The unwholesome mid-century: Clear heels and butt-padded briefs

I just got through with a book on the history of the bra in America, but it'll take awhile to find enough pictures and select quotes to put together a whole post on bras and breasts. In the meantime, I've noticed two other weird contemporary things that turn out to be throwbacks to the mid-century.

First, take a look at Marilyn Monroe's preferred footwear. Lucite heels were big in the 1950s, not just with her. Do a google image search for Marilyn Monroe heels to see many examples, including these two:

When did clear heels become the new whore uniform? When did that happen? Was there a big ho convention and all the hos got together and said, "We need something new. Something that just says nasty" … And one girl said, "I got it! Clear heels!" "Uh, girl you’re disgusting!" [Chris Rock] 

Don't ask me what specific features about clear heels make them unwholesome, but strippers couldn't have chosen them for no reason. The mid-century was also big on the burlesque, striptease, girlie show, pin-up, look-but-don't-touch kind of female attitude that we suffer from now. Similar mindsets will choose similar fashion accessories.

In 60 years, do you think it'll be common knowledge, even among those who study the pop culture of our time, that in the early 21st century, clear heels = stripper shoes? Most will probably look at non-strippers wearing them and have no strong reaction of "Why did they wear such sleazy shoes back then?"

That's the temptation when we see Marilyn Monroe wearing them -- hey, it was the '50s, they couldn't have had any unwholesome quality to them. But we don't know that. Maybe Jack Benny did a bit about what's the deal with this craze for slutty lucite heels. How would we ever know about that now? If we're so inclined to judge them unwholesome now, it should go for the mid-century too, not knowing anything more about them.

Second, here's a 1950s ad from Frederick's of Hollywood hawking a pair of briefs with some serious junk-in-the-trunk padding:

They were the major lingerie retailer before Victoria's Secret, so this thing has to be fairly representative of what customers wanted back then. In the 21st century, these things have become profitable again, at least to judge by their being advertised in Southwest Airlines SkyMall catalog.

Here is an earlier post about the cycle in ideal female body type, which tracks the cycle in the crime rate. Rising-crime times select for girls with less T&A, and falling-crime times for more voluptuous girls.

Today we attribute the craze for plump rumps to something having to do with race -- Sir Mix-a-Lot, J. Lo, Beyonce, Shakira, etc. But back in the '80s black girls didn't have jungle booties, so it's not a race thing. Looking back at the mid-century, it definitely was not a race thing. It was Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, et al., who women wanted to look like -- shapely white girls. And if women were willing to pad their bra with "falsies" in order to keep up with the ideal (more on that in another post), then why not wear padded briefs too?

I certainly wouldn't mind the sight of women wearing those things, but only if I didn't know what was really underneath. Seeing butt-padded briefs, stuffed bras of one kind or another, shaved pubic hair, etc. -- it all signals a heightened self-consciousness on the girl's part. Like she's so nervous she won't measure up that she has to resort to elaborate tricks to distract and fool the viewer. You can't give off an unwholesome vibe if you lack self-awareness (one of the great things about ditzy girls is how wholesome they appear).

Ultimately any guy who she goes all the way with will see her natural body, so why be misleading in the meantime? These things aren't like make-up: they're making a substantial alteration of her body type. Clearly the bootylicious briefs are designed to deceive or manipulate the perception of men who won't actually get to see the real thing. They're for self-consciously drawing male attention to your tits or ass so that you can string them along and have them do your bidding, while they drool stupidly.

There really does seem to be a cynical, almost Machiavellian approach among women in the mid-century as far as displaying themselves to men was concerned. Like, "Well you know men -- always thinking with their dicks, so if you need to recruit them in reaching some goal of yours, just stuff your bra, pad your seat, and put on a caricatured pin-up smile. Hey, a gal's gotta do what a gal's gotta do."

You can pick this up, less severely, in the lyrics to the early '50s Doris Day song "A Guy Is a Guy". There's a throwaway reference to marriage at the end, but for the most part it sounds cynical, self-aware, even sleazy (without however being obscene like it would today). During the romantic '80s, you didn't hear that kind of attitude. (And no, that "I Know What Boys Like" song doesn't count, since it wasn't a #4 hit on the charts from a major singer, but a dud from one of the few unlikable new wave groups on the fringe.)

Anyway, more to say about these topics when I get around to writing up the stuff about bras.

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.

