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Most young adults, women and men, enjoy having sex. When there is obvious interest and consent, it usually happens. These poor girls thought you didn't like them or find them attractive. None of my business actually, it just seems like a strange story.
Ummm...you're confused. I'm female.
It was males who were asking me if I wanted to "go to bed" with them.
I just don't think that the good old days were as you say!
My reading of history...let alone looking at the family tree (probably a typical one for Europeans) is that vast numbers of kids were raised without both bio parents present and accounted for. The reasons may have differed.....
Some parents were drunks - many had to work so hard to survive that they never were a "father figure".
Some parents were so poor - and one spouse might die young (very common) and the child given up to an orphanage for many years. This was also quite common in the USA just a century ago.
Many came back from Wars and were changed men...back then you didn't admit to being changed, you just were (PTSD existed, but not admitted)....and, again, not a great father figure.
I guess the overriding question is "are we just guessing at how things were or do we have real data to back it up?".....
I was raised VERY traditionally and among a set of people and in a place that would seem - at first glance - as "perfect". Yet looking back, some close relations, neighbors and others I think about....represent the following:
One uncle had a complete 2nd family - kids and all - going with his secretary. That was just ONE of his many affairs, and he would also "set example" like whipping it out and peeing in a pool for a joke. He owned a large business and was a regular at the country club.
One poorer uncle beat his wife badly. I didn't find this out until decades later.
One friends mother just disappeared one day. It turned out she was mentally ill (had a nervous breakdown) but such things were not talked about at the time.
Other - very wealthy - friends were living in broken homes (a mansion in one case)...turned out then, as now, guys with money would usually feel entitled to do exactly as they please with women.
In order to randomize this, I can look at my wives family - from the other side of the tracks, and find many similar events. No matter how hard I look there is no Ozzie and Harriets...
As a wise friend likes to say "the good old days....weren't".
I do have one friend who was from an old-fashioned family that, as you say, made them get married when he knocked up his GF. Wasn't very long before he was divorced. I honestly don't see the advantage there.
My uncle was going with a girl, but got another girl pregnant, and so "He did the right thing" and married that girl. He went on to have 2 more children with her. To me, the pregnant girl was my aunt, and she is sweet as candy, and I love her. I was a flower girl in their wedding.
And years later, my uncle divorced my aunt and went back to the other woman, who left her husband for my uncle. She has 3 kids. They all look like my uncle. He legally adopted them. And why not? They were all his, no doubt about it. They're my cousins...but I don't know them really.
This all happened a long time ago. He married his second wife way back in the 70's. Got my aunt pregnant back in the 60's.
My husband's father...HIS father gave him a pouch full of tobacco, some money, put him on a train and said "Good luck". That was during the depression.
My GGGreat grandmother. We know she was married previous to meeting and marrying my GGGrandfather. But we don't know much about him. I don't know how he died. But then she met and married my GGGrandfather, somewhere along the Trail of Tears. They had a bunch of kids together, and then HE died.
And then SHE died of pneumonia, sitting in a jail cell, at the age of 42. She was unwilling to tell the Union soldiers where she was hiding her sons, and some other younger boys. (She hid them in a cave, and sometimes she dressed them up like girls.)
The weird thing is though, I've seen kids from really messed up parents go on to do really well. Sometimes they see how screwed up their parents' lives are, and decide they want something better, something different. So they work for that. I know just as many young people who got pregnant barely out of high school, who actually got married and stayed together (whether they were happy about it or not) just to make sure the kids could be provided for at least, as those who end up adrift single Moms with babies they can barely handle living on the taxpayers' dime. I know kids, too, who whether they have children or they don't, struggle to get launched and continue to lean heavily on their parents for quite a while. I've seen it all. I have a hard time believing in these "society is just goin' down the toilet" stories because I think that there is a lack of accurate data to really substantiate them. I don't think that every divorce is a tragic statistic. I don't think that those trying to make "studies" to show or prove their assertions, ask everyone, or even enough people to get a strong idea of the real picture.
It's like how people freak about how dangerous and crime-ridden a world we live in, when I look back myself and during the time I was growing up in the burbs of DC, I was running loose and alone in the woods around the Potomac river, private property meant nothing to me, I had no cell phone and no supervision. I'd come home having lost my shoes in the creek. Nothing bad ever happened to me, beyond a close call with a cottonmouth snake once. Now, I think most parents would be afraid to let their kids run around outside alone like that, at all of 7-9 years old... But in fact the data on crime shows that it was more dangerous THEN. Violent crime, killings, abductions, sexual assaults--all of those things were higher then, than now. Both in that region AND nationally. It's been getting better.
So when people complain about how terrible everything is, I sometimes wonder if they even leave their house much or are they just sitting at home watching the news and getting upset about junk shared on social media? Do ya'll ever actually get out there and interact with humanity? There are an awful lot of good people--including young ones--living decent lives out there, you know?
