I did, I think.
The internet becoming more widely accessible happened very rapidly, and mostly during my college days in the late 90s. When I started college, I remember it being a HUGE selling point that the dorm I was assigned not only had two computer labs with 24-hour access, they were networked to Telnet. The rooms were also wired for internet(!!), though just in this one dorm, it was a pilot project. Laptops weren't super common, some of the wealthier kids and comp sci majors had them, and treated them like they were made of gold. Car phones had been around a while, but most kids didn't have them (I did, because I was a single female who drove 800 miles to and from college alone...it was a big Motorola bag phone). I remember going to Ireland to study abroad in 1996-1997, and being ASTOUNDED by the fact that everyone carried a teeny-tiny "mobile" with them there (long "i" sound in "mobile."). Cell phones were pervasive in Europe among young people a few years before they were in the U.S. By 1999-2000, we'd caught up to where Dublin had been in 96-97, in terms of cell phones.
I was pretty much coming of age right at the cusp of a big tide turn in communications technology, both online and in the telephone industry.
Did people smoke marijuana, what other drugs were popular then, was sex and drinking popular with teens then? Did they have cliques like there were today? Were the girls who were slutty like now? How did people dress and what music was popular? What are similarities and differences of a high school in the 1990s and 2010s besides cell phones and did schools in the early-mid 90s have computers? Any other information would be greatly appreciated.
I graduated in 97.
Will start off that I went to an inner city, heavily integrated (we had some of everyone), lower income/working class high school. People smoked weed. I was only one of a few people I knew who didn't. Sex was WAY more popular. Our of 250 girls in my graduating class, I was one of 3 who either weren't pregnant at graduation or already had a child. Teen pregnancy was at its height in the 90s. I had plenty of girlfriends (I'm a girl BTW) who had babies at 14 years old. There were cliques. The girls were slutty. I remember the belly shirt was in style back then with the pierced navel, that is when that became vogue. There were also a lot of baggy clothes wearing kids and a lot of prima donna girls and skater dudes and gangsta looking guys (watch the movie "Clueless" my school was similar except on a poorer level).
I think school was easier in the 90s. We weren't bombarded with a bunch of busywork. We also had more freedom in that we went more places by ourselves. We were in better shape because we walked everywhere instead of driving. We were allowed to leave campus. We had teachers who really really cared about us in my school and I do think we did higher levels of work at my particular school, in my particular classes (I was an Honor's Student in the TAG program).
My family did have a computer - we had a very expensive HP computer that was black that was the envy of my friends and we had AOL dial up internet service. It was not that expensive - the AOL, but the computer was pricy. I had a step dad who was into tech things and during the 90s my mom and step dad made about 60K per year, which was a lot back then and which put my family into what my friend's considered "rich" so we had a lot of things other people didn't. Other friends of mine had the internet too. My step dad also had a "car phone" but not a cell phone, that was more than he was willing to pay, but they were around when I was in high school.
Crime was MUCH worse back then IMO (and this is backed by crime statistics). The area I lived in had a large gang problem with major street gang and we did have gang fights in my school and a couple times they got pretty violent. One led to a girl being in a coma after being hit in the head with a pipe. We led a protest against lack of security at our school and received a police detail. But other than those scary incidents I LOVED high school, loved my friends, loved all the sports I was involved in, loved that I had free time, which it seems many high schoolers today do not have. It was a great time in my life. I feel bad for kids now-a-days who have to study forever and who are distracted by so much crap like social media and who have to go to different classes on MWF and T/Th. We had 9 periods of classes and had the same every day except electives every quarter like home ec or keyboarding, and such.
At my school we also had a lot of career fields we could study. Many of my classmates were certified nurse assistants or medical assistants when they graduated from high school. We had auto body mechanic courses and Data and Word processing, which I took. I learned all of the Microsoft Office Applications, Lotus 1-2-3, another type of database software I can't remember, college level accounting, bookkeeping, and all sorts of other computer programs that helped me get jobs while I was in college.
Our outlook for jobs was MUCH better. I made $10 an hour every summer working as a data entry operator. I know people who do the same job who make less than I made in 1995 today.
Forgot to mention that many of my friends used drugs heavily. Mostly weed. Not many drank as much as smoked. Maybe this is because I lived in a mid range city in the Midwest, people had easy access to weed.
A lot of my white classmates were also into taking pills, like they do today. I remember one of my classmates begging me to sell him some of my percocets after I had a surgery so that he could crush them up and snort them. Most of the black, Hispanic, and Asian kids just smoked cigarettes or weed. There was a house across the street from our school where everyone would go before, on lunch, and after school to smoke.
People did drink but I just saw the smoking more. I also knew some kids who did crack and snorted cocaine. Mostly just the weed and pills though. There was a big rave scene in my city too. We had student party promoters who let us know where the parties would be on weekends and they made a lot of money on admission.
And I find it amusing now-a-days the stereotypes of Asian students. We had a large Vietnamese refugee population at my school and we had some people from Thailand and Laos. They were really cool and down to earth people and not all of them were in the TAG classes that I took and most were poorer than my family except one girl whose family was from Laos. She was one of my best friends and was the most and still is one of the most funny, sarcastic monotone people I every knew. Real smart alec and she was not techy, she was more of a skater and into Nirvana and such than stuck in a book.
We're the same age. My peers all had cell phones or at least could borrow (actually had to) mom or dads for the weekend. We were all over Napster, I don't think I've paid for music since 1999. No trouble downloading anything while chatting on AIM. Definitely worried about gun violence. We had metal detectors starting in '95. I'd say the big difference was that I could fill up my car for less than $10 (everyone had cars). This is a middle class area of Dallas.
The woman talking about specialization is spot on. My younger siblings all felt they had to do one thing and do it pefrectly whereas I played multiple sports, did music, even had a part time job. I prefer that way, but don't we all prefer how we did things?
I agree with other people that its probably different regionally. I don't ever remember being afraid of guns at all , I'd never heard of a school shooting before columbine and even after it was so shocking no one thought it would happen again. Certainly not on the scale it has.
Did people smoke marijuana, what other drugs were popular then, was sex and drinking popular with teens then? Did they have cliques like there were today? Were the girls who were slutty like now? How did people dress and what music was popular? What are similarities and differences of a high school in the 1990s and 2010s besides cell phones and did schools in the early-mid 90s have computers? Any other information would be greatly appreciated.
I am pretty sure some people were smoking pot, but I think cigarettes and alcohol may have been more prevalent. No cell phones.
I am not a high school student these days, so I cannot attest for what people are like now. I am sure not all girls were slutty.
The people who are saying bullying wasn't as big an issue obviously didn't go to my school. I was bullied to the point I almost committed suicide because I felt so hated by everybody. No authority figures cared enough to help. I was ostracized because I didn't fit in with my peers no matter how hard I tried. My body didn't develop(I'm a woman) so I was mocked for being flat chested. I have stunted growth, so I was mocked for being short. I couldn't afford or fit into the trendy clothes of the time, so I was mocked for what I wore. I had no escape from it except at home because Facebook and that stuff didn't exist.
I remember Power Rangers being huge in the 90's, but any high schooler who admitted to liking it was pretty much bullied to hell and back.
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