Girl fight voyeurism then and now: Roller derby

Here is a concise history of women's roller derby. Although the roller skating craze dates to the turn of the 20th century and lasted through the Jazz Age, the combative, EXTREME sport version dates to the mid-'30s. Its popularity grew through the '40s and early '50s, when it was broadcast on TV. In 1940 there were 5 million spectators, or nearly 4% of the entire US population at the time, as if there were 11 million fans today.

Some pictures from its mid-century heyday:

Perhaps by the late '50s, and no later than the '60s, it began losing popularity, only used for pure camp value in the '70s, and absent from the '80s and early '90s. Only in the late '90s did interest re-emerge, and its 21st century revival is another example of how the Millennial age is repeating so much of the mid-century culture.

The only thing that distinguishes these periods is the trend in the crime rate. During rising-crime times, voyeuristic fascination with other people's pain and failures disappears. People actually participate more in sports, especially in team settings, but it's more to let loose their ambitious drive, act as a member of a larger team, and feel socially integrated into the larger community.

During falling-crime times, everyday violence isn't so common, so people try to over-stimulate themselves with violent imagery to make up for it. Human beings just have a certain need to see violence in their cultural products. But because people are more cocooning and emotionally unattached to their peers, this takes on a more lurid and voyeuristic quality. Unwholesome. If there had been YouTube in the mid-century, it would have been full of "fail" videos. (But not if they'd had it in the '80s.)

Seeing the roller derby gals from the mid-century knock into and tumble helplessly under each other was part of a broader voyeurism about violent women and girl fights. The heartless femme fatale was a stock character from film noir movies of the time (not only the better ones, but the cheesy ones too). And mid-century comic books, akin to today's video games, regularly featured images of voluptuous dominatrices, butt-kicking babes, and girl fights. Below are just three covers out of many on the theme, with the middle one coming from an entire series devoted to Crimes By Women.

Apart from the demand-side effect of greater voyeurism in the mid-century and Millenial periods, what about the women who star in the show? In falling-crime times, women just seem more snippy and cutting toward one another, and toward men as well, beyond the female animal's basic bitchiness. You don't see it in action as much because they're more cocooning in those periods, but things like femme fatales and roller derby reveal how they behave when they do lock themselves in more competitive settings.

It wasn't like the craze for women's tennis and golf in the Jazz Age or the New Wave Age, where they emphasized sportsmanship and the fun-loving aspects of competition.

Men paved the way out of the mid-century malaise

I don't think there's a strong received wisdom about women leading the charge out of the stultifying mid-century culture, or about men and women leaving at the same time. So this post isn't to "debunk" a standard story, but to show something you wouldn't notice without looking.

Our Millennial age is the re-incarnation of the mid-century, and we're a good ways into our falling-crime phase by now. We're 21 years past the 1992 peak in the crime rate, and 21 years past the previous 1933 peak in the crime rate was 1954. Within the next five years, then, we're going to see the culture open up and breathe a little more freely, just like the mid-late-'50s. That will set the stage for the mass exodus from private cocoon life during the next 1960s -- yeah, a lot of that time to come will be annoying, but it'll one of those gear-shifting times that will ultimately lead us into the neo-'80s.

In looking over the period of the mid-'50s through the early '60s, when you can see people starting to leave their cocoons, it's striking how different the timing was between men and women. Already by the mid-'50s men were growing discontent with the social role they were supposed to accept (that of the "company man"). This is summed up in the 1955 hit novel, and 1956 hit movie, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It wasn't until 1963 that the rough female counterpart came out, The Feminine Mystique.

Sloan Wilson and Betty Friedan were born just one year apart in the early 1920s. Belonging to the same generation, they should've heard similar rumblings among their same-sex peers at the same time, if men and women were growing equally tired. Yet Friedan didn't even get the idea to write the book until the late '50s, let alone publish it. By then, more than half a decade had gone by of discontented 30 and 40-something men revealing their grievances in public forums, such as pop culture. So, women felt that the trail blazed by men wasn't going to grow back over -- it had been trodden enough to be safe for female feet now too.

Related to the passivity and risk-aversion of the mid-century was a widespread acceptance and usage of amphetamines, barbiturates, and minor tranquilizers to help confine one's emotional ups and downs to a narrow, steady band. The backlash against that kind of "cosmetic pharmacology" first made an issue of men taking them -- the reformers portrayed them as emasculating and domesticating the more animal-driven nature of male users.

Only somewhat later did the more numerous female users come out about their problem, mainly suburban housewives popping Valium. By then I think the backlash took on something of the flavor of the Feminine Mystique -- they saw their drug addiction as the unwholesome extreme that they'd gone to in the quest to play the role of Supermommy.

