Valentine's Day rituals

Here is a comment thread in a "senior citizens" section, where people tell what Valentine's Day was like when they were growing up in school. Looks like the tradition of bringing a special box to collect the cards in dates at least back to the 1940s, probably earlier.

Like our other rituals, Valentine's Day seems to be slowly fading out. For example:

An elementary school in Eugene, Oregon bans Valentine's Day altogether.

High schools in Orange County, Florida ban exchanging gifts on Valentine's Day.

Primary school in England bans giving out Valentine cards.

Horace Mann School near Boston bans Valentine candy.

Elementary school in Mass. bans Valentine's Day and replaces it with Friendship Week.

Obviously an outright ban is just the tip of the iceberg -- more schools must show signs of erosion, they're just not so far gone that they've resulted to a ban. Here is a short thread among 5th grade teachers. One who taught younger kids  implies that she didn't do the Valentine's Day traditions with her lower-grade kids. The other teachers say that about 3/4 of their 5th grade kids participate.

I seem to remember doing the Valentine's Day thing just about every year in elementary school, not just 5th grade. And I think just about 100% of kids took part. Anti-social kids must not mind standing out from the majority these days -- I wonder if they offer some cynical sour grapes rationalization about how it's just a Hallmark holiday, etc.

The candy bans are part of the health food trend. The majority of the bans, though, are based on felt violations of fairness -- any time you produce and distribute a lot of stuff to lots of people, some will end up with more than others. And it won't be random, but will reinforce existing hierarchies, like who's pretty and popular vs. ugly and awkward.

So obviously we must get rid of those traditions to prepare children for a real world where there are no lop-sided distributions, and where people never prefer giving things to some individuals rather than others. Rather than remind them that "life isn't always fair". Shoot, I heard that all the time. And "well that's just tough," i.e. "tough luck".

I doubt the children of helicopter parents (like my nephew) have ever heard those responses -- they're not rational or logical principles that the child can apply to other contexts. They're just a reminder that out in the real world, they aren't always going to get explanations -- "I dunno why I don't wanna be your friend, you're just annoying." Well, like annoying how? "I dunno, you're just annoying. Now go away."

To end on an up note, here's "Everlasting Love" by Howard Jones.  I don't think they make many songs anymore about settling down after having been around the block a few times. Let alone in such an optimistic upbeat way, not in a tone of feeling sorry for yourself or taking your Plans For Settling Down so seriously, like it's a homework project. Anyway, it's got jungle drums, the Egyptian revival, racquetball, dining out instead of eating in -- so much '80s goodness in a single video.

Neuroses about feminine hygiene: The present (pubic hair removal)

A further case of the similarly unwholesome climates of the mid-century and our Millennial age is an unhealthy obsession with feminine hygiene and a compulsive set of rituals to try to relieve their anxiety, only to worsen their self-doubt and, in all likelihood, to worsen whatever minor problems they might have had. Radically altering the ecology down there is likely to wipe out the good flora and leave only the bad guys left.

There is a parallel unwholesomeness among males, who begin to feel ever greater disgust toward female sexuality, beyond basic taboo feelings and warping their minds back into a pre-adolescent reflex of "ewwww, you put your thing-y in her what-y?!?!?!" The closest case outside of developed societies is the pervasive fear and disgust of female sexuality found among tropical gardening cultures (horticulturalists), such as those found in the Amazon, New Guinea, and much of black Africa.

I've split this topic up into two posts, the next one covering the douching craze of the mid-century. This one will cover the past 20 years.

Well, I finally figured out what the whole removal of hair down there trend is all about -- the re-emergence in our society of extreme OCD thoughts and behaviors about hygiene. Us dudes have tried to figure it out for awhile, batting ideas around without simply asking the girls themselves. You can't do so in real life, but the internet has recorded plenty of frank discussion from girls who wax or shave it off.

I won't provide links because they're all over the place, though Yahoo! Answers and comment threads at various chick-only sites (e.g. Cosmopolitan) were pretty helpful. This article from the Atlantic is the best single source, including an estimate of just how common it is -- 60% of 18-24 year-old females are bare sometimes or always (higher for college students).

Whether offering a reason spontaneously or when asked directly, the hair-removers over and over use words related to hygiene and disgust. Hygienic, gross, clean, fresh, eww, disgusting, sick, icky, nasty, etc. Occasionally they mention a better feel or smell when they're sweaty after a work-out, again a hygiene theme. Sometimes they mention personal comfort. And they only rarely give reasons about oral sex or intercourse feeling better, their appearance looking prettier or sexier, or some other sex-related reason.

In sum, it is rarely out of concern for someone else, like looking prettier for the boys. All of their other style choices point the other way -- not wearing visible make-up, not adding volume or waviness to their hair, not wearing jewelry, not smiling, and so on. They are trying not to invite boys over to chat them up, which would creep them out.

An ongoing fixation about, and ritualistic maintenance of personal hygiene smells like OCD, and indeed the hair-removers often emphasize how inflexible they are. It's not like your favorite color being red, where sometimes you'll wear other colors without feeling disgusted. Rather, these girls use phrases like, "I can't stand it", "it makes me feel ill", or "Having hair down there is kind of annoying to me and I'm a huge neat freak."

For their part, the guys who chime in to these discussions tend to offer the same hygiene and disgust-based reasons. So, even to the small extent that girls are catering to male demand, that too is heavily influenced by hygiene/disgust. However, because it is on the internet, there are a lot of desperate nerds ejaculating praise about how much better it feels to hoover a waxed floor than a shag carpet. Note to dorks: shouting enthusiasm for muff-diving will not help you lose your virginity.

Pubic hair removal is a phenomenon of the past 20 years only (see here, and an academic reference in the Atlantic article). And sure enough, that's when we've seen people grow more obsessive and compulsive about hygiene, most clearly visible in the rapid adoption of hand sanitizers and antibacterial everything. Back in the '80s, it was common to walk around outside with no shoes or socks on, weather permitting, but that feels so dangerously unclean to the OCD masses of the 21st century.

