What do you miss about the 90s

[whytesnow]

Watching the x files just now got me thinking about the 90s

Everything! 1995-1999 were the best years of my life. I was doing GCSE's and A levels, had a great group of friends, my Mum and Dad were still alive. I loved the music, the films, no internet etc

Tizer, I used to drink gallons of the stuff it was immense! Then they changed it to ‘fruit flavour’…..

Video shops, I loved choosing a video, felt like a huge treat.

soya pieces in a pot noodle, I’m easily pleased

Yeah because Tony Blair was fab...

The Shops!
3 types of music shop on every high st.
Mooching round second hand record stores .
Independent bookstores. 'Hippy' shops which only seem to exist in places like Bude and Bath now.
The music, the TV, the films.

And my waistline.

I miss feminism actually being in the interests of women, rather than men who want to identify as women. I really, really miss that.

I was telling my daughter about that jukebox music channel 'the Box' where you'd call and pick a song with a 3 digit number on your landline then wait for hours for them to play it.

She thought I was taking the piss 🤣

Everything! How did we go from the upbeat optimism of the 90s to the shit of today?

Totally agree

The complete lack of lives lived rotating around social media.
No cyber bullying.
No obsession with designer stuff for little kids.
No 'screen time' unless you were going to watch tv.

The complete lack of men wandering into the ladies in womens clothing.
The complete lack of women getting double mastectomies to try & escape the reality of their sex.
The complete lack of teaching primary school children how to have anal sex, or to question their sex.

The freedom we used to have & how much less the 90s resembled the book 1984.

Dating men & it never even occurring to me that they might want to strangle me if we slept together because it was not a common thing.

It's all Newspeak now & none of it benefits society.
Big Brother is watching you & his eye is on what you buy, where you go, what you say & trying to police what you think.

Things were not perfect in the 90s, but society wasn't the cesspit it is now.

I wonder how the young people of today feel? Do they still have the sense of optimism and boundless possibilities that tends to come with youth? Or do they feel gloomy about their finances, Climate Change, Brexit etc?

Cadburys chocolate, all sweets were better! Agree the optimism, it was a very different world back then. I miss drives with my family, sunny carefree days and 90' music playing from the car radio/cassettes. I miss delayed gratification. i miss when social media wasn't a thing, people were less vain and no love island! I am so pleased I grew up in the 90s and not today. I feel sorry for the younger generations growing up in this world.

Every.single.thing

They are a lot more nihilistic but funny with it (I guess they have to be to not be completely depressed). They are more clued in thanks to social media and 24 hour news. They have ridiculous beauty standards and everything is recorded so they are always "on". They joke about having more once in a generation events (inflation, pandemic, crises, etc) in their lifetime than they want. We will never see another generation like 90s kids imho - we were the lucky ones between the end of the Cold War and the start of the war on terror, and wars like Bosnia etc. seemed "far away" because you couldn't get constant coverage even as an adult, when internet access was rare and mostly limited to forums on niche interests.

I really miss the lesbian, gay and bi scene of the 90s. Women only club nights. ❤️ Men wouldn’t have fucking dared come in! Mixed clubbing was a lot of fun too..

Where I was the straight cross dressers met occasionally in gay bars because they needed the tolerance which was fine, but at complete separate regular times a few times a year, and they were a totally different crowd in those daytime get togethers- the two scenes did not overlap.

Same sex attraction was celebrated back then and not castigated or co-opted by narcissistic men.

I know this thread is meant to be lighthearted but I think of all the young lesbian and bi girls coming out these days who can’t access women-only spaces to have fun in. I feel disgusted that male wants have all but obliterated a whole scene and culture. Today’s sexism and misogyny is as bad as in the 90s but in a different way.

Buying M peoples CD and listening to the tracks.
Loved M People.

I miss being young, but that didn't have anything to do with the 90s.

And Malcom X's, California Sunrises, Dennis the Menace, Supermen - If you remember the 90's you were not there!

Also lack of social media - teens were way more hedonistic and had actual freedom!

I wonder this. I imagine the internet has made them a lot more politically conscious, which doesn't usually lead to optimism. I know in my teens I wasn't too bothered by anything in the news, other than maybe the Iraq war and Labour's vague firtation with a surveillance state. But they were very much peripheral to everyday life.