I don't recall the dates off the top of my head, but they're in the Happy Pills book by Herzberg that I cited before. I want to say it was the late '50s / early '60s when men began to rebel against being emotionally medicated, and women around the mid-late-'60s.

The Billboard year-end singles charts show a fairly ho-hum procession of songs throughout the early half of the 1950s. Then all of a sudden, the 1956 charts show male performers unashamedly opening up, putting it all out there, and cutting loose -- mostly Elvis, but also the Teenagers with "Why Do Fools Fall in Love". By '57, there are even more (there's a table with all the year-end charts at the bottom of the previous link). There's still Elvis, but now also the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly / the Crickets. And it just goes on from there through the last two years of the '50s -- even more Everly Brothers, Dion and the Belmonts, Ritchie Valens, the Drifters, etc.

Those early songs are breaking away from the emotional restraint -- or perhaps lack of much emotion to begin with -- of songs about boys and girls from the mid-century. They're pointing the way toward the power ballad of the 1980s, after which emotional numbness and blandness would set in once more, lasting through today.

What about female performers? There's a noticeable lack of them altogether in the '50s. The most memorable ones were probably the Chordettes, but they don't sound like they're letting go -- it sounds more rehearsed and under-control than the songs by male performers of the same time. "Mr. Sandman" came out in '55, when "Rock Around the Clock" ushered in the rock era, and "Lollipop" came out in '58, the same year that saw "All I Have to Do Is Dream," "Great Balls of Fire," "Peggy Sue," and the original recording of "Do You Want to Dance".

Nope, the first year with a clear breakthrough by emotional females, akin to Elvis in '56, was 1961 when the Shirelles took the world by storm as the first "girl group" -- i.e., the just-go-with-it, boy-crazy type. Whereas the late '50s saw the male rock explosion, it took until 1963 for female singers to join in the excitement -- just about every classic early song came out in that single year: "Be My Baby," "Then He Kissed Me," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "Just One Look," "One Fine Day," and so on. They were pointing the way toward the Pointer Sisters and Bananarama, who perfected the genre in the '80s. Again we see females trailing males by about five years.

Finally, there's clothing, another obvious difference between the drab mid-century and the upbeat '60s - '80s period that followed. The main shift seems to have involved variety of colors and the presence of patterns, both of which make clothing look more striking and signal the willingness of the wearer to put themselves out there and get noticed, trusting that others aren't going to ridicule them, or perhaps feeling too carefree to pay them any mind if they did.

In an earlier post on Christmas sweaters, I detailed how men were the first to re-adopt them after their more or less disappearance during the mid-century, after having been so popular during the Jazz Age. The Sears Christmas catalog ("wish book") shows sweaters with multiple colors and winter-themed patterns for men starting in the 1956 edition, when women's sweaters are still uniform in color and lacking in patterns. Multiple colors and bold patterns don't show up for women's winter sweaters until the early '60s -- they're definitely in the '62 edition, and perhaps in the '60 or '61 editions, though neither is online for me to check.

Outside of seasonal clothing, everyday shirts showed the same timing. By the mid-'50s, the Sears catalogs have lots of what we'd call "flannel shirts," with their bold all-over pattern and contrasting colors. (Sounds more fun than a gray t-shirt, khaki cargo shorts, and brown sandals.) Not until the early '60s do we see a similar profusion of multi-colored and patterned shirts for women. Once again, men led the way out of drabness by a good five years or so.

There are surely other examples, but these are diverse enough to make the point. A falling-crime era selects for more feminized traits, so naturally men will be the first to grow restless and try to pave the way out toward a somewhat more dangerous but ultimately more fulfilling way of life.

By the same logic, when the outgoing zeitgeist grinds to a halt and swings back toward the cocooning side -- most recently, circa 1990 -- women seem to be the first to drop out of public spaces and to withdraw trust in the opposite sex, while men stick it out for a little longer before closing themselves off as well. But that's for another post.

Neuroses about feminine hygiene: The past (douching)

Part 1 here covered the trend toward pubic hair removal of the past 20 years. It's not an aesthetic or sexual thing, but a hygiene/disgust thing, in their own words. They obsess about it if it begins to grow in, and they compulsively remove it to alleviate their anxiety. Yet the OCD woman of today never feels real relief because the damn thing keeps growing back in.

Now let's turn to the previous outbreak of both OCD and of neurosis about feminine hygiene, the mid-century.