I recently became aware of an online rant by certain individual, who stated that he was between 15 and 18 years old. The person presented himself as a high school student. He described himself as living in “Loserville,” a town adjacent to “Craktown” and stated that he was only interested in “getting money fast” and “school (is) not (his) interest.” He also described that he and his friends were into activities that were “very not right.”
This post or essay from this young man seemed intelligent. He stated that he was not a migrant or a member of any group subject to racial or ethnic discrimination.
This got me to thinking about problems such as teen pregnancies, dropping out of society, opioid abuse and bad behavior generally. These people are, in general, not going to grow into being providers. They are going to parent children who don't know their fathers, and may not even know their mothers, because of incarceration.
The question is how do we get people back to pride in their homes, schools and community? Single parenthood, unconventional relationships, and dropping out of school are the order of the day. What have we gained by "liberating" people from nuclear family-hood? And teaching children that there are no rules, no limits. Is the mental anguish this is causing eased only by opioids? Why are religious, educational or community leaders taking an interest? Where are the pastors, teachers and small-town mayors?
While politically I am liberal, I feel that experimentation in lifestyles, gender identities and sexual promiscuity that has developed since the "Summer of (Free) Love" in Haight-Ashbury in 1967 has not ended well. Time to walk back from the experiment. Maybe "Ozzie and Harriet"and "Leave it to Beaver" were cornball but at at least the results are better than we have now.
What do you expect? Children are sequestered behind chain link fences and denied adult contact. The majority of teenagers are sociopaths. It's why we charge them as juveniles in crimes. When their primary social development comes from other teenagers, they internalize sociopathy as normal.
Maybe he'll grow out of it. Kids do. Or maybe he won't.
What do you expect? Children are sequestered behind chain link fences and denied adult contact. The majority of teenagers are sociopaths. It's why we charge them as juveniles in crimes. When their primary social development comes from other teenagers, they internalize sociopathy as normal.
Maybe he'll grow out of it. Kids do. Or maybe he won't.
What?
No they are not.
Either you don't have much to do with teenagers, or you don't know what a sociopath even is.
The weird thing is though, I've seen kids from really messed up parents go on to do really well. Sometimes they see how screwed up their parents' lives are, and decide they want something better, something different. So they work for that. I know just as many young people who got pregnant barely out of high school, who actually got married and stayed together (whether they were happy about it or not) just to make sure the kids could be provided for at least, as those who end up adrift single Moms with babies they can barely handle living on the taxpayers' dime. I know kids, too, who whether they have children or they don't, struggle to get launched and continue to lean heavily on their parents for quite a while. I've seen it all. I have a hard time believing in these "society is just goin' down the toilet" stories because I think that there is a lack of accurate data to really substantiate them. I don't think that every divorce is a tragic statistic. I don't think that those trying to make "studies" to show or prove their assertions, ask everyone, or even enough people to get a strong idea of the real picture.
It's like how people freak about how dangerous and crime-ridden a world we live in, when I look back myself and during the time I was growing up in the burbs of DC, I was running loose and alone in the woods around the Potomac river, private property meant nothing to me, I had no cell phone and no supervision. I'd come home having lost my shoes in the creek. Nothing bad ever happened to me, beyond a close call with a cottonmouth snake once. Now, I think most parents would be afraid to let their kids run around outside alone like that, at all of 7-9 years old... But in fact the data on crime shows that it was more dangerous THEN. Violent crime, killings, abductions, sexual assaults--all of those things were higher then, than now. Both in that region AND nationally. It's been getting better.
So when people complain about how terrible everything is, I sometimes wonder if they even leave their house much or are they just sitting at home watching the news and getting upset about junk shared on social media? Do ya'll ever actually get out there and interact with humanity? There are an awful lot of good people--including young ones--living decent lives out there, you know?
I can't rep you again, but great post.
Regarding the bolded, same here. I've observed highly dysfunctional parents produce good upstanding kids, and I've seen "good" parents with kids who ended up with criminal records, unplanned/unaffordable pregnancies, etc. It's not as 100% surefire a process ("good parenting will fix everything") as often as declared in these discussion forums.
Speaking as someone who is way more protective of her kid than my parents were... people drive so much more aggressively (even through neighborhoods) than they did when I was growing up, plus now half of drivers are on their phones, that I have much less confidence that he won't be flattened by a speeding or inattentive driver if I let him roam too far on his own. Probably an overblown fear, but a hard one to get past when I witness how people behave behind the wheel.
Well, I lived through the Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver era and they were not rich people. They were supposed to be middle class suburban families. They were a sanitized version of what I saw all around me. I say "sanitized" because they were so perfect--they never fought, never raised their voices, the dads never lost their jobs, the moms never got depressed. Everything was great. Not. But the bland lifestyle was pretty much typical of that era from what I could see.
