Now let's take a look at the situation for guys' rooms. Have they too taken to displaying only same-sex role models? First, a brief reminder of what a red-blooded young dude's room might have looked like back in the day. The top pic is Jeff Spicoli's room, and the one below is a dorm room from 1996. I included the one from the mid-'90s to show how this babe-centered form of interior decoration was still hanging on then, if in decline.
Notice that you didn't need to buy posters in the good old days -- you could just rip the pages out of a nudie magazine. The same thing can be seen in Just One of the Guys, adorning the walls of the protagonist's teenage brother. The movie pokes fun at him as the kind of guy who is pasting up these nudie pics because he can't get the real thing in real life. And you don't see Jeff Spicoli cruising for babes that often, but hanging out with his buds most of the time.
But if it were a substitute for the real thing, then we should expect nudie pics to be covering the entire bedroom of the typical teenage guy today. Rather, it was a complement to getting the real thing -- a little something to excite the mind and keep it busy when you weren't actually out flirting with girls. And by displaying them in a relatively open manner -- as opposed to keeping them hidden somewhere -- it told your friends (and family) that you weren't ashamed of having a healthy libido. That was way before the feminazi takeover of American society had become complete.
Notice what else went along with the pictures-of-girls in the average guy's room. Alcohol and drug paraphernalia -- more out in the open for Jeff Spicoli, but a random teenager could have had the dancing Budweiser cans, a poster with the Budweiser swimsuit babes stretched out, and anything involving the mascots of underage substance use such as Spuds McKenzie or Joe Camel.
The scene on the bottom shows a couple of signs that have been removed from wherever they were put up by the local government. I'm not sure how common that was in the '80s, but I do remember that being a sought-after trophy in the mid-'90s. I think my brother had a "Ped X-ing" sign that he gradually defaced, hanging on his wall. Young people used to not worship authority like they do these days.
So what do teenage guys' rooms look like in the 21st century? Here are some examples of the common types I found while browsing around Google Images for "my room":
#1 shows the same scene as the #6 scene in the post on girls' rooms. Photographs that mostly involve hanging out with his same-sex peers, and probably the occasional female friend who he's semi-attracted to but never makes a move on.
#2 is the video game addict's room, where all the posters are of video game characters or in this case the cover sleeves from the games themselves. Lots of plush toys and action figures of video game characters too. And the odd "prop" like a giant key from some game I've probably never heard of, the sword and shield from the Legend of Zelda games, etc. Not a girl in sight.
There is a less common variation on the video game addict's room -- the anime nut's room. That guy is more likely to put up pictures of girls on his wall, but only if they're a cartoon, and only if they're in some ridiculously wacky or emo pose, to heighten the goofiness and deaden any sexiness that a picture of a girl might have given off.
#3 is the closest you'll find to an adolescent's room from the good old days. Yeah, most of those bands suck, but he's still got a few classics, plus he's wearing a Slayer shirt. And his tastes haven't gelled into place yet anyway, since he looks about 12 or 13.
Still -- where are all the babes on the wall? If he's too shy to buy a poster from Spencer's, he could still rip some pages out from the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Then again, how would he get his hands on a copy? His dad probably wouldn't have it (too offensive to the wife), and he couldn't buy it in person without triggering his awkwardness. Guys young and old are just paralyzed at the thought of letting their libido show in public these days, with the busybody feminazi foot soldiers always out on patrol.
#4 shows the sports fan's room that also would have been common back in the day. Yet, as with the little metal dude's room, where are the posters of cheerleaders, athlete babes, swimsuit models, and so on? They didn't always have to be the focus of the poster, of course, if you were worried that the "hot babe" poster would've made you look desperate. Just stick them in the background and put the main focus on the frat dog mascot:
Well, it looks like guys too have lost interest in interacting with the opposite sex. Unlike the girls' walls, though, which are meant to amplify her bitchiness or princess-iness, the guys' walls don't give off such an aloof or hostile vibe. They're more resigned vis-a-vis the birds and the bees, and are just biding their time until they become a doofus dad. In the meantime, they'll try to escape boredom by affiliating with guy teams of one form or another. Except for the video game addict and anime nut, who strike me as angry loner types.
