Did the Rules of Etiquette Provide a Greater Sense of Safety For Women?

[Paisley]

About the only thing I'm nostalgic for is the time I was into swing dancing. I'd still go, but my knees won't take the abuse anymore. That, and I miss a few people who've passed or whom I don't see anymore.

But childhood? Or being young and dumb? Or twenty-something and broke? Those days were drudgery for me. Once they were over, I spent 12 years tearing up the dance floor and going through life bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. I studied things that interested me. Then I moved to another state--a wonderful place--and felt like I'd run away from home. No, I don't want to go back, in space or time.

My grandparents lived in Missouri, and I have happy memories of visiting them. That was probably part of the appeal of Indiana for me: the fireflies, the humidity, the smell of the water, it all reminded me of them.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

People come out of the womb with no moral compass whatsoever. An infant is a creature driven by three instincts: to eat, to sleep, and to void. Everything else is imposed on that being by society. So in that sense, in every society there have to be some sort of agreed-upon social standards. The question then becomes "who sets them, and for what purpose?"

Yes, we are born with the predispositon to be brainwashed, behaviorists would call it conditioning. We are 'psychologically programmed' by our family units, immediate society, general society, state, nation & the universe in order that we may fulfill our function as cogs in an organized society & not pose too many questions. We can be programmed to believe that the majority of wealth, kept in the hands of a few is normal, that men are superior to women, that whites are superior to blacks & that the Earth is flat. Nothing can be easier than programming a person's hard-drive, it's much harder to delete corrupted programs.

But as soon as society began to evolve in a hierarchical direction, with rulers up top and subjects/slaves down bottom, the rules moved into a hierarchical direction as well -- they were less about ensuring the well-being of all than they were preserving the "order of things" and the privilege of those at the top of the hierarchy.

I think Humans have always lived in hierarchical groups like most other primates or indeed as other social animals.

Some rules can evolve from one to the other. The "rules" about how to treat women evolved from the tribal need to ensure the ability of that tribe to reproduce. In violent times, it was necessary to ensure that fertile women were kept out of harm's way or the tribe would become extinct.

That may be more female fantasy than reality. If we look at 'primitive cultures' (for want of a better term) today, women look after the kids, plough the fields, guard the lifestock, harvest & sell surplus fruit & veg, cook & keep the hut clean, whilst the men sit in the shade under the boabab, drinking homemade beer & complaining how lazy the women are. I doubt women were ever considered as treasured reproductive units. In movies we sometimes see tribesmen raiding surrounding villages to steal a wench or two to renew their genetic stock but that may be more male fantasy than reality.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

I'm nostalgic for 2016, life was so much simpler back then.

As for rules, regulations, codes & laws; they are necessary to prevent us from butchering each other. A human being given carte blanche ain't a pretty thing.

 

[BlueTrain]

Oh, I had a lot more freedom when I was in my late teens and twenties. That was my whole point. Power? No, I didn't have any power then and I don't now. Life has gotten easier, to be sure, and most of the problems have finally disappeared. We have zero debt, two cars less than two years old, which means they are less trouble than the old ones with 150,000 miles (but the personal property taxes sure add up). When you're young, life is more "carefree" than anything else. The aches and pains that come with age aren't there and you are totally unaware of them. And mostly, it's just because you're young.

But I wouldn't want to live it over again. That carefree life included the loss of my mother when I was in junior high school, a new step-mother and step-brothers and sisters and a move to the next county and the previous century. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if those things hadn't happened. But I guess it could have been worse. There was all the incentive to leave home when I finished high school and I did.

 

[BlueTrain]

About the only thing I'm nostalgic for is the time I was into swing dancing. I'd still go, but my knees won't take the abuse anymore. That, and I miss a few people who've passed or whom I don't see anymore.