Summer of Love--1967--we did not want to get rid of old values but we did want to change things. We were ignorant in that we actually thought we could change the world. We were young and foolish, invulnerable.
We wanted to end the Viet Nam War. That was the main thing. Later on we wanted better rights for women. Back then women only had choices to be a secretary, teacher, nurse, or social worker. The classified ads were split as to Jobs-Men and Jobs-Women. And even if we accepted the nurse or secretary type jobs that we were allowed to work at, there were no laws and not even any mention of how we got treated by some men in the workplace. And rape was always the woman's fault.
Those were the types of things we wanted to fix. But it went way too far. By that time I was out working and done with any protests or trying to make a better world. I just wanted it to be clear that we did not advocate for all this craziness that came later. We only wanted to fix a few things but somehow it took on a life of its own. You had students doing sit-ins in their professors' offices, stupid, disrespectful things like that. Most of us thought it was crazy.
And we never pushed for this permissiveness in child raising either. Just to set the record straight. I don't know where that nonsense came from but it wasn't from us.
I lived through it too, and thought the Beav was pretty alien. Wally didn't have a job. The Beaver didn't have to work in the summer, and didn't have chores to do after school. Did the kids even do the dishes after dinner? June didn't have a job either.
I remember about 1956, one summer I added up everybody's paycheck and the family was raking in $1000/month. Today's equivalent would be about 10x that. The kids didn't get an allowance. If we wanted money, we had to get a job and earn it. When I was 10 years old I bought a gasoline powered lawnmower and went into business mowing lawns. I pushed that lawnmower from house to house, with no parental help. They taught me how to manage a bank account, but after that the money was mine. Beaver Cleaver may as well have lived on a different planet.
I graduated from high school in 1965, and was ready for a change. I had grown up as the proverbial square peg in a round hole. The adults around me thought military discipline was the way to go, and the way to raise children was verbal and physical abuse. It made me angry and rebellious. By 1967 I was ready for the world to change, and it did. I never went in for the hippiedippie costumes, but loosening up the rules and roles was welcome and wonderful. I started to meet women whose dreams extended past matching pots and pans.
I never saw any office occupations. There were occasional news reports about them, but they were easily disregarded. I never had a class or a job disrupted by protests. Most of my contemporaries were pretty idealistic and well intentioned, if less than practical. It was the second half of the boomers that got labeled "the me generation," in the '80s. Making money became the goal rather than a means to the goal. People got obsessed with physical things and started neglecting their kids. Nobody ever pushed for child neglect, it just happened because people had different priorities.
I recently became aware of an online rant by certain individual, who stated that he was between 15 and 18 years old. The person presented himself as a high school student. He described himself as living in “Loserville,” a town adjacent to “Craktown” and stated that he was only interested in “getting money fast” and “school (is) not (his) interest.” He also described that he and his friends were into activities that were “very not right.”
This post or essay from this young man seemed intelligent. He stated that he was not a migrant or a member of any group subject to racial or ethnic discrimination.
This got me to thinking about problems such as teen pregnancies, dropping out of society, opioid abuse and bad behavior generally. These people are, in general, not going to grow into being providers. They are going to parent children who don't know their fathers, and may not even know their mothers, because of incarceration.
The question is how do we get people back to pride in their homes, schools and community? Single parenthood, unconventional relationships, and dropping out of school are the order of the day. What have we gained by "liberating" people from nuclear family-hood? And teaching children that there are no rules, no limits. Is the mental anguish this is causing eased only by opioids? Why are religious, educational or community leaders taking an interest? Where are the pastors, teachers and small-town mayors?
While politically I am liberal, I feel that experimentation in lifestyles, gender identities and sexual promiscuity that has developed since the "Summer of (Free) Love" in Haight-Ashbury in 1967 has not ended well. Time to walk back from the experiment. Maybe "Ozzie and Harriet"and "Leave it to Beaver" were cornball but at at least the results are better than we have now.
I think its important to note that there has been a huge decline in the teenage pregnancy rate in the last fifty years.
Roughly stated, the teen pregnancy rate has declined 63% since the 1960's.
Which is not to say that it still isn't a serious problem. However, those who believe the problem is "getting worse" are simply wrong. Its gotten better over time.
I believe that children thrive the best in a stable two-parent home. No argument there. However, what do you do when married couples divorce? I don't think rigid laws against divorce are a good idea. I suspect they lead to things like higher rates of spouse abuse and situations where people simply move out of a home and begin a new relationship without getting a divorce.
In the end, we really can't tell people how to live. We can only educate them, provide incentives for good behavior, and hold up examples of good behavior.
I suspect those who fail to get a decent education or job skill will ultimately pay a terrible price. The modern world is not kind to slackers or ignorant people.
No, sorry. I was middle class, white, christian, college educated, small town boy who went to the big city and had a great career and a good retirement. Hardly a professional victim. Perhaps you should reread what you posted as your "world view"...you might not be so snarky.
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