Was there an earlier era of widespread OCD and an unwholesome anxiety about feminine hygiene? Well, definitely not the '70s, and not much of the '60s either -- somewhat in the earlier part, but fading out even then. As usual, we've got to go back to the mid-century to find our closest parallels. And it's even weirder than the current mania for lawn-mowing.

The unwholesome mid-century: A wave of dependency on tranquilizers, barbiturates, and amphetamines

He's the one they call Dr. Feelgood
He's the one that makes you feel all right
He's the one they call Dr. Feelgood
He's gonna be your Frankenstein

The lyrics and music video for Motley Crue's song about "Dr. Feelgood" sum up the popular view of the drug culture by the late 1980s. Drugs came from the street, and were distributed by local and entrepreneurial pushers, with no advertising and no appeal to authority. They were risky, dangerous, and unnatural substances (hence the reference to Dr. Frankenstein), and therefore only reckless long-haired badasses like Crue fans would be into the scene for the long, or not-so-long, term. The post-apocalyptic imagery and way-out-in-the-desert setting tells you that this way of life was another world apart from the white-picket-fence suburbs where the majority lived out wholesome lives.

That could not be farther away from the zeitgeist of the mid-20th century, when physician to the stars Max Jacobson, also nicknamed "Dr. Feelgood", acted as an amphetamine supplier to such luminaries as Tennessee Williams, Mickey Mantle, Nelson Rockefeller, and John F. Kennedy.

From roughly the mid-'30s through the late '50s, the popular view was that drugs came from all-American manufacturers, and were distributed by benevolent doctors not known for rocking the boat. Aside from the appeal to the "physician knows best" principle, they came stamped with the approval of the federal government, and were widely advertised in the popular media. And ad men would never try to sell you something that was bad for you but profitable for their clients, now would they? After all, these drugs were the result of invention and fine-tuned engineering by research scientists, not some kind of "eye of newt" nostrum that an old-fashioned witch doctor would try to fob off on you.

So, aside from the odd side-effect, they were basically safe to start taking, regardless of whether or not you thought you were such a head-case that you required "medicine". Why, even -- or especially -- the middle-class majority, both the frazzled housewife and her upward-striving husband, could benefit from a daily dose of whatever could energize the listless and steady the nerves of the anxious. Far from being adulterating substances that might threaten personal and societal ruin, regular drug use heralded an age of progress toward a "choose your mood society," as Fortune magazine styled it in 1957.

It doesn't get more unwholesome than that. Not only is the dream of widespread, rather than sub-cultural drug use, but the attitude toward potential danger is glib and dismissive. As JFK himself said about Dr. Feelgood's amphetamine cocktail: "I don't care if it's horse piss. It works." People are trying to squeeze out the highs and lows of life, as though they'd surgically altered their vocal apparatus to only speak in a flat tone, rather than to occasionally introduce even more emotional variety into their experiences. Drug use is hoped to be a staple of their daily habits -- not the occasional up-ending of routine in a cathartic release, returning afterward to normal life. Worst of all, stabilizing drugs aren't safer: they are addictive, can lead to overdose, and can have harmful side-effects and/or withdrawal pains after discontinued use.

We could sum up the differences between the two drug cultures as "stabilizing" and "destabilizing". The former breeds complacency and thus widespread adoption, while the latter instills a sense of wariness and thus restricts hardcore users to the most reckless part of the population. Because they're more sensational, destabilizing drugs get more charged coverage at the time and after their day has passed. It's the more common culture of stabilizing drugs that goes unseen by most at the time and to observers in the future.

Was the mid-century zeitgeist merely a trend in attitude but not in behavior? No: changes in the popular mood mirrored the popularity of mood-changers. My goal here is not to establish that on a factual level, since it has been done in great detail by historians.

The best all-encompassing account is Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac by David Herzberg. For the mid-century, he focuses on the craze for minor tranquilizers like Miltown and Valium, used as anti-anxiety drugs. First adopted enthusiastically in the second half of the '50s, they came under suspicion during the '60s, from the regulatory agencies of the federal government, to patients at the grassroots level, and pop culture stars like the Rolling Stones, whose 1966 hit "Mother's Little Helper" blasted mid-century hypocrisy about drug use. The growth rate in the number of prescriptions written had already slowed during the first half of the '60s, hit a plateau in the early-mid-'70s, and have never regained their popularity since.

Two article-length accounts, here and here, cover the other major drug types: "America's First Amphetamine Epidemic 1929--1971" by Rasmussen, and "The history of barbiturates a century after their clinical introduction" by Lopez-Munoz et al. The graphics include ads as well as data charts, and are worth a look themselves.

Amphetamines AKA "speed" appear to have been the drug of choice during the mid-century mania, more prevalent than tranquilizers, and perhaps more than barbiturates, although I can't tell from the data available. And they were also used in amphetamine-barbiturate combinations. In any case, people started adopting amphetamines during the mid-to-late 1930s, and they enjoyed their guilt-free peak during the '50s, only to come under suspicion during the '60s and begin declining during the '70s and '80s. In 1962, enough amphetamines were being produced to give every American 43 standard 10-mg doses per year, or about one hit every 8.5 days -- again, not for actual users, but as though everyone were getting high that often.

Barbiturates are hypnotics (sleep-inducing) or sedatives, and were meant to mellow out the symptoms of anxiety. Their heyday was the '30s and '40s, and still did well into the '50s, not suffering from a tarnished reputation, just being edged out a bit by the introduction of tranquilizers like Miltown. Only during the '60s did they come under suspicion and decline, never to return to their peak popularity. Dark fun fact for the day -- barbiturates were what Marilyn Monroe turned to when she committed suicide in 1962.

Despite their declining reputation starting in the '60s, and their declining usage during the '70s and '80s, both prescription uppers and downers have come back into fashion since the 1990s, in the form of amphetamine-like or amphetamine-containing drugs (Ritalin, Adderall, etc.) and SSRIs (Prozac, Zoloft, etc.), respectively. And yet before their surge during the mid-century, approved-of and sanctioned uppers and downers were on the decline, from roughly the turn of the century through the end of the Jazz Age in the early '30s.