When I moved to the Washington, D.C., area, I saw a notice in the paper about some Scottish Country Dance groups and I went to one. And then to another one that met on a different night. I was hooked. It was the center of my social life for several years. The people I met and got to know changed my life in several ways. The coincidences were unbelievable. Once, I was driving down the street in Alexandria where I lived and noticed a car like mine. It was a Rover sedan, an uncommon car. So one day, I summoned up the nerve to try to find the owner and I stopped. The person who answered the first door I knocked on told me who it was and after knocking on that door, the owner, a man my father's age, graciously invited me in. It turned out that he and his wife were members of yet another Scottish country dance group that met much closer to where I lived than the other groups, although I continued attending one of the others. Two met the same night, so I had to pick and choose. Anyway, three or four years later that man was the Best Man at our wedding. I married someone who was a member of their group. Also, they happened to be members of a church in the District that I had been attending (but somehow had never noticed). And the church was within a block of where my wife was born--same hospital her father was born in, too.

That was 40 years ago. Still married. But a few weeks ago I attended the funeral of one of those people who I had got to know way back when. It was at the same church where the dance group met.

My wife and I continued with the dancing until after we started having children and that was that.

 

[Paisley]

That may be more female fantasy than reality. If we look at 'primitive cultures' (for want of a better term) today, women look after the kids, plough the fields, guard the lifestock, harvest & sell surplus fruit & veg, cook & keep the hut clean, whilst the men sit in the shade under the boabab, drinking homemade beer & complaining how lazy the women are. I doubt women were ever considered as treasured reproductive units. In movies we sometimes see tribesmen raiding surrounding villages to steal a wench or two to renew their genetic stock but that may be more male fantasy than reality.

Substitute all those chores with housework, shopping and child care, on top of full-time work, and you have a common complaint among present-day wives.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Never mind present-day wives, read "Why Women Cry" by Elizabeth Hawes, written in 1943. She was calling for "revolution in the kitchen" at a time when too many "nostalgic" males today think women were perfectly satisfied with "Kinder, Kuche, und Kirche."

 

[ChrisB]

Fair enough but today and for a long time since, there are those who aren't part of the local community. It's the "race of man that don't fit in."

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible" - Frank Zappa

With advancing years, it becomes harder to not fall under the spell of nostalgia. However I do think that life was simpler (not necessarily better overall) before the age of instant communication and information overload brought about by cell phones and the internet.

 

[Fading Fast]

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible" - Frank Zappa

With advancing years, it becomes harder to not fall under the spell of nostalgia. However I do think that life was simpler (not necessarily better overall) before the age of instant communication and information overload brought about by cell phones and the internet.

While there is plenty of evidence that each generation has it youth-nostalgia moment, I agree that the digital revolution has truly changed our lives in a way that has pluses and minuses, but clearly has made them busier and more complex.

Everyone I know works longer owing to the email-internet's 24/7. Also, many things that used to be done by companies are pushed out to the customer - we are now the switchboard operator when we "push one, push two, etc." We also research order issues on line that a rep would have done; we read through FAQs and solve our own issues, etc. Health insurance - as noted on many threads - is a byzantine world that consumes one's time and energy from picking policies, confirming what is and isn't covered and then "solving" billing issues afterwards. While healthcare was never simple, it has become an incredible time and emotion drain.

I believe "this time it is different" and the cause is the digital / internet revolution. My pre- and post- '96 (about when the internet took off) lives are very different.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, it would only have seemed that way. But instant communication doesn't necessarily complicate your life, although having to deal with people a long distance away and being expected to do so quickly will, I suppose. The information overload, as you put it, is something else, though. It makes everything seem worse than it is, or used to be. A school bus runs off the road in Oregon and it's on the news at six, details at eleven, "Is your child's school bus safe?" But sensationalism has always been true of the media to some degree, more for some news outlets than others, of course.