The other day in the department building, somebody had left a copy of the new People magazine lying around, the one with Christie Brinkley on the cover. I took it to the office, wrote LUV ME in pen next to her (her vanity license plate from Vacation), and left it on the table in the main hallway that is ordinarily crusted over with boring brochures, forms, etc. The next day it had gone missing -- I hope because somebody found it funny, and not because the feminazis picked up the offense on their hidden security cameras.
I think that's the first steps we need to take to get out of this mess. Take a good cop / bad cop approach: some guys can put up not-so-offensive, yet still red-blooded babe posters, while others can draw obscene figures on public bathroom stalls, write BIG HAIRY PUSSY on the school bathroom's mirror, and so on. We don't have to cover every surface with girls, but even a little bit would go a long way toward making guys feel comfortable again about having a healthy sex drive. We need that after the witch hunters slandering the male libido as poisonous, polluting, harmful, violent, etc.
Irreverence is the best response to self-serious prudes.
"while others can draw obscene figures on public bathroom stalls, write BIG HAIRY PUSSY on the school bathroom's mirror, and so on."
ReplyDeletepersonally, i think this is too much. and I was always too self-conscious to put up posters of women.
It's the tail of a distribution, and you have to take that over-shoot with the healthy stuff. To eliminate the sexual graffiti in high school bathrooms, they had to move the whole bell curve of libido way over toward the Puritanical side.
ReplyDeleteEverything's a trade-off, and it comes down to which extreme do we want to see -- where the bathroom mirror has BIG HAIRY PUSSY written on it, or where you get expelled or fired for telling a sex joke in mixed company? We can't lop off both extremes at the same time.
Actually my cousins who are millennials had lots of posters of babes on their wall. However, they were from a small town and were very social. Meanwhile, I have noticed people born especially after 1989, are obsessed with pop-culture posters.
ReplyDeleteGood example is videos of internet reviewers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CA_YKOJy4I
Notice that all the posters are of recent movies. Also the guy is wearing a t-shirt of a tv show. Also he talking about candy, and not the actual social experience he had. Lastly, his weird self deprecating smugness. All pretty millennial signs to me. These millennial symptoms get worst for people born after 89. People born in the nineties tend to be hyper-millennials.
Nineties-born Millennials didn't get to experience the brief break from the cocooning trend during the mid-2000s. Not as adolescents anyway. It seems like the early Millennials must have suffered the most whiplash growing up -- first the helicopter parent trend that began in the late '80s for babies (but not older children), continuing into the '90s and early 2000s. Then everyone's coming out of their hiding places, the country is patriotic rather than sarcastic... we'd better change our intuition about what the world's going to be like! Then by 2009 or so, Uh-oh, everybody's going back to their hiding places, it's back to super-snarky sarcasm... damnit, let's switch our expectations back to what they were in the '90s.
ReplyDeleteMy cohort only had one episode of whiplash, not two. Right around '92-'93, the slow and steady reversal of what we'd expected from our childhood years in the '80s.
In fairness, I'd put those born in 1990 with late '80s births. Those were a lot of the students I was tutoring back then. I notice a big jump with those born in '92-'93, but I don't know enough who were born in '91 to say where they go.
It's kind of like the zeitgeist overall -- '90 and even '91 weren't so different from the late '80s, whereas '93 and after were a whole 'nother culture. I think infants are imprinting on the surrounding culture and social mood more than we realize. Perhaps even in the womb, the mother could be relaying signals about what the world's like through her changing stress / hormone levels.
You might be interested in the latest episode of the BBC show Top Gear, which airs here on BBC America. The episode tonight featured the hosts 'proving' that hatchbacks of the 1980s were better than the modern equivalents. The reason I think you might find it interesting is that they demonstrate that more carefree fun was had in the 1980s. Really, fits right in with your themes perfectly. (The hosts were born in the 1960s.)