That period itself was a reversal of the Victorian craze for ham-fisted drug solutions to the normal demands of real life, which saw the heyday of the "patent medicine" AKA snake oil. Patent medicines only came under suspicion and regulation during the early 1900s, as part of the muckraking and Progressive era -- the pre-cursor to the muckraking and Progressive era of the 1960s.

What ties together all of the periods of rising enthusiasm for "cosmetic pharmacology" is a falling crime rate, and all periods of rising wariness of everyday mood-changers is a rising crime rate. I explored some of the connections between those variables in a post about cocooning and mental dysfunction, and in a post on the cycles in advertising that brought us campaigns for snake oil, Geritol, and Enzyte across three separate falling-crime periods.

That may strike us as surprising when we recall the heady atmosphere of seemingly widespread drug use during the Jazz Age (opiates) and the New Wave Age (just about everything, but especially pot). However, those were sub-cultures, with the more hardcore ones being almost underground. They were not blithely adopted by mainstream middle-class suburbanites, who instead came to appreciate how destructive casual drug use could be. And even among users, the goal was not to squeeze out all the variety of life, but indeed to introduce more excitement, and in a social rather than isolated setting.

All of these aspects point to a more wholesome culture during rising-crime times, when destabilizing drugs are popular, and to a more unwholesome one in falling-crime times, when stabilizing drugs rule the day. Apart from the crime rate itself, life is overall more fulfilling when we're put to manageable challenges that we must work through with one another.

Cocooning's web of mental dysfunction

Human beings are social creatures, so cocooning will warp their nature. Rather than explore every possible dysfunction that might stem from social isolation, I thought I'd take a look at how a handful of them are inter-related.

These thoughts began to cohere after looking more deeply into the culture of the mid-20th century, roughly the mid-1930s through the late '50s, although leaking into part of the '60s as well, since the shift away from the mid-century during the '60s was not instantaneous. It's uncanny how similar that zeitgeist was to today's, as well as to the Victorian era, although I'm not as familiar with that period.

What these periods all share is a falling crime rate, which goes along with a tendency toward cocooning. Indeed, it follows shortly after cocooning begins -- fewer people out-and-about means slim pickin's for predatory criminals, and even heat-of-the-moment crimes won't happen as often when, for example, fewer young males hang out in bars.

The psychological impulse toward cocooning comes from having a lowered view of other people -- who needs 'em? Either they're inferior and can't do anything for you, or they're liable to exploit you if you let down your guard. In the helpful framework of Attachment Theory, we'd say that people first become more avoidant emotionally. That then leads on a behavioral level to fewer and shallower social connections being maintained.

Now for the web. First, cocooners develop a higher free-floating level of anxiety because, deep down, they still sense that social isolation makes them ultimately more vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. They don't confide in others, or allow others to confide in them, so they may feel like they're the only one -- or not? -- they can't tell, and that uncertainty about where they stand relative to others only compounds their anxiety.

In fact, that point generalizes: lacking the feedback that comes from lots of social interaction, they don't know how they measure up on all sorts of dimensions, not just nervousness. Are they funny? Are they charming? How can they know without interacting and judging the results of how others respond? They don't exactly feel worthless -- that is, having a keen sense that others do definitely have a low view of them. It's more like a pervasive self-doubting.

The mid-century was the "Age of Anxiety," and the Victorian era popularized the notion of "nervous illness" and "neurasthenia". We don't have a handy name for what we've been suffering from over the past 20 years, but we could just as well call it the Age of Anxiety v.2.0, or perhaps the Prozac Years. During more outgoing times like the Romantic-Gothic period before the Victorians, the Jazz Age before the mid-century, and the New Wave Age before the current period, it's hard to find people who have a generalized and gnawing self-doubt, unsure of who they are across most dimensions of human identity.

In the psychological literature, it's known that self-doubt is associated with obsessive-compulsive thinking and behavior. The obsessions stem directly from the self-doubt because the cocooner feels uncomfortable accepting feedback from others. It all comes down to their own individual appraisal -- does my hair look OK like this or like this or maybe like this, are these carpets really clean enough, am I putting in enough time at the office to get that promotion, does this essay have enough examples to hand in and at least get a B?

The compulsions follow as a way to relieve the stress of obsessing so much about so much of life. Let me just put these hairs over here or maybe there or maybe there, let's just vacuum the room one more time just to be sure, what's another 30 minutes after hours anyway, let me add this example to make the point, no I mean this one, or how about this one, and why not that one too.

Have you been in a college computer lab lately? It's amazing how long they fuss over a simple 2-page paper, forever deleting and re-writing, and pausing for long stretches to beat themselves over the head about whether their examples are good enough. And of course it still comes out sounding however it would've sounded if they'd only taken 30 minutes instead of 3 hours. They're simply too OCD to get shit done.

The rise of OCD over the past 20 years, nowhere more visible than in the game of beer pong and other rigidly defined drinking games, had its parallels in the mid-century with housewives running nervously on their domestic treadmill, and the husband running nervously on the promotion treadmill. Not in the sense of actually going nowhere, but in the sense of wasting too much time on tasks because of obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions and counter-actions, second-guessing themselves for hours instead of just going to it.

The Victorian era had its epidemic of OCD as well, referred to then as "pathological doubt". (Modern sources attribute the phrase "doubting sickness" to the Victorians, but Google's digitized library doesn't show that phrase appearing anywhere.)

Because their compulsions don't ever solve their obsessive problems, cocooners turn to what they hope are mind-altering substances that will root out their anxiety directly. The Victorian era was the heyday for "patent medicines" AKA snake oil, the mid-century for prescription barbiturates, amphetamines, and anti-anxiety drugs, and the current period for prescription anti-depressants. Unlike recreational drugs, these are taken regularly to treat what they feel is a chronic illness, not to every now and then transport their ordinary mind into an extraordinary state.

The data are so rich on this topic that I'll have to come back to it in a separate post, but in brief, cocooners always begin a movement toward popping "happy pills" rather than relieve tension by socializing and realizing from others' reactions to your over-blown fears that your world isn't about to implode after all.