One thing, though, that I will admit has complicated my life is commuting. Complicated isn't quite the right word. It just makes my day longer, if not exactly harder. My commute is 20 miles one way. Morning is maybe 25 or 30 minutes, afternoon maybe ten minutes longer. But I knew people who commuted even further when I was a boy in the 1950s and that wasn't in the big city, either.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I don't know as I'd say "simpler." I led the first half of my adult life in the pre-Internet era, and found that it was a lot more complicated to do the research I needed to do for my writing work -- getting in the car and driving an hour to the State Library to squint into a microfilm reader that made me carsick for the hour's drive home, for example, just to nail down one or two facts. Now I can sit in my office at home, or even in the projection booth at my day job, and scan a hundred and fifty years' worth of daily newspapers, trade magazines, census records, books and so forth without leaving my chair. I don't think I could keep up my two writing jobs and a fulltime day job without that simplification.

As far as information overload goes, I do exactly what I did thirty years ago. I buy the Boston Globe and the local weekly, and that's where I get the bulk of my news. I avoid all blogs, social-media news sites, and current-events message boards, and I refuse to watch cable news or listen to talk radio. I don't need that stuff, and I'm able to successfully avoid it. And I don't own, or need to own, a mobile phone, so I'm able to avoid that. The Lounge is pretty much my only regular indulgence in social media.

 

[Angus Forbes]

Life in the developed world inevitably becomes more complex with each passing year. Thus it is natural -- and not at all contradictory -- for each generation to look back on childhood as a simpler time. This is not due to a child's cognitive limitations and sheltering; rather it is due to the fact that life in fact becomes increasingly complex.

To use my own experience: I was born in 1948, and view life in 1958 as being far less complex than life today. But I also view life in 1988 as being more complex than in 1958, and less complex than today. This latter point has no dependence on sheltering and cognitive limitations -- I was 40 years old in 1988.

More generally, those inclined to math or computer science may look at life in the developed world as a state machine. Clearly, there are many more states now than in 1958, and clearly there are many more transition paths available due to advances in communications, transportation, medicine, finance, weaponry, and many other fields, along with increasing affluence.

So those who value simplicity likely see earlier times as being better than present times, as earlier times were in fact less complex. Others who value the benefits of the aforementioned advances likely view today's life as being better.

But dealing with complexity taxes human ability. The question at this point is "will the downside of increasing complexity come to outweigh the advantages of increasing complexity, and if so, when?"

 

[LizzieMaine]

But sensationalism has always been true of the media to some degree, more for some news outlets than others, of course.

I think a few weeks spent seriously reading any metropolitan newspaper of the 1920s or 1930s will prove definitively that the media of the Era was, in fact *more* sensational than the media of today. On January 11, 1937 nearly the entire front page of the Home Final edition of the New York Daily News was taken up by a lurid, gruesome, full-length photo of the mutilated, molested corpse of a ten-year-old boy. If any paper today ran a photo like that the outcry would be deafening, but in 1937 it was just more everyday fodder for Charlie Straphanger to look at before he turned the page to see what Dick Tracy was up to. People in the Era were far more jaded about such things than people today, because their world was far harsher. And, one could argue, from reading the news sections of those newspapers, a good bit more complicated.

 

[Paisley]

Never mind present-day wives, read "Why Women Cry" by Elizabeth Hawes, written in 1943. She was calling for "revolution in the kitchen" at a time when too many "nostalgic" males today think women were perfectly satisfied with "Kinder, Kuche, und Kirche."

There's no shortage of men on Youtube mansplaining why women today would be happier as housewives with a couple of kids than they would with a career.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I didn't enjoy being a child at all. I enjoyed being an adolescent even less. And my twenties and thirties weren't exactly a barrel of laughs either. .... But I wouldn't be a kid again for anything. And if, god forbid, I was cursed to return to my teenage years I'd cut my own throat first. Those were a long way from being "simpler times."

I hated- hated- being a kid. And I didn't care for being around other children because.. well, they acted like damn children. I preferred being around adults when they were talking about the Depression or the War: far more interesting than listening to whiny little pests. Most adults who got to know me learned in short order that they didn't have to patronize me, and I enjoyed that.


