What now makes you uncomfortable that didn't at the time

[drinkingwineoutofamug]

As a teenager I like listening to a certain rock band.
Just found their album on iTunes, downloaded and listened.
I was shocked. One of the songs - sung by grown men - ' she's a 13 yr tease , with bleach blonde hair. Let me eat your cookies , let me see your cookies '
Sat in the bath gob smacked. When I was 15 , this never made me question.

Has anyone else come across something that as a younger person it never crossed your mind but now it's a wtf moment

The way Britney Spears was treated at 15 or 16 and the resulting mental health issues. The way Maucaley* (sorry probably not correct spelling) Caulkin was treated, Drew Barry more and going further back stars like Shirley Temple and,Judy Garland .

Watched the first episode of Dawson's creek the other day and thought it was so amazing as a teenager. Now I could only see how sexist it was, the teacher and pacey , and the language they use is ridiculous!

When I was 16 I was groomed by an older man of 30 (although he refused to tell me his actual age) and my parents turned a blind eye, even though he was regularly abusing and exploiting me. I still find it hard to accept they did nothing to protect me.

@Standrewsschool

Is it Seven Brides or another musical whereby a trader sells/auctions his wife?

That happens in the Hardy novel "The Mayor of Casterbridge" - I don't know of any musicals (but I don't know of many musicals IYKWIM0.

Apparently at the time the novel was written this was an acceptable wy of ridding yourself of a woman/raising a bit of cash.

@DeciduousPerennial

A girl of 12 who had a baby in year 8 when I was in secondary school.

At the time, she was the scandal, not the MAN who did it to her.

That's so grim and sad for that innocent little girl. How is she now?

Also what about single mothers being demonised in the 80s (not the fathers who had had their fun and ran off scot free!!)

The mums (who were absolute saints) were the "scourge of society" so they were taken advantage of, abandoned, looked down at by society and had little financial support for themselves and their little ones who they had chosen to keep despite all that! Makes me cringe and pretty sick tbh - that's patriarchy in all its glory in the red tops right there. ;((

My son goes to a special school,but I have heard some horror stories of how some children with SEN are treated in some mainstream schools now

My own son has additional support needs and agree the system leaves a lot to be desired but it doesn’t seem as bad as it was in my day. There were kids in my year who now thinking back most likely had ASD and they were just totally ignored and left to rot.

Agree 100% with Whitchurch.

Yes, I remember a Tory Party conference where Peter Lily MP vilified single mothers in a version of ‘I’ve got him on the list’ by Gilbert & Sullivan. Even at the time it was considered really nasty.

@TooManyAnimals94

Some of these have not aged well but a few I think you're missing the point. If you listen to Does your Mother Know You're Out, he is discouraging the girl from trying to act older than she is. I've always heard it as being very self aware about girls who think they are more grown up than they are. Also Cruel Intentions...it's an adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons...the whole point is the seduction of young girls and how these awful people try and ruin their lives and reputations. The message is not that this is ok...but watch out for the perverts out there!

Totally agree - they were warming songs! 🪳

Daddy-Long-Legs - the novel. It’s a study of grooming a vulnerable orphan. Yuck. I loved it when I was about 10

The film with Fred Astaire was as creepy as hell. Even as a child I thought it was horrible!

@Whitchurch

Songs tell stories. They don't always have to be positive stories, they don't necessarily reflect the views, experience or aspirations of the artists. They talk about life. The Police sing about a stalker - the lyrics aren't promoting it as a good thing, they are relating how it might be to be that person. It comes across as creepy. It's supposed to. I think that songs that explicitly tell us that the singer is lusting after an under-age child are something else of course! but some of this putting lyrics under scrutiny is madness to me. Do we want to live in a sanitised world where nobody is allowed to write a work of fiction (song or book or poem etc) that reflects a seedy, but real, aspect of life? It's wrong to murder people, but crime thriller writers aren't to be condemned as prospective murderers are they? Or their books burned because they portray situations that are illegal, cruel or otherwise unacceptable. Somehow we need to stop this constant looking for wrong where it was never intended. We're heading for ridiculous censorship resulting in the loss of classics and the narrowing of our views of life. As an example - Go and read the Bryan Adams lyrics for Summer of 69. It's a man looking back on happy times in his youth. His first guitar. How he and friends formed a band. It didn't work. First love. "Those were the best days of my life". No abuse, no under-age lust, just life as it's experienced. While we look backward we somehow don't manage to deal with the vile stuff that surrounds us now. Listen to some current lyrics. The ones being picked over here pale into insignificance.