Finally, there's a kind of narcissism that pervades the culture. Not the kind that borders on sociopathy, more like being smug and self-satisfied, and acting in a glib and sassy way towards others. Self-satisfaction would seem to contradict the self-doubt, but it's the direct result of it -- with no feedback from others about where you stand on all those dimensions, you fill it in yourself or listen to what your nuclear family members say, all of which is biased toward inflating your ego.

You're aware that your view of yourself doesn't come from others' evaluations, but from what you've decided you are, and that feels nakedly self-promoting. When you do occasionally sense what others feel about you, and that it clashes with your own view, you dismiss them out of hand as clueless.

In an earlier post on attenion-whoring vs. being popular, I provided long quotes from contemporary observers of both the Victorian and mid-century periods, to the effect that women of the day, especially younger women, were attention-whoring and coarse, glib, and dismissive toward others. All I can say is -- they were there, and we weren't. They might have been called airheaded, but nobody said that the valley girls of the New Wave Age were contemptuous of all other people -- rather, that they wanted desperately to fit in with a group of their peers, and that their minds were too wrapped up in trying to be pleasing toward boys.

Most of us try to think about the mid-century through TV shows like Leave It To Beaver, but TV was only around in the '50s. Radio was much bigger, but most of us including me have little idea what was on it. Sometime I'll get around to doing a content analysis of the popular shows. Still, all of us should have some familiarity with the movies of the mid-30s through the late '50s. And several stock phrases spring to mind to describe a good number of the women -- fast-talking dames, sassy broads, and wise-cracking femme fatales. That type of woman was ever-present in both light movies like the screwball comedy, as well as the darker movies like film noir thrillers.

And they all had a knack for that smirky-smuggy sassy-face that should look familiar to residents of the Millennial age:

There could be other features that tie in with the rest of the web, but these are the ones that stand out the most as being different from other time periods, and that reinforce one another -- avoidant attachment style, cocooning, self-doubting anxiety, OCD, addiction to happy pills, and glib sassiness.

What songs still get a reaction from sports audiences?

The Announcer's Blog has a handy list of songs (in the right-hand column) for use in various situations during a sports game -- win, loss, rain delay, seasonal theme, etc. They've been at it for awhile, and hail from different parts of the country, so it's withstood some kind of test, not just a list that sounds good on paper.

No surprise that there are so many '80s songs given. It's more striking, though, that they appear in every category, whereas newer or older songs do well in some areas but aren't up to the task in others.

For example, their list of long game songs that are meant to "get a rise from the crowd and a smile on some dreary faces" has one song from 1957, one from 2000, and a dozen spanning the '60s through the '80s. The most pick-you-up-when-you're-down song of them all has to be "Rhythm of the Night" by DeBarge. They should make one of those bot-detector programs that plays this song and tests whether you push replay when it's over. A normal human being still capable of feeling joy can't help it, while the growing autistic majority will shut it off before it finishes the first time. This is only a test...



Most of the post-game win songs are from the good old days, not counting the boastful "All I Do Is Win" by DJ Khaled or the not very useful "My Hero" by Foo Fighters. Winning is supposed to be a team thing, and everyone's so fragmented these days to get a crowd unified; we're right back to the mid-century zeitgeist. "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" may be a bit too romantic for a sports context, although maybe female players would appreciate hearing it. And "Celebration" from the last days of disco is a bit too light for a triumph. The best would seem to be "Flashdance... What a Feeling" -- nice underdog beginning, gradual build-up, then celebratory release.

For the championship game, they've nailed it with "You're the Best Around", which plays during the final match in The Karate Kid, along with "We Are the Champions" for when the winners are honored afterward. Speaking of Queen, I haven't been to a stadium in forever -- during the game, do fans still do the stomp-stomp-clap to the beat of "We Will Rock You"? Or did that die out with the chanting of "U-S-A! U-S-A!"

Post-game loss songs are another strong suit of the '80s, when the soaring crime rate brought resiliency to its peak. The more recent ones sound whiny and sour-grapesy, like "When It's Over" by Sugar Ray. If it were some time after the end, I could see playing "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" or "C'est La Vie", which are great for the moving-on-with-life stage after a big loss. The Tom Petty songs "Don't Do Me Like That" and "You Got Lucky" are a little too bratty in this context. In the immediate aftermath, you need to acknowledge rather than dismiss or suppress that drop of testosterone following your team's loss. Something down, yet subdued and sincere, "we're all in the same boat" kind of messages. "Human" by the Human League sounds like the best choice. They didn't list "The Way It Is" by Bruce Hornsby and the Range -- that sounds OK to me on paper, but it could sound too defeatist in context.

There are plenty of newer songs on the "America" theme list, although I doubt they kick as much ass as "Living in America" by James Brown, from the Rocky IV soundtrack. What's really fallen off a cliff are songs that highlight several regions specifically, not just an overall American theme, nor boasting about why your state is better than everyone else's. That's a sign of regional fragmentation. "California Girls" (the Beach Boys or the David Lee Roth version), "Dancing in the Street" (the original or the Jagger / Bowie cover), and "The Heart of Rock & Roll" are the only ones that run a tour across the whole country. One of the songs from Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet album has a fade-out that calls out a bunch of places -- Detroit, southern New Jersey -- but I can't remember which one, and lyrics websites don't say either. There's also no more songs about red states, the last major one being "If You're Gonna Play in Texas" by Alabama, another triumph from that peak year in music, 1984.

People in the good old days were more in touch with nature, too, and knew how to go along with it. Either of the two Creedence songs about rain would do, but I'd actually go with "No Rain" by Blind Melon to pick the audience up when they might get cranky. "You Shook Me All Night Long" is the obvious balls-to-the-walls choice for after an earthquake, and "Walking on Sunshine" is the must-play for a bright daytime game.

Anyway, have a look around their lists. Some would be self-conscious and corny, but they look pretty good overall. It's also a good exercise to show how the '80s had a tune for every mood.

When did the Super Bowl become about everything but the game?