Casually strolling into a local record shop literally a few weeks before Glastonbury in 1994 and buying a ticket from the till. Job done.
Hooch alcopop and Diamond White
Glitter body gel
The 60s revival in the 90s - a-line skirts, swirly pattern mini dresses
Sheer tops with a bra underneath
Thin eyebrows, adhesive face sparkles
Flat tummy often shown off in crop tops
Britpack era
Gladiators and Blind Date on TV on a Saturday night before going out
Going out on £5, (£1 taxi share for there and back, £1 entry with free drink voucher, £4 left to spend on another 4 drinks as they were £1 each). If we had £6 we'd club together for chips after the club before going home
No mobile phones or emails, so people had to make arrangements by landline and stick to them and also write letters to friends
A feeling of freedom

I was at uni at Bristol in the mid 90s, took it for granted at the time but the local music scene was phenomenal, Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky, Groove Armada etc. Tony Blair had swept into power and there was just a groundswell of optimism, people just seemed to get along better and there were fewer collossal arseholes about. Even though we were cash poor we could still 'do' things, travel places, go to gigs, look forward to stuff. The cold war had thawed, it was an age of excitement, possibility, and chaos, we saw a rise in multiculturalism and alternative media. The Good Friday Agreement was signed after 30 years of conflict. Nelson Mandela was freed after 25 years’ incarceration.
Britain was drawing closer to Europe with the Channel Tunnel opening in 1995. We saw our European neighbours as friends on a collective wave of positivity after the Berlin wall had come down and the Russians no longer wanted to nuke us. In an era of self-reflection, we railed against technology. Some of us even joined ecowarrior communities to live in the trees to stop the march of motorways. We upgraded our desktops to laptops and fought the battle of Windows with the Apple Mac. We all dreamed of joining tech giants like Apple and Windows and rebelled with Linux servers. Phone calls and text messages became incessant with smiley faces appearing on our ever-shrinking mobile devices. We watched the ‘Titanic’ sink again and Hugh Grant being foppish and got blown away with Trainspotting. We wished we could be in the Central Perk with our Friends. We decorated our bedrooms with Athena posters and Coca Cola signs and adorned our homes with a mixture of metal wall signs of times gone by. Our 80’s mullets and perms relaxed and grew out as we tried to iron our curls out and bleached our hair. We were awesome and the world was our oyster, the party would last forever...............

.................and then it ended.😪

Just thought of more

Thats so raven
Sweet valley high
Regrets
Bear in the big blue house
Tiny tots tv
Rosie and Jim
Wizadora
Sabrina teenage witch

Panda pops
Cheap chocolate
Gladiators are you ready, contenders are you ready
The generation game
Jeans for genes day

Mark one or mk one
Bhs
Claire accessories was really cheap
Adams
Neon rubber bangles
Woolworths
Freddo and fudge bars just 10p
Pilot shop
Chokers
Fluffy diaries
Tamagotchi
Furies
Decent toys in happy meals
Toys in cereal boxes
Soft play for free in mcdonalds
Joke shops that sold fake dog poo

Recording favourite songs on a tape from the radio
Smash hits magazine
Girl talk with animal posters and stickers

Impulse body spray
Glitter body roller

@Brokendaughter @SuitcaseofBooze Sadly I agree. I know teenagers today think the '90s was some awful, unenlightened time ('rape in marriage was legal until 1991' etc) but overall I think things have gotten a lot worse for women and girls in many ways and the situation for young lesbians is particularly scary.

I turned 18 in '93 and my pop culture memories of that time are of men like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder talking about feminism, misogyny and women's rights, Anita Roddick being interviewed in Just 17 magazine as an inspirational role model and alternative comedy replacing sexist old school comedians etc, etc. As a teenager it felt that feminism was the norm - I never felt limited by being female.

I think there was then a distinct change in popular culture that started around the mid 90s, with the advent of Loaded magazine and 'lad culture' - supposedly an ironic rejection of the 'new man' but essentially a male-centred celebration of beer, football and sexism, with women relegated to being 'get your tits out for the lads' dolly birds. Then shortly after that the internet (and internet porn) came into peoples homes, and a whole generation were brought up to view women as a collection of holes that exist for men's sexual entertainment ... I remember at the time that the whole culture shift felt very anti-women. Looking back now I wonder if I was just very lucky to come of age when I did and that maybe what I thought was 'the norm' (ie feminism and anti-sexism) was actually just a blip between the old school sexism of the '70s and the misogyny of the current internet age.

I remember being a child and would receive a birthday card from the council do they still do tht?

@SinisterBumFacedCat I haven't thought of Spectacular nail polish in so long - I loved it, such good colours, and so cheap!