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

[china_shop]

I may be wrong because I was both a geek and pretty young, but I feel like body hair was still a normal thing back then, too.

[sara]

No, no, it was normal. Many of us even considered it attractive.

[china_shop]

I still do (and I still have all mine). :-)

[desireearmfeldt]

I don't know about norms for hair on men, because I wasn't paying attention, but there was sure a lot of peer pressure for girls/women to shave their legs where I grew up (Boston). I didn't wear shorts from approximately 1987 to at leas the late 1990s.

[resonant]

For sure, every follicle on your leg had to be maintained, but at least pubic hair was permitted.

Once (a while ago, but much later than 1985) I scheduled a leg wax and something went awry with the schedule. The waxer opened the door, looked at round little gray-haired me, and said, "Is this your first Brazilian, hon?"

I said, "I'm from the seventies. We're allowed to have public hair."

[starwatcher]

LOL!

[china_shop]

I said, "I'm from the seventies. We're allowed to have public hair."

Hee! Yes, this! *applauds*

The nurse at my GP clinic has three daughters, and she once told me she could see the generational shift in body-hair fashions happening in real time, as the oldest was comfortable with I-can't-remember-now-but-having-some-body-hair, the youngest was firmly in the it-all-must-go camp, and the middle one was somewhere in between.

The real reason I don't do anything about mine is because I'm lazy, but if I start feeling self-conscious about it, I tell myself it's part of my gender expression, and then it just is what it is. ;-p

[resonant]

Absolutely. Chest hair was beginning to be unfashionable, but you knew everybody was a mammal in their pants.

[libitina]

Female armpit hair was scandalous and foreign. There was a lot of whispering about the French foreign exchange student's armpits.

But men were weird if they shaved their armpits or chests or legs (for sporting events, but must complain about it). And pubic-scaping definitely meant business.

For female pubic hair, my mother told me that she had tried shaving in her day (50s? 60s? 70s?) and strongly advised never removing all of the hair, but leaving the landing strip so that your hair knew what direction to grow back in.

[china_shop]

My mother actually discouraged me from shaving even my legs and armpits -- she said once I started, I'd have to keep going because the hair would grow back thicker and darker -- so I never did except for one time I was bored in a motel, and then I had to put up with my then-partner complaining about scratchy leg stubble for weeks until it grew out and softened again.

But then, I am foreign. :-)

[libitina]

Oh, yes! I ran into that, too. But mostly with why you should wax leg hair. Or wax or pluck chin hairs. And I always have to run through the explanation in my head - yes, that's because it's the wide flat part of the hair growing out, instead of any fundamental change in the hairs.

I don't know. I was once half asleep shaving my legs before high school and dragged the corner of the razor up most the length of my calf. After that, I decided it was a special occasion sort of thing and not something I cared enough about. Plus, any opportunity to be militantly feminist is a plus. Because my breasts are too big for comfortable bra burning (at least for moving at the speed required in public spaces)