I was there, Gandalf, in the Reagan Administration

[resonant]

Additional notes to young writers who saw Cobra Kai and got sucked into Karate Kid and are now trying to set stories in the foreign country that is 1985:

- The shorts were that short. It was normal. Men were allowed to have thighs in the '80s.

- The hair was that clean and shiny. It was normal. On TV even scary criminal types all looked like their hairdryers were still warm.

- "Thirsty" and "the D" didn't have any slang meaning then, and they wouldn't have made anybody laugh.

- Wikipedia says the phrase "safe sex" was being used as early as '84, but it wasn't really mainstream; condoms were generally thought of as birth control. Most of them were unlubricated and really, really dry. They'd suck all the moisture out of your Parts. I was 21 in 1985 and was unaware of the whole concept of lube, though I was familiar with spermicidal gel.

- No internet meant that it was difficult and embarrassing to get hold of porn, so a lot of people had just never seen any. No internet also meant teens went around believing some things about sex that were really spectacularly wrong.

- Spandex wasn't common except in leotards. Jeans had no stretch, zero. So they were loose enough in the leg that when you unfastened them, they pretty much just fell to the ground.

- Earphones were little sponge-covered things the size of Oreos strung on a length-adjustable arc of metal. They neither went into the ear nor fully covered the ear. They really didn't block outside sound at all unless you had the music turned up as high as it would go.

- You can go right on imagining these guys in boxer-briefs if you like, but I promise you they were wearing white Jockeys.

Edited to add a link to feklar42's addition on the subject of consent and date rape, which is an area where attitudes were very different in 1985.

Comments

Concepts of Consent and Date Rape

[feklar42]

On a more serious note, when I was in high school the concepts of Consent and Date Rape did not exist. I knew 2 girls who had been what I now would describe as date raped, but it wasn't rape, it was just what guys did if you were "stupid enough" to get into the situation that lead to it--go into an enclosed or dark space, make out, have a drink, be weaker... :(
I think the concept of date rape started to be more common in my college years, but was still kind of discussed in whispers.

Re: Concepts of Consent and Date Rape

[resonant]

Oh, a good addition, and one that would be relevant to a lot of writers.

Re: Concepts of Consent and Date Rape

[cathexys]

I think that was the most affecting thing during the Kavanaugh hearings for me. The fact that what was discussed was so very much not exceptional but just a standard weekend. Boys being boys and blackout drinking and at most self recriminations but never ever the concept of rape or sexual assault. But also the stigma of sexual promiscuity an the excuse of heavy drinking...

I think that's what makes it really interesting watching our favorite 80s movies. Yes, the racism in Sixteen Candles is bad, but the sexual assault isn't much better...

Re: Concepts of Consent and Date Rape

[resonant]

On a similar topic, my dad once told me that as late as the seventies, if you wrecked your car and said to the judge, "I was drunk," that was a mitigating factor!

Re: Concepts of Consent and Date Rape

[china_shop]

I rewatched the movie Broadcast News (1987) not long ago, in which they made a news segment talking about date rape as if it was an entirely new concept (which, yeah).

Re: Concepts of Consent and Date Rape

[twistedchick]

Date rape wasn't prosecutable (in any states that I know of at that time) because the concept of rape meant that the assailant wasn't personally known to the victim. Essentially, if a woman knew anything more about the guy who attacked her than his name, she would be accused of 'leading him on'. And district attorneys would decline to prosecute. This meant that if a woman worked with someone who later raped her, it would not be taken seriously; same thing for a victim and rapist who happened to ride the same bus.

Re: Concepts of Consent and Date Rape

[feklar42]

Yes and even more so for marital rape. That's why just the concept of it was quietly revolutionary. The people it happened to literally did not have a vocabulary for what happened to them or even the acknowledgement that it was fundamentally different from "sex".