After reviewing the ads from Super Bowl '85, it struck me how subdued they were, compared to a random sample of '80s commercials. It's as though they were trying to not take you out of the game itself. Today the relationship between ad and program has become inverted: everybody is on the edge of their seat for the commercials, and annoyance sets in when that stupid game interrupts them yet again.

When did this shift in focus occur? Here is a graph showing how common the phrase "Super Bowl ads" has been across time among the books in Google's digitized library. The graph looks the same when similar phrases are used ("commercials" or "advertisements" instead of "ads", and "ads / etc. during the Super Bowl" instead of "Super Bowl ads"). "Super Bowl ads" is the most common way that the topic shows up, though.

They start attracting attention in the early-to-mid-'90s and have taken off since then. I searched the New York Times for these phrases to see what they were saying about them. The occasional mention that they received pre-'90s was to emphasize how expensive they were, not that they were an entertainment draw in themselves. Only in the '90s and after did they start talking about their content.

In an earlier post on Super Bowl national anthem performances, I reviewed how they changed from normal to exaggerated. The turning point seems to have been 1991, when Whitney Houston pre-recorded an over-the-top rendition, and it only got more diva-like after that. By now there is so much warbling around the melodic line ("melisma"), or such a slow, drawn-out tempo (it should take a little over a minute, not two and a half), that the song gets lost. Because it has become a showcase of uniqueness, the players and the audience in the stadium and at home cannot possibly sing along. It is no longer sung to bind the listeners together and get them pumped up, but to serve as an entertainment spectacle in itself.

Finally, there is the halftime show. In the good old days, the performers were not current stars (or even old stars, most of the time), and they were not there to promote themselves. Rather, it was usually a marching band, in keeping with football tradition. And there was an over-arching theme that celebrated something outside of and larger than the performers -- a salute to the Big Band era, Mardi Gras, etc.

Looking over the list of Super Bowl halftime shows, there are two shifts away from tradition. The first is the replacement of marching bands, or the odd oldies star, by current mega-sellers. That began in 1991, when New Kids on the Block took center stage. Then there was the removal of larger themes from the set list, and making it all about the performers themselves, which began in 2005.

Here's a graph showing how common the phrase "Super Bowl halftime" has been (adding "show" gives the same result):

There are isolated years where it was talked about in the earlier history, but it's not until 1989 that it receives regular discussion.

Putting all of these changes together, it looks like the early-mid-'90s saw the decisive break away from the Super Bowl as national sports ritual to the Super Bowl as insipid pop culture overload. No wonder the last one I remember was Super Bowl '90 (after that the names of the star players are only vaguely familiar). It became impossible to stay locked in to the game itself, and I'm not enough of a football fan to suffer through all the junk just to see who wins.

This is worth keeping in mind when you hear about viewership records -- those viewers are not talking about the game the day after, but girls talking about how fierce Beyonce looked, and guys talking about which commercials were dumber than which others.

Consciously articulated parenting strategies stunt your kid's growth

Those 1983 issues of Parents magazine may have been a pleasant trip down memory lane, but I can't say the same for the 1989 issues that I just looked through. Something clearly went wrong starting with the Millennials, but did it begin in elementary school or even earlier? It looks like helicopter parenting began sometime in the late '80s, although only for very young children, like toddlers or younger. That would explain the birth years that did and did not lead to Millennial traits (I'd include '85 and '86 births, but definitely from '87 onward).

Many things leap out as different between the two years -- most strikingly, the obsession with safety in '89 that gets cursory treatment in '83. But they're all the kind of things you would expect from helicopter parents, and not worth discussing in detail.

However, one major shift that I didn't anticipate really sheds light on how easy it is to mess your kids up socially and emotionally. The '83 issues have almost no bullet-point lists of Do's and Don'ts -- bulleted lists are rare overall, and when they do occur, they're more like hints, suggestions, guidelines, etc., to try out and judge for yourself in your own sticky situation. By '89, they're more common, more specific, and more mandatory about Do this / Don't do that.

So, parents of infants and toddlers in '83 were flying more on intuition, while their counterparts in '89 were rationally formulating explicit check-lists or blueprints.

How did that affect their kids once they got out into the real world? Well, your kid's peers, no matter what stage they're in, are not consciously forming check-lists of Do this / Don't do that when interacting with your kid. They're going purely by intuition -- smile if your kid makes a genuinely funny joke, shove him down if he's acting like a selfish brat.

Maybe the kid's teachers will have a Do this / Don't do that approach, but more or less everyone he meets out in the real world will be reacting from intuition. To prepare him the best for adapting to real life, then, you should give him plenty of experience early on with interactions that are intuitive rather than having clear rules (even if they're unspoken to the child). I mean, that's how every parent in the world ever raised their kid before Dr. Spock and Dr. Phil, and somehow homo sapiens has avoided mass extinction.

Instead, if you have precise rules for interacting with your kid (unspoken or not), once he goes out into the real world, he'll take an almost OCD approach to interacting with his peers. Wait a minute -- you didn't explain why you do or do not want to be my friend ("I dunno, just cuz I don't like you"). Wait a minute -- you followed one rule in a situation, and then a different rule in that same situation -- you're being logically inconsistent! ("Yeah well I changed my mind, life isn't fair.")

By only giving him practice with rigidly consistent rules of interaction, the fuzzy and up-for-grabs nature of real socializing will throw him for a loop. He will be so inflexible and irritated that no one will want to be his close friend, i.e. someone they'd trust deep down, not just play Modern Warfare with online.

So in fact, you should not strive for consistency in rewarding, punishing, or interacting otherwise with your kids -- his peers sure won't be, and he has to get familiar and even comfortable with that early on so he can hit the social ground running. Again, caveman parents didn't strive for consistency in parenting, yet somehow we're still here and indeed have taken over more of the globe than they could have dreamed of.

Spastic parents will try to frame this as supporting total unpredictability and chaos, but nobody is retarded enough to act that way. Going on intuition does not lead to unpredictability or chaos -- just a fuzzy spectrum of responses to your kid's behavior, a distribution with variance (like a bell curve), rather than a perfectly predictable single response.

