Was sex at school less stigmatised in the late 90s?

[blubberball]

I was at school in the late 90s. I see things online now about "body count" and how that can be used by some to shame people (women). I don't know about your school and the general attitude around at the time, but it really seemed like the opposite was true back then. The cool people at school were the ones who had experience. Admittedly my town did have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe at the time. Was this the case when others were at school? People didn't seem ashamed of sex when I was at school. It was the opposite, they were very proud of it and laughed at the inexperienced people.

I found that as a girl you were shamed whatever in the late 1980s and 1990s. Either a slag or frigid or a lesbian (oh no! 🤔) and nothing in between. The portrayal of women on TV was not great really either. I didn't find there was a lot of peer pressure to have sex younger, it was more that girls were routinely more sexualised in the media at a young age and this was not questioned, so if anything the pressure was coming from there.

Then lads were influenced by the misogyny in TV and tabloids and just the casual sexism and double-standards which pervaded society. Now it's social media and a lot more shite coming out of the US and crappy influencers which is a lot more fucked up than most European countries in terms of sex and sexuality, IMO, and a lot worse than the UK.

I had a fair bit of sexual harassment and name calling at school and if anything that has got worse. Schools on paper take it more seriously now but in reality they can be absolutely awful in dealing with it. Back then I probably thought it was normal, unfortunately.

From what my mum tells me, being seen as being gay was the worst thing at school in the 70s. In the late 90s, me and my friends would link arms or hold hands walking down the road. My mum said people would have shouted abuse at us for being lesbians in the 70s. Glad things are better than they were for all gay people now

A common thing I found in the 1980s and early 1990s as a younger teenager was that people considered you promiscuous if you had noticeable breasts. I was always absolutely outraged by that! 🤔Even adults had that attitude sometimes.

Definitely, it was absolutely a term of abuse, being gay in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Only the 2000s it seemed to start to change.

The Sun were particularly homophobic in the 1980s though and a lot of people read that nonsense.

I remarked to the school that DDs' Y6 sex education in the 2010s still didn't mention that you might be attracted to someone of the same sex and that was ok. I think their material was about 15 years old.

Gawd no it was far worse.

girls were called slags for having too many boyfriends and judged in every way

being gay was still very much a secret

Section 28 meant it was difficult for schools to talk about it.

Yes, it wasn't precisely illegal to talk about it but a lot of schools erred on the side of caution to avoid accusations of 'promoting homosexuality'.

Really? You see, with the benefit of hindsight and maturity I think that the people at school with ‘experience’ were mostly vulnerable kids. Particularly the girls. And as per, the boys with ‘experience’ were lauded for it, and the girls were shamed. And my school was no Malory Towers.

I knew it would be 🤣 The private school boys I went to uni with were nothing like that

Although it wasn't taught as part of Sex Ed, a few people were openly gay at my sixth form in the early 1990's and it wasn't considered a big deal. I lived in a medium-sized town, so it surprises me that this acceptance was unusual for the time. Makes me feel better about where I lived, I thought it was pretty backwards at the time.

I went to Maplesden Noakes.

The cool people were definitely people with experience, but too much and you were a slag

In the early 90s a 12yr old girl in our school left abruptly and it was rumoured that this was because she had got pregnant by her stepfather so had left to have the baby.
Incredibly to modern eyes, the gossip surrounding this was "wow, she must really hate her mum to steal her man like that" rather than "omg poor victim of CSA/rape, we should support her".

Girls shamed other girls for being slags. Boys were happy to have a go if the opportunity arose.

Bodycount just wasn’t a thing people mentioned as ruling in or out a partner. This whole red pill high value bullshit wasn’t an issue at all.
But then porn was a magazine from the newsagent and most men didn’t even think to ask for anal.

I was at a private convent in the 80s and I’d been to a state girls school before. Lost my virginity partly due to pressure from my 2 best friends. At the convent they were mostly virgins and I didn’t dare tell them I wasn’t! A few went wild come age 15/16 though.

No one mentioned body count then either.

I left school in 98.
Everyone was pretty desperate to lose their virginity.
The cooler girls were definitely revered for having sex.
I was not a cool girl and when I had sex in year 10 which (which didnt seem early compared to my peers) I was slut shamed as it was gossiped about.

Oh yes, I'd forgotten I was automatically a slag because I had big boobs.

Was fucking horrible.

We live in increasingly polarised, contradictory times.

Sex has never been so ubiquitous so it’s probably lost its coolness / mystique among certain younger folks. A bit like booze has lost its appeal for many who’d prefer a gym date followed by a matcha tea.

That sums up the summer before my final year in school!

I do think part of this is that context collapse means every group hears what every other group is discussing online, whereas in ordinary life, stuff is segregated more. So boys in the 90s and 2000s might well have discussed not wanting a 'slutty' girlfriend and preferring one with fewer partners before them, but girls wouldn't have seen them talking about it on social media.

I do think part of it is that men/boys have always rated/ranked this kind of stuff but usually in all male groups where girls wouldn't hear.

But I also think Andrew Tate, red pill etc have definitely made it more of a preoccupation for boys.