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

[synecdochic]

Don't forget "everyone smoked, everywhere, and I mean everywhere " and the importance of the local arcade and the local mall in teenage social habits!

[desireearmfeldt]

That's also somewhat regional, I think. I know restaurants had smoking and non-smoking sections when I was a kid, and towns in my area started prohibiting smoking in public spaces during that time.

For example, I don't think I've ever been in a movie theatre or mall where people were smoking. Or an airplane, though by the time I first traveled in an airplane (late 80s) they sure still had no smoking signs and announcements about not smoking.

Or maybe I'm misremembering.

(My parents and their closest friends, who have never smoked in my lifetime, were all smokers before I was born.)

smoking

[feklar42]

Oh gods, I remember being handed a $10 and sent into the store to by a carton of menthols for my Mom. The checkout stand was about my eye level and the cashier didn't even blink.

[cathexys]

Indeed. I remember still smoking on the plane in the mid to late 80s. Europe, of course, didn't have nonsmoker section at all in restaurants at the time, and I remember being amazed on a trip to Syria (1988?) that everyone was standing in the aisle smoking.

[resonant]

In 1991 I took a job in a company where smoking in your office had only just been banned within the last couple of years. Oh my god, the sticky residue that clung to everything from the pens to the phone mouthpiece!