The manageable stress of not knowing precisely how the parent will respond causes the kid to develop social and emotional skills that can at least anticipate the probable range of responses, giving up the fool's game of guessing exactly how someone will respond, and to grow thick skin. Otherwise they wind up thin-skinned and autistic.

Of course, the helicopter parents' goal of shielding their kids from all outside "influences" (i.e. relationships) will postpone the rude awakening. But eventually they're going to have to interact with real-life people, not their biased and coddling parents, and will crack from having grown up so weakened socially and emotionally. And by that point it'll be too late to correct. Kids get their picture of what the world's going to be like from toddler age or so up through adolescence, and then it's set. They don't learn other languages after that point, and they don't form radically different schemas about how interactions take place.

Indeed that's why it's so infuriating to try to interact with them sometimes -- someone from Gen Y or earlier can't just wave a magic wand and psychologically adjust to the new world of autistic youngsters. We're stuck in our non-weirdo social expectations. It'll be a miracle if workplace interactions survive a generation gap this wide. And forget about inter-generational togetherness outside the workplace, where things would have to be more voluntary.

But, not to worry too much, since it's just one generation that's messed up. Parenting styles akin to engineering pass in and out of "fashion" over the decades, so some new generation will come around and be more like the Boomers, who are easier for most people to interact with, especially the later ones. Just keep your radar on and you'll know it when they're here. Until then, I think we have to write off most Millennials as lost causes for anything requiring social-emotional competence (let alone excellence), trust, behavioral flexibility, and so on.

Live-blogging the commercials from Super Bowl '85

Advertising in all forms has not only become boring but downright aggravating over the past 20 years. Even when it's not all in-your-face, "you only wish you were as extreme as us," it's so detached and snarky that you just want to reach through the TV or magazine and choke the life out of those smug dorky faces.

As an antidote, I thought I'd intersperse the usual posts here with some videos from the "80sCommercialVault" channel on YouTube. Mostly it's just to provide some relief from the irony, over-the-top-ness, and gloppy earnestness of today's world.

But I'll also scribble some notes for each commercial to highlight the differences from today, just for the record, and to provide a catalog of '80s design themes and motifs. Like for instance, why aren't there dark backgrounds anymore? -- that dark/light contrast looked pretty neat. And back in the '80s it was common to combine the primitive with the futuristic, neither of which you see much of today, let alone in striking juxtaposition. Like, when was the last time you saw neon signage across from an indoor jungle or oasis at the mall?

Lots of little and not-so-little details like that really gave the '80s a footloose, playful, shape-of-things-to-come kind of vibe -- the choice of a new generation.

To start, let's have a look at vol. 79 of the commercial vault, which shows ads from Super Bowl XIX in 1985. My, how our culture has decayed. But let's focus on what was good, not what's bad, and get on with it.



1. KFYI 1310 AM
On-the-go lifestyle, dark-light contrasts, a grid pattern on the coffee cup (the grid was everywhere in the '80s -- it was the future).

2. Eastern Airlines
Customers wanted to breathe free while walking around buildings, not have to focus on navigating an obstacle course of kiosks, island displays, sales bins, etc.

3. Chrysler
Nice inoffensive jingle, an '80s background sax.

4. Hormel Chili
Hint of the expressionist revival with a dark inside and smoky light coming from outside, shadowy figures.

5. Buick
A Super Bowl ad that isn't bombastic...

6. Parents United PSA
People who get tired of hearing me use the phrase "rising-crime times" forget how the threat of predation formed the background to the zeitgeist, including sex abuse of kids. Children are worth celebrating because you never know if something bad might happen and rob you of that chance. You didn't need to hear that message constantly, just often enough to remind you. It's like the "negative visualization" that the Stoics used to appreciate what they had, only in the '80s it was natural rather than artificial.

7. United
See, that background made parents not take their kids or families (husbands) for granted, and value them more. Remember how when you got off the plane, the people waiting outside were family members eager to see you, and not uppity passengers on the next flight waiting for you guys to GTFO already? Dark-light contrasts.

8. Promo for "Police Story"
Do they make these short-and-sweet promos anymore? Or are even bumpers extended out to Lord of the Rings length?

9. Okidata
A grid, a broken / fallen pillar, bright light entering a dark room, a printer that looks alive with moving parts, though still using paper. Futuristic-primitive.

10. Almost Home Cookies
Bright smokey light entering a dark room. Even a dull ad could be saved by a catchy jingle at the end -- Na-biiis-co *ting!*

11. Diet Coke
Another dull one saved by a memorable catchy slogan -- "Just for the taste". They made a catchier jingle later, "Just for the taste of it ... Diet Coke!"

12. Promo for "Inauguration '85" presented by ABC News
Real old-timey colonial fifes (or whatever) playing in the background. Simple enough: going forward while being rooted in the past.

13. IBM Assistant Series
Too retro-looking for a computer company in the computer age. Needs a white grid in the background and a neon logo.

14. Goodyear Vector
Dark-light contrasts. Tires were hyped up for their performance qualities, not as part of a tell-the-world-your-lifestyle statement.

15. Classic Lite
The return of Jazz Age glamour. Sadly the whole low-cal, low-fat, sugar-free theme is pervasive in food ads even back then.

16. Promo for "Good Morning America"
17. Promo for "Hardcastle & McCormick" and "Scandal Sheet"
The '80s had its trashy and lurid shows too, although I wonder how many younger people watched them. I'm guessing the audience was more Silent Gen types in their 40s and 50s, raised on a diet of mid-century luridness. Remember, the Boomers were in their 20s and 30s.

18. Wesson Oil
Like everyone else, homemakers weren't very self-conscious -- like, "Hey, look at me viewers, I'm a homemaker." There were no "mommy wars" back then. And the African-American isn't the Sassy Black Lady.

19. United
Hawaii has been in the popular imagination since at least the '50s, but in falling-crime times its image is more about rest & relaxation. This ad from the '80s plays up its wild and sublime aspects. "Bring Hawaii alive" sounds like the island has a force of its own, not a domesticated, constructed playground.

