Posted on 07/05/2021 9:05:16 PM PDT by MNDude
I was just sitting in a Cub's parking lot waiting for my wife. It seemed there was an endless parade of what I would call freaks-- girls with blue hair and pierced noses, men with dreadlocks and huge inserts into big holes in their ears, women covered with nasty tattoos. You know what I mean.
I realize there has always been unusual people, but if you were alive before the 1960's, do you remember if there was a concept of trying to make one look as idiotic as possible?
I call it, “identity crisis”.
"To this day the biggest turnoff for me is to see a woman with a visible tatoo. The body piercing thing is also totally bizarre."
Actually the tattoos don’t bother me as much as the body piercing does. Now I don’t like excessive tats, but I could deal with them in moderation. Of course what is moderation on those?
I don’t think there were freaks that stood out like they do today. If you looked like some of these people today 60 years ago you would be unemployable for the most part and live on the fringe of society. If you looked totally out of step and the norm then people pretty much shunned you.
They probably fall within a range considered “normal” for their day. If they were teens today, they might be tattooed, pierced potheads. And, their blue-haired, tattooed stoner girlfriends would think they were sexy. Humans are malleable creatures.
No.
Not before Marijuana changed everything...
“How many of those “hippies” exchanged their flowers and beads for disco suits in the 70s?”
Since I loathe disco and avoid it like the plague, I can’t make a reliable estimate. I can say two things about the subject, though.
1. Once the draft was eliminated, turnout at the “antiwar” protests took a downturn.
2. By 1973, it was unusual to see men wearing their hair “freak flag” long in most places.
...”but a culture is in decline when the upper classes mimic the lower classes.”
...and also when so-called adults try to emulate the youth.
Back in the early 1960s, I went to the Detroit Metro Airport to pick up my brother coming home from the service. It was a hot summer day, and I was sitting alone in an empty waiting area, with my head down reading a magazine, when I notice the fat nyloned calves of two blacks females in high heals. But I heard two men talking, which I thought was strange. Looking up I saw the two women, were big fat sweating black guys with mustaches in tight black dresses, wigs, and pillbox hats like Jackie Kennedy used to wear sitting across from me fanning themselves with magazines and complaining to each other about the heat in a feminine manner. First time I had ever seen anything like that, and was in a state of shock. I remember saying top myself, “Oh my God, they’re men in woman’s clothes!”
I spent years close to the arts scene. I noticed that the less talented someone was, the more freaky and affected their manner of dress and countenance were. The real artists, the ones who worked their assess off and produced great work, were usually low key.
When I was in Jr HS, I wanted to belong to the counterculture for all of it’s “free love”, rock and roll, far out freedom in the Space Age, groovy girls looking for a groovy guy, etc., but it never really happened because all of those people were at least 10 years older than me and some were Vietnam vets who were still in their early 20’s. Some of those vets were teachers in our school district and most of them were good teachers. The “freakiest” of them was one of the Geography teachers who was also the JV football and basketball coach. On the first day of 7th Grade, he came to school long-haired, wearing a headband with a long feather in the back and a Fu Manchu mustache like Joe Namath’s. The football team went undefeated and I made the basketball team, but that team was not so great. Was he a really a “freak”? Nope, he was just daring to be different. We also had a WWII vet who had two prosthetic legs and he was not unlike the Coach. Was he a “freak” too?...Nope! The (hippie) freaks who called themselves “freaks” were the real freaks. As it turned out, I was just a good rock and roll fan and that’s about it. I latched onto the scene and went along for the wild and reckless ride until people my age started dying like the rock stars of the ‘60’s, or landing in rehab and some were close friends in the neighborhood and from school. Now I find that I’m part of a new pro-American counterculture and it seems to make more sense this time around and rightly so! Yes, I’m a Baby Boomer and I can’t change that but I can ignore it if I choose to. I can’t divorce myself from my youthful indiscretions but I understand better than ever how it was mistake to try to align myself with that first counterculture, especially at such an impressionable age. Don’t let the smooth taste fool you. You don’t want to find out the hard way that “Love” had almost nothing to do with it.
It has been all about language for at least 40 years.
One word: Codpiece.
We've been the braggarts of the planet forever and about as closed minded to diversity as any one culture CAN be .... until the 60's.
THAT'S when the language was infiltrated, not with anything new, but with a new exposure.
I had the HAIR album almost memorized, like a Sunday school star pupil and believe me .... it was all about using the English language as outrageously as possible.
F and MF became household words back then and the public schools became populated with "those that can't. teach"
Yes. Women/girls have always pushed the envelope of decency in appearance, but when Twiggy” and miniskirts became the rage, promiscuity became the norm.
When I was young, if you saw a tatoo you knew it was either on a sailor or the carnival was in town.
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