I agree with this.

Songs that romanticize or glorify grooming / violence / abuse of power are inexcusable, but songs (such as 'Summer of 69') that simply depict young love/lust, or tell a story about the human condition - what is the problem here? I don't want to live in a world where everything is sanitised.

Telling stories should be fine. We're all adults, we should be able to cope with a song mentioning sex or a film depicting uncomfortable scenarios. It's only when the problematic behaviours are romanticized and promoted that there is an issue. The Father Ted example upthread is a good example of this - the writer of Father Ted is not glorifying the behaviour of its characters!

@GintyMcGinty

I will add John Hughes films like Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club.

Full of sexisms, racism, homophobia with sexual assault and rape as punchlines and achievements.

John Hughes films are grim in general.

I was in the target teenage demographic at the time and I loved them. But looking back, these films were horrid. The female characters are sexualised and only interesting in how attractive (or not) they are to men/boys.

@RedcurrantPuff

My son goes to a special school,but I have heard some horror stories of how some children with SEN are treated in some mainstream schools now

My own son has additional support needs and agree the system leaves a lot to be desired but it doesn’t seem as bad as it was in my day. There were kids in my year who now thinking back most likely had ASD and they were just totally ignored and left to rot.

I think it depends on the school tbh I have know children to be illegally excluded because the school can't cope with their needs one child I know his mum was told not to bring him in when Ofsted were visiting .

Clare is about him babysitting his agents daughter. I have heard interviews with Gilbert talking about this. He is still friends with Clare. Nothing untoward here.

Reading some of these, people have really misunderstood some songs and films.

A DT teacher who used to be really handsy with girls when using the lathe, getting right up behind them. Makes me feel sick to think about it now but we just laughed it off that he was a bit of a perv...

Oh and Twilight...

@mermaidsariel

I’ve just looked a the lyrics from I’m on Fire by BS mentioned above. Oh dear oh dear. I had never really listened to them before.

They look bad, but going by the video, the 'little girl' is a young woman and the 'daddy' is her sugar daddy. We see her - well we only see her carefully manicured hands - pulling up in a posh car to the garage where Bruce works as a mechanic. It's more of an uptown girl going for a downton boy fantasy I think.

How they dress and make up little kids in pageants has never sat well with me.

@Whitchurch

Songs tell stories. They don't always have to be positive stories, they don't necessarily reflect the views, experience or aspirations of the artists. They talk about life. The Police sing about a stalker - the lyrics aren't promoting it as a good thing, they are relating how it might be to be that person. It comes across as creepy. It's supposed to. I think that songs that explicitly tell us that the singer is lusting after an under-age child are something else of course! but some of this putting lyrics under scrutiny is madness to me. Do we want to live in a sanitised world where nobody is allowed to write a work of fiction (song or book or poem etc) that reflects a seedy, but real, aspect of life? It's wrong to murder people, but crime thriller writers aren't to be condemned as prospective murderers are they? Or their books burned because they portray situations that are illegal, cruel or otherwise unacceptable. Somehow we need to stop this constant looking for wrong where it was never intended. We're heading for ridiculous censorship resulting in the loss of classics and the narrowing of our views of life. As an example - Go and read the Bryan Adams lyrics for Summer of 69. It's a man looking back on happy times in his youth. His first guitar. How he and friends formed a band. It didn't work. First love. "Those were the best days of my life". No abuse, no under-age lust, just life as it's experienced. While we look backward we somehow don't manage to deal with the vile stuff that surrounds us now. Listen to some current lyrics. The ones being picked over here pale into insignificance.

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Excellent post. Ive always thought of songs as poems set to music, stories like you say.

@CityDweller

So many films from the 80s & 90s Splash - Tom Hanks takes a vulnerable (naked) Daryl Hannah back to his flat and keeps her there American Beauty - Kevin Spacey pervs over his teenage daughter's school friend. All those bloody Scandi, etc, police programmes. All of them, ALL of them, about violent sexual crimes against women. In fact, the whole weird fetishisation of sexual violence against women in crime fiction/ tv drama

Isn't Kevin Spacey's behaviour meant to be seen as inappropriate and the sign of a mid-life crisis though? And let's face it, not a few middle aged men do in fact perv over their daughter's friends. I don't think the film is saying this is admirage.