20. Toyota
Bright smokey back-lighting of a scene in darkness. Nice jingle at the end with the word "feeling". Also, back when "a friend you can count on" was a major selling point.

21. Promo for "Cruise Into Terror"
Horror movie craze, the Egyptian Revival (also found during the rising-crime Jazz Age and Romantic-Gothic Era).

22. Toyota and Burger King Commercial Bumpers
Burger King's ad is boring -- "Aren't You Hungry?" -- but at least it wasn't the 21st century's over-the-top drag queen masculinity for castrated beta nerds.

And those were the commercials of the 1985 Super Bowl -- when the game was the spectacle, and not the ads. Come to think of it, these ones were pretty low-key and conservative compared to the typical '80s clips I've seen at the commercial vault. Maybe they were going for restraint during the Super Bowl. I'll get to the more rockin' and gut-bustin' ones later on.

Children's faces in pop culture and real life: Mask-like or naturalistic

Awhile ago I looked at how impossible sympathy is in today's culture because of how exaggerated people make their faces look to others. Such behavior stems from an avoidant attachment style, where you want to keep others at a social-emotional distance, and only interact with them transactionally and strategically. These people don't consciously think over the pros and cons of establishing bonds with others -- it's just that, on a gut level, attachment and connections feel creepy. The fearful-avoidants worry about being exploited, while the dismissive-avoidants feel superior to others and not needing their connections.

Presenting others with a face that looks like a kabuki mask avoids the danger of potential attachment by creating an unbridgeable chasm between the individual and the viewers. To resonate with another person's facial expression, you have to ease into it, coming from your own everyday neutral expression. Subtle signs of joy, sadness, pensiveness, and so on, allow us to meet the person half-way or closer. Hence, all portraits in whatever medium show their subject with a subtle yet clearly non-neutral expression.

But to meet someone half-way who shows an extreme expression of anger, say, would require us to shift abruptly from neutral to pretty-angry, an impossible feat. So, we can only observe them from a distance and not get onto the same wavelength. That's why no one cares when you spray your Facebook feed with caricatured emo-face pictures.

Well, that's the ironically detached, snarky, duckface side of the adolescent and adult world. Does it extend even into the world of children? That should be a safe space for sincere expression, although after looking through it, there seems to be a similar mask-like presentation of children's faces.

They aren't ironic and sarcastic like the older kids, but a caricature of kiddie. They too look too extreme to invite us onto the same wavelength and feel attached to our children. Instead, they distance us and only let us observe the kid's hyper-surprised look or their wacky-zany face. It didn't used to be like that in the '80s, when kids looked more sincere and wholesome -- when they looked like real people with their own real feelings, not some animatronic doll that you program to display an extreme face for your own amusement.

Showing the full range of naturalistic expressions from images of kids in the '80s would be a bit too much work. So I've decided to try to restrict things to a slice of the emotional spectrum that can stand in for the full range. Why? You tend not to see faces in this range at all when people are closed-off, guard-up, and at-arm's-length. Only when people are more open do you find faces here, even if they aren't the most common type.

And that is the happy-sad face. It shows, in a single expression, that you're capable of expressing a range of emotions, and that you're comfortable with the complexity of real feelings, where joy may be tinged with vulnerability.

The happy-sad face is composed of a subtle smile in the mouth region (not agape as in surprise, and no bottom teeth visible as in an ear-to-ear grin), and eyes that pinch somewhat around the outsides as with a true smile. But unlike the plain smile where the eyes squint towards closing, the eyes slope gently upward from outside-in, both along the upper eyelid and the eyebrows. There's just a hint of pain or sadness in eyes like those.

That can be contrasted with the stereotypical kiddie face -- namely, surprise. Everything is novel to children, after all. In the surprised face, the eyeballs have a more circular look, no sloping, and the eyebrows and forehead are lifted straight up along the full length of the forehead, not just in the middle as in the sloping sad look. Also, the mouth tends to be in a gaping or at least slackjaw position, with visible empty space underneath the top row of teeth.

To make clear comparisons between the two periods, I chose the closest counterparts possible from each time. First, here are covers from Parents magazine, by far the most widely read of its kind, from 1983 and 2010. (Goddamn, magazine covers are so cluttered today.)

You might object that I'm comparing an older child with a baby, but after looking through old issues, it looks like they didn't limit themselves only to infants as they appear to now. There are many covers from the '80s with infants in a non-caricatured look, but I couldn't find any images of them online. I may try scanning some myself at the library sometime.

At any rate, it's clear that in order to sell to today's parents, you have to show the most exaggerated surprised face possible, one that looks like a wind-up toy. Back in the '80s, parents wanted to see faces that were more adorable and precious, something that you could connect with, and you can't feel that way about a face that's so obviously artificial. It has to look natural. (Recognize the happy-sad girl? That's a 6 year-old Sarah Michelle Gellar.)

We see the same difference in Parenting magazine, the other mega-seller in the genre, between 1989 and 2007.

The one from the '80s is meant to tug at the mother's heart-strings. (Even the mother's expression is subdued, unlike today's covers where the parents themselves have raised eyebrows and wide-open mouths.) The one from the 21st century, though, looks like he's already wearing his Halloween mask. Again we see parents today wanting to avoid the reality of their kids having their own thoughts and drives -- they are dolls for parents to role-play with, so they will assume whatever thoughts and drives that we program into their character specs.

Even in the toys meant for kids, there's a shift from marketing ones with more natural-looking to more kiddie-looking faces. Let's start with the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, one of the most sought-after toys of the 1980s, and still in their recent incarnation among the best-sellers on the "baby doll" section of Walmart's website.

The one from the '80s has a restrained smile, almost like a baby pursing its lips together out of nervousness, like "will this child walking by find me worth adopting?" They were marketed as newborns that came with birth certificates and adoption papers. Also notice the bottoms of the eyes: the white part is wider on the outside than on the inside, although the whites narrow to the same thinness as you go up the sides of the iris. This gives them that sloping-up-and-in look to hint at sadness.