The prevalence of OCD back then is pretty easy to diagnose from the ubiquitous hygiene films that were screened to schoolchildren. Here you can see stills and summaries of a couple dozen of them, mostly from the '40s and '50s. They didn't fall on deaf ears either: most candid pictures from the mid-century show people who are fairly fastidious about grooming and hygiene.

As for their obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior about feminine hygiene purification rituals, they centered around douching rather than hair removal back then. A concise account can be found in chapters 8 and 9 of Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation. (I know, the things I read to uncover the truth...) The tone is your standard snarky sassypants, and the rest of the book consists of predictable feminist griping about having to live up to male-determined standards bla bla bla. But the chapters that stick more to primary sources like ad campaigns are quite revealing for just how out-there the mid-century zeitgeist was, and how similar to our own.

Unlike the seeming mystery of pubic hair removal, it's a no-brainer to interpret douching as a hygiene and disgust-related practice. Not always -- sometimes they market them about feeling comfortable and fresh, not appealing to the yuck factor. But in the mid-century, the mindset was all about purifying her disgusting, offensive odors.

There were two major purveyors of douching solutions, Zonite (weak bleach) and Lysol -- I mean, why only disinfect your counter-tops with the stuff? To see how widespread they were, do a Google image search for douche ad lysol, and douche ad zonite. These dozens of ads span decades and appeared in perfectly mainstream magazines like Woman's Day and Good Housekeeping. You want to see how surprisingly bizarre the '40s and '50s were? -- take a look for yourself. Below are only a few that illustrate the pattern.

Her husband has locked himself away from her disgusting odor, which because of doubt and inhibition she's neglected to do anything about. Some of the copy:

One most effective way to safeguard her dainty feminine allure is by practicing complete feminine hygiene as provided by vaginal douches with a scientifically correct preparation like "Lysol." So easy a way to banish the misgivings that often keep married lovers apart.
. . . truly cleanses the vaginal canal even in the presence of mucous matter.
. . . the very source of objectionable odors is eliminated.

Once again we see the crippling self-doubt of the mid-century on full display. Women who are more well-adjusted don't get hysterical about this kind of stuff, and would not be susceptible to these kinds of ads. The fact that these campaigns lasted so long, and so presumably drummed up so much business, tells us that women of the time really were ashamed of their sex and neurotic about feminine hygiene, far beyond taking basic care of themselves. Just like today's hair-removers.

Also note how disgustingly palpable the word choice is -- "mucous," "matter," "odors," etc. They had little sense of taboo when talking about the effluvia and odors of the female sex organ, no roundabout references here. This taboo-violating word choice is not uncommon to find across the ads.

Young married couple were supposed to enjoy a little roll in the hay during their quiet evening at home, but the disgusted huband just can't bring himself to tell his eager wife that it stinks.

And she must constantly be on guard against an offense greater than body odor or bad breath -- an odor she may not detect herself but is so apparent to other people.
Zonite... actually destroys, dissolves and removes odor-causing waste substances.

Again the appeal to self-doubt and shame, the OCD emphasis on "constantly" being on guard, and the vivid description of "odor-causing waste substances". Here are a couple other funny ones from Lysol and Zonite, but again just wade through the Google image results for yourself. To find ads for other brands, try douche ad 1940s, or douche ad 1950s.

So what's the big deal, you might ask? Wasn't it great that ads could so freely shame women for not pleasing their husbands, and that husbands were still allowed to look disgusted if their wives didn't meet the standards?

Well, no, that atmosphere is just like ours today with hair removal. Women feel a crippling shame themselves, other women try to shame them if they don't shave or wax, and hysterical "men" get all grossed out by normal female appearance and texture. Indeed, the guys' inflexibility and appeal to violations of hygiene/disgust norms shows that the guys themselves suffer from OCD and fetishism, almost as though they'd be unable to perform if her vulva didn't look the way they preferred.

A normal woman has nothing to be ashamed of down there, unless she truly does have an infection or something. Clearly the douching phenomenon was hysterically blowing the "problem" out of all proportion. We don't know how men felt, but if they were like those depicted in the ads, then they were psychologically stunted too, in that "ewww, girls are yucky!" stage of childhood.

Crippling shame and juvenile girls-have-cooties disgust are not signs of healthy minds. Rather, we've found yet another case of the broader picture that the mid-century was the "Age of Anxiety". They make the population look more like that of tropical gardening societies (horticulturalists), where there's a pervasive fear and disgust of female sexuality. These are the societies with little to recommend them, they're the most savage. Think of your first impression of the Amazon, New Guinea, or sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, even today African-American women are much more likely than whites to douche, owing to the tropical gardening culture of their ancestors.