I do agree about the crime drama obsssion with violence against women. This is recent, so maybe not appropriate for this discussion, but I really hated those scenes in The Fall where the camera lingered over the bodies of attractive young women. Ugh.

@RaiseTheBeastie

I used to sleep over a friend's house regularly on a Saturday when I was 11/12, there would be 3 of us who would go.

Her mum used to cook us tea, get us settled with our sleeping bags and snacks etc and head out to town at 8.30, dressed up to the nines, going clubbing.

She'd usually get back around 3am, very obviously giggly and worse for wear. Then she'd sit with us for a bit and chat about her night before heading to bed. My friend would take her a cup of tea in the morning whilst her mum slept off her hangover. Her mum would make sure there was bacon and eggs there so we could make ourselves a fry up in the morning.

I used to think my friend was so lucky to have such a young, cool mum. She was about 30, my parents were late 40's and much more straight laced. And unaware of what happened at friends house!

I'd be totally horrified now if my 11 year old had this at a friend's house!

My mum and her friends were the local brownie leaders. They organised pack holidays away. They were the most fantastic experiences and we all look back on them as great fun, but looking back it’s amazing they didn’t kill us! They walked 30 nine year olds up Snowdon in a heatwave, tied the girl who kept having nightmares and falling out of her (bottom) bunk to the ladder, crammed 20 little girls into a minibus (one fell out when the back door flew open, thankfully at a junction when the vehicle was still!), and used to drink loads of wine when the brownies had gone to bed.

@stressbandit

I can remember being so obsessed with boys and sex when I was a teenager from the age of 13 and forever being in some sort of predicament because of it. But no one ever pulled me aside and explained anything to me.

I was using sex and boys and even at times had meetings with grown arse men for sex, all because I had been orally raped and sexually assaulted when I was younger.

And I was so desperate for love and attention as I didnt ever experience that growing up.
It skewed everything I was constantly looking for sex as I thought that's how you get love and to be wanted. I'm 27 now and it makes me so sad that no one ever stepped in and put a stop to it.
My mum didn't bat an eyelid at me at 14 having a 25 year old boyfriend. 😭.

No body did anything to protect me more and even writing this I feel like a "slag" but I'd be through the most traumatic thing ever, had zero support and just let myself be used and used yet I feel I've done something wrong.
The whole estate knew what happened to me also.

Aw you were and are not a slag but definitely a victim of a misogynistic society. Leave any shame you feel in the past. All the shame is on THEM!! Hope you had happier times after all that xxxx

@Pyewackect

Not "cancelling the past". Re-evaluating the past.

I was about 12 when my uncle poked the tip of my first bra with his forefinger to see if my boob reached the end of it - in front of my parents and grandparents. Everybody fell about laughing. Thinking about it still makes me feel sick.

I had a boyfriend as a teen, we were both 15, we spent a lot of time together, I stayed at his most nights, we were joined at the hip.

Anyway, his parents had a friend who was a 37 year old woman, she offered to do a lingerie shoot fir my bf's photography course, he was about it but our peers egged him on and she did it "tastefully" then she had an affair with his Father so she didn't come to the house anymore and his M and D started to patch things up.

Then she got in touch with BF to "chat" and ended up inviting us both to stay at hers a few night a week, which we did (god knows why) she was keen to appear younger than her age and always made herself seem quite edgy and our peer group lapped it up.

Anyway, I ended things with BF after him and this woman were getting close and I found it uncomfortable that despite being his GFI felt like the third wheel. The second I broke things off they were in a relationship, openly. No one batted an eyelid that a 15 yr old boy was living with a 37 yr old woman who was the OW in his parents relationship, it seems it's far more accepted for a woman to be predatory than a man. They're still tougher btw and live close tome now, it's funny how horrified he looks when he sees me as I cheerily wave across the communal allotment because I refuse for it to be awkward when I'm doing a hobby I enjoy.

There was also two cases of female teachers having sex with teenagers at school, one MF relationship and one FF relationship, again barely an eyebrow raised.

I spent most my teen years hanging out with now famous and disgraced heavy metal/rock bands and nothing untoward happened so I'm always shocked when things come out in the news ( not to say I don't believe the people brave enough to come forward because I do but I never knew that side of the accused ) but I had a for,er 'friend' who suggested I was obviously too ugly to be abused by said musicians ... ffs