The new ones have the mouth agape and circular eyes, and the slightly drooping upper eyelid makes them look sleepy. It's a kind of vegetative contentedness, not happy-yet-nervous to see you.

Stuffed animals fit the pattern too, not just baby dolls. Here are Pound Puppies, popular in the '80s, and the most popular puppy plushie on Walmart's "stuffed animals" section.

Like the Cabbage Patch Kids, the Pound Puppies were marketed as rescuing a lovable but defenseless living creature, and they too came with adoption certificates. They didn't all look so sad in the eyes (I guess they overdid it in the ads), but you get an idea of how they were meant to tug at the heart-strings of the kids and their parents. Also like Cabbage Patch Kids, their mouths are slightly raised at the ends in a smile, but the lips look pursed together in nervousness, awaiting your decision of whether or not to adopt them.

The recent dog plushie looks just like a stereotypically surprised baby with wide-open eyes and mouth agape. Unlike 21st-century children's faces, though, the dog does at least have a hint of upward-sloping eyes (the thicker whites at the base on the outside).

Boys didn't play too much with dolls in the '80s, although we all did receive Cabbage Patch Kids as gifts. But with a little ingenuity, they got us on-board too. Just as they got boys to want action figures by turning posable dolls into something mean, gross, or violent, they took the over-sized baby doll and turned it into My Pet Monster. Although it looked angry, sported fangs, and wore hand-cuffs that you could pull apart to show its strength, it was still meant to be your friend -- not a pet, despite the name. (There were other pet-like animals in the toy line, kind of a mini monster version of a puppy.)

The "doll" was updated in 2001 with a totally different face.

The ones from the '80s have a middle-mouth line that goes more or less straight across the head, while the new one has its mouth raised up in a phony-looking grin. And where the eyebrows of the old ones look mean by arching downward on the inside, right over the eyeballs themselves, the new one's eyebrows have been raised away from the eyeballs and look more suggestive of the eyebrow and forehead raised in surprise. The nose has also been reigned in from a bulbous mature-looking schnoz to a flat, non-protruding one like an infant's.

Although the My Pet Monster "dolls" didn't have the sloping sad eyes, they remind me a lot of Ludo from Labyrinth, who does. He also has raised lips at the outside, and an upward purse in the middle, the familiar happy-yet-nervous look.

In fact, it wasn't just pop culture that showed these changes. I think that children themselves were more capable of and willing to make more adorable faces back in the '80s, while kids now look more caricatured. Obviously that's harder to show since there are so many more pictures of real-life kids to study, not just a handful of popular toy lines and magazines.

Still, check out the reactions of two boys opening up the must-have video game system of their day, the original Nintendo and the Nintendo 64. (The second picture is a screenshot from a now legendary home movie clip on YouTube.)

The kid on the left looks just like the other '80s images we've seen, adorable and wholesome, with upward sloping eyes, while the freak on the right not only shows the exaggerated wide-open eyes and mouth of surprise, but also downward inner eyebrows and stiff squared-off lips of rage. When kids of the '90s and later experience happiness, it is usually adulterated with contempt and superiority -- "in your FACE, bitch! I got the Nintendo 64 and you didn't!" Check out the video, where the two little brats pump their fists in victory. They don't just feel joy by itself, or mingled with sadness, unconsciously aware that such joyfulness is fleeting.

Because Christmas usually brings out the smiles and the cameras to capture them, here are a couple more. The one from 1984 is not a detail from a Rembrandt painting, but my two little brothers sitting on Santa's lap at the mall, and the one from 2012 I pulled off of Google Images.

My brothers both have the upward sloping eyes, and although the one on the right has his mouth slightly open, it looks like he was caught speaking, since it's not in the slackjaw position. The one on the left may not even be smiling; if so, it's incredibly subtle. And with his hands clasped together like that, he looks like a Pound Puppy himself. He's the most Scotch-Irish of us three, so even as a baby he'd already mastered the charmingly pathetic Celtic eyebrows.

The siblings on the right are obviously posing, with the infant opening his mouth almost as wide as he can, and the toddler stretching a grin across her face while wrinkling up her nose and eyebrows in mock anger. I doubt either of them have seen kabuki mask pictures on Facebook yet, so they're picking this look up from older people in real life. Perhaps behind the camera, the parents are explicitly modeling the gaping-mouth face and the wacky-sassy face for their kids to ape.

So, it's not just media representations but also candid family pictures that show the changes. And it's not just what the adults want, but what the kids themselves feel motivated to do. Those toys didn't become popular because the parents foisted them on unwilling children. That's what they wanted.

And I doubt my brother was copying a grown-up's face when making that pound-puppy look. The recent Christmas picture might not reflect copying the parents either, but just what kids these days are prone to. That spazz in the Nintendo 64 picture might have been copying what he'd seen in the poor sportsmanship of older kids, but then he might have had that reaction spontaneously.

Children are very perceptive of the social and emotional atmosphere around them, just by observation, not having to be told, for example, that they live in a tense household when mommy and daddy are constantly shouting at each other. Somehow they picked up on the fact that their world in the 1980s was more open and trusting, so that they could and should express themselves more sincerely. They also sensed that grown-ups did not view them as an engineering project, but as real, unique creatures to enjoy a wholesome relationship with -- so give 'em what they want, and make yourself adorable.

Over the course of the '90s, children shifted away from those behaviors as they sensed changes in the social-emotional atmosphere around them. Grown-ups had flatter tone-of-voice, more restricted facial expressions, and treated them more like a computer programming project. If the grown-up world was so evidently closed-off and distant, and if that's where you see yourself headed toward, then prepare for it now by never revealing your true self to anyone, and only display caricatured masks on those rare occasions where you do have to make some kind of face.

These changes mirror the changes in the crime rate, a relationship that I've explored elsewhere, although I can't remember where at the moment. Just search this blog for "attachment" or "avoidant" or other relevant word. These changes should therefore also appear when contrasting the 1920s with the '40s or '50s, the former looking like the '80s and the latter looking like the 21st century. I've seen that in looking through advertising, candid pictures, and children shown in the Sears catalog, but that's for another time.