ReplyDeleteI couldn't when living at home but, when I moved out, lotsa nakie chicks on the walls. Erica Rose Campbell my preferred option.
ReplyDeleteInteresting observations to be sure, but the overwhelming majority of people if polled would choose low crime rates over girly photos on the walls of adolescent boys.
ReplyDeleteGood old hatchbacks... unlike today's tugboats-on-wheels with a trunk so high up it blocks the rear window, all just to hold invisible cargo.
ReplyDelete"the overwhelming majority of people if polled would choose low crime rates over girly photos on the walls of adolescent boys."
Don't spazz out. Chicks on the walls was one piece of the interconnected whole of the '80s (and '70s and '60s). No contest against the limp-wristed, stultified culture of the 21st century.
Agnostic, the show featured how much fun used to be had in the cars. Some of it was pure hooliganism (smash and trash of stores) that may or may not have been played up by the show, but some of it was reminiscent of stuff my friends and I did in the same time frame, like doing a lap of a car. (Driving the car at some speed, put it in neutral, climb out the driver's side window, over the roof, into the passenger side window and then back into the driver's seat before the car came to a stop.) We didn't do that particular brand of idiocy, but we had our own. Other than drive-bys in bad neighborhoods, I don't know that many people do that kind of thing any more. Yeah, it was stupid and dangerous, but it was also fun and carefree.
ReplyDeleteThe episode also featured a nice soundtrack from the 1980s, and much mocking of current teenagers and social customs. (They mention that one used to be able to tell a female work colleague that she looked good, which is strictly verboten these days in GB as well as the USA.)
BTW, in my part of the country the preferred cars were muscle cars, and failing that any beater would do, but big old boats from the 1970s were still pretty common. They were good for cramming all your friends into them, though they were a bitch to push after the inevitable breakdown/failure-to-start - always on the other side of town, of course. Ah, the good old days!
Spicoli's room reminds me of college. I hung up a centerfold from Hustler on my door with the girl spreading wide. I lived in a co-ed fraternity house, none of the girls complained. Our house was toned down from most frat houses, since we did have some girls living in the house, but they knew what they were getting into.
ReplyDeleteI imagine porn magazines are quaint now, with all the porn on the internet.
When I first got to college, there was an actual porn theatre a few blocks from campus. I never went to it, but we had one brother in the house who went almost every week, and he was constantly mocked for his porn viewing habit.
Kids growing up in the 90's probably don't realize the porn situation in the 80s. For most of us in the 80's. When I started college in 1987 I had never seen a porno film,
but had seen copies of Penthouse and Hustler since my friends dad subscribed to them. We were 10 years old, and would sell them in school to the older kids for $5 each.
I imagine the typical freshman in college today has seen more porn than 99% of graduating seniors in 1989. This may be why sexy posters of girls are less popular today. in the eighties we would actually admire these posters, which today probably seem quaint to kids who have seen hours of hard core porn before starting college.
I don't think over-exposure is it. Young people had been over-exposed to girls in swimsuits, yet they still decorated their walls with them. Perhaps even the same girl in a swimsuit, like that Farrah Fawcett poster or whoever was in the SI swimsuit issue that year.
ReplyDeleteDitto for singers or actresses, like Alicia Silverstone (not even shown in a bikini).
And seeing porn is one thing, but putting up a babe on the wall or door is another. It's a public declaration, marking territory, setting the tone, or something.
while we did see girls in bathing suits often enough in the 80s, rarely were they as good looking as the posters of models. The main difference between the 80s, most boys had very little exposure to porn. The typical 18 year old today has probably watched 1,000 hours of porn before starting college. Thus the swimsuit models are not very stimulating. Putting poster of a hot model on your room today would be like posting Miss America from 1930 (when women still covered their legs, on your wall in the eighties.
ReplyDeletetypical porn magazines until the late eighties never had any depiction of actual sex, even Hustler. You would never see even a guy getting a BJ.