Another thing is that kids could be remarkably heartless. You have commented in the past of how Charlie Brown and others in the Peanuts strip were brutalized by other kids- and it isn't an exaggeration. We've all been on the short end of that one, but having represented kids in delinquency cases and adults in criminal cases, I can tell you that the former are far more prone to remorseless, vicious criminal conduct.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I suppose (like a lot of Loungers) I was wired differently than most kids. I can recall how ridiculous I felt it was at the time when, at age 7, we moved from the city of Chicago and moved to a (then) all white suburb. "You'll be a lot happier there. More kids to play with, and lots of parks where you can play!" Hell, at that age they could have given me a roll of subway/ bus tokens, five dollars cash, and an admonition to be home by six.. and saved themselves thousands of dollars. I'd have been a lot happier.

 

[Paisley]

In some ways, people are working harder because of technology. Fifteen years ago, my employer could hire a temp to fill in for me if I called in sick. Now, the technology for the same job has become so much more complicated that that isn't possible. When I return to work, I come back to a big stack of assignments to be done.

Internet research, though, allowed me to fix my health problems. Mainstream medical advice was wrong by 180 degrees. Without access to studies and blogs, I'd likely be 200 pounds, diabetic, and on a raft of medications. So health care has gotten more complicated, requires a LOT of knowledge on the patient's part, and possibly some out-of-pocket expenses for tests and books. But a lot of people who cleared those hurdles regained their health. The changing mainstream advice now on fat and sugar? The result of heretic doctors and thousands of laymen who debunked decades of junk science and lousy advice and publicly ridiculed it. The gatekeepers had nothing to do with it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's no shortage of men on Youtube mansplaining why women today would be happier as housewives with a couple of kids than they would with a career.

It's safe to say that the chant of "simpler times, simpler times" is very often a dogwhistle on behalf of a particular agenda. In such cases "simpler times" means "times when People Like Me ran the show, and everybody else kept in their place."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Another thing is that kids could be remarkably heartless. You have commented in the past of how Charlie Brown and others in the Peanuts strip were brutalized by other kids- and it isn't an exaggeration. We've all been on the short end of that one, but having represented kids in delinquency cases and adults in criminal cases, I can tell you that the former are far more prone to remorseless, vicious criminal conduct.

The "Peanuts" illustration is a good one, especially given that the strip was at the peak of its savagery in the treatment of Charlie Brown from 1950 until about 1965 -- precisely the period most often given a soft-focus picket-fence whitewashing by nostalgia buffs today. Some of this was, admittedly, a product of Schulz processing his own bitter memories of his own 1930s childhood -- but some of it also came from observing his own children and their interactions with others.

One has to wonder, if Charlie Brown was a real person, born about 1945 or 1946, what memories he would carry of his childhood today. Given the human tendency to sand off the rough spots in what we recall of the past, I suspect he'd be telling his therapist he was a very happy, well-adjusted child. And then he'd go home and sit in the dark mulling over his ambivalent feelings about his wife Lucy.

 

[Angus Forbes]

What is the point of all this embittered cynicism?

Is it not possible that some (many? most?) women prefer to be stay-at-home moms?

My mother did -- she later had a career, but couldn't wait to "return home."

Same for my wife, aunt, numerous cousins, and just about all the women in my densely populated 1950s neighborhood. Careers were pursued for financial reasons (Elizabeth Warren talks about this in her book called something like The Two Income Trap). Careers are mostly an unavoidable crock, for both men and women.

Regarding Charlie Brown: I was born in 1948. My (only) first-cousin (let's call him "Jack") was born in 1945. So we have Charlie bracketed, chronologically. Neither Jack nor I has a therapist. Neither of us sits in the dark and broods about anything. We are both happily married and have been for many years. No divorces. Neither of us is ambivalent at all about our wives. We both have wonderful young-adult kids, whom we enjoy very much. Just for the record . . .