The ads are more disgusting than the "problem" they seek to treat -- imagine opening a mainstream magazine and reading the words "mucous matter," "odor-causing waste substances," etc., in the context of feminine hygiene. That's what's gross -- violating the taboo that you talk about that somewhere else.

Aside from warped minds and gross language, the douching phenomenon had real consequences for women's health -- negative. Doctors don't even recommend it anymore because it's now understood how altering the vulvo-vaginal ecosystem so radically can eliminate the good bacteria and allow the nasty ones to take over. See here for the negative outcomes that douching is associated with, and see here for a longitudinal study showing that douching raises the risk of getting bacterial vaginosis (similar symptoms as a yeast infection, including a fishy smell, but more common than it). So, douching causes at least some of those problems, including infection, rather than being a harmless bystander in a web of mere correlations.

We don't even know yet what the parallel harms are that pubic shaving and waxing do, but we don't need to right now. It's clear that they're there, because of such radical alteration of human nature. And no, as some airhead suggested before, it's not the same as shaving the armpits -- there are loads more pathogenic organisms in and around the vagina, which is an opening into the body, unlike the armpit. You're messing with something more serious when you remove pubic hair vs. armpit hair.

At any rate, harm is not the main issue here. It's how well-adjusted, healthy-minded, and socially integrated people are. Normal men and women will not show such an OCD mindset and behavior toward feminine hygiene, as indeed they did not during the '80s, the '70s, and even most of the '60s. The neurotic preoccupation with douching provides another example, then, of how unwholesome the mid-century culture was.

I'm sure it didn't occupy their every waking moment, but then neither does pubic hair removal today. It was so common -- if 30% douche today, when doctors discourage it, it must have been near or over 50% during its heyday. And it was so centered on shame. As with pubic hair, it's just not the kind of thing women should be obsessing over and compulsively trying to "treat," only to remain neurotic.

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.

Uncovering unwholesomeness in culture throughout history

50 years from now, when people try to figure out what life was like in the early 21st century, how many will know what the Grand Theft Auto video game series was? Or torture porn movies? Or the sado-masochistic character of much mainstream porn? That's just to pick three examples of the general shift toward voyeurism and sensationalism in the culture over the past 20 years.

It may be hard to remember (even more so if you weren't alive), but back in the '80s there was no lurid violence in young people's entertainment. The slasher flick presented all-American teenagers who were mostly likable, or at least sympathetic, although doing what hormone-crazed young people do (or used to do, anyway). This makes you feel for the victims when they get attacked. When the characters are annoying or downright unlikable, you're actually cheering the serial killer on -- "Finally we won't have to listen to that whining bitch anymore!"

Ditto all of the glorification of crime in video games over the past 20 years. In the video games of the '80s and early '90s, where crime was a theme at all, you played the good guys taking on the bad guys, with little or no gore. Kind of like Lethal Weapon with martial arts. Kids increasingly want to role-play as a hoodlum who deals drugs, steals cars, and kills hookers.

And porno movies then featured a guy and a girl who were hot for each other and felt like getting it on, neither one trying to exploit the other, just smiling and having fun. No shock or sensationalism. More and more dirty movies emphasize domination, degradation, and humiliation, whether of the male ("femdom") or of the female (throat gagging). The prevalence of bondage themes is bewildering. How can so many people be so into such degrading stuff?

Yet when people try to reconstruct life in the early 21st century, I'll bet the turn toward sleaze doesn't make the textbooks or popular accounts. From what you learned in US history class, could you give an even basic contrast between the zeitgeist of the 1880s vs. the 1920s? Professional historians love getting into the nitty-gritty, if anything erring on the side of being too particularistic. But the average person, even the average educated person, just doesn't feel like knowing that much about the variations in the historical record is worth anything today. The past must therefore be homogeneous beyond a certain point in time, either uniformly worse than today if they're a progressivist, or uniformly better than today if they're a declinist.

Aside from the past 20 years, the other highpoint of unseen unwholesomeness was the mid-century, especially the '40s and '50s. I don't mean that there was a "seedy underbelly" to the white picket fence suburbs. It was right out in the open, and everyone at the time would've recognized it -- there could have even been a widespread moral panic about it -- but it hasn't been preserved in the popular memory.

The most flagrant example is the sleazy sensationalism of mid-century comic books