I was a typical guy in 1987 and had never seen any photographs of penetration. Seeing a copy of Hustler was the extant of most males exposure to porn in 1986. by the 90s, these magazines got raunchier and would show guys getting head.
in the 70s the vintage photo of Farrah Fawcett was actual jerk-off material, as was the Sears Catalog Undergarment section and National Geographic after your parents confiscated your playboy magazines. Porn in the 80s was less , less accessible and less accepted. Even if you did get a VHS copy of a porn film (they were about $80 in 1987, which translates to $150 today) the sex scenes were preceded by dialogue, story lines etc.. with just a few sex scenes which look more like todays amateur porn.
I can't imagine college kids since 1999 getting excited over seeing lingerie ads in their lifetime. Exposure to the hard core desensitizes one to the bikini model photos. I don't think the kids born after 1990 would even use Playboy as jerk-off material, let alone Sear Lingerie models.
What I mean is that you guys were over-exposed to the things you put on the wall. Not just real-life girls in swimsuits, but images of them. Ads, TV, movies (every movie back then having T&A), music videos, posters, magazine covers, etc. So something other than over-exposure is going on.
ReplyDeletebut you can't put up hard-core porn on your walls, people would complain and you might get kicked out of the dorm. it will probably not be socially acceptable in our lifetime.
ReplyDeletetrue, we were exposed to more girls in swimsuits, but girls in swimsuits today can't possibly compete with naked girls having anal sex, which the typical male can see with the click of a mouse. The exposure of massive quantities of hard core has made swimsuit models appear dull, while swimsuit models were seen more often in the eighties few college kids were exposed to much porn , so the swimsuit models still had more appeal.
another factor has been the feminization of the college campus. Students are too afraid to appear sexists, which actually started in the late 80s.
what is most shocking to me is that college kids would put up posters of the Beatles, a band who had their heyday 50 years ago. Cannot imagine someone in the 80s having posters of Chuck berry, or Buddy Holly in the 90s, or having posters of the Kingston Trio in the 80s.
It's definitely the culture. In the two years that I was subscribed Entertainment Weekly had only a couple of full-page babe photos (Kristen Stewart and Natalie Portman) but hundreds of images of muscled dudes, posing beefcakes and assorted wienerschnitzzles.
ReplyDeleteGiant key in room 2 is from Kingdom Hearts...
ReplyDeleteI don't know who the heck Agnostic is, but I like his blog. He should take another look at Sam Witwicky's bedroom. For all the hate they get from P.C. critics, the Transformers movies symbolize one of the last mainstream bastions of male libido in our pop culture.
ReplyDelete"For all the hate they get from P.C. critics, the Transformers movies symbolize one of the last mainstream bastions of male libido in our pop culture."
ReplyDeleteMicheal Bay makes awful, awful movies. That being said, he's one of the few post '90 directors who can get away with not sugar coating how much contempt Hollywood has for women. Any industry dominated by Jews is going to be misogynistic. Semitic males have serious woman issues.
Now that we're in a PC/careerist era where a lot of people make hay by leveling accusations of sexism, Hollywood has put more of a PC "strong woman" slant on things since the 90's. Don't be fooled, the Jews, gays, and strivers of the industry mostly see women (especially young ones) as commodities to be chewed up and spit out.
Isn't it amazing how conduct that disgusts the silent majority (e.g. gentile whites of West Euro descent) somehow becomes the norm in Jew controlled industries (Like the entertainment biz and Wall Street)?
Steve Sailer's done some good stuff regarding how so many Ashkenazi movements (Psychoanalysis and feminism among other things) are an incoherent and vindictive expression of how deeply insecure and bitter Ashkenazi Jews are. Gentile Euros find feminism to be unnecessary and bizarre, not realizing that it's a product of unstable Jewish women who are treated like doormats by ugly, boorish, and vain Jewish men.
A culture that prizes devotion to studying numbers and verbal jujitsu (as opposed to refined personal dignity and heroism) is going to produce people who are deeply and perpetually unsettled. And who lack the restraint and taste to deal with hard feelings in a responsible way. Why do you suppose Jews tend to cluster in rootless areas (where residents are less likely to mind the store) until the natives finally get tired of their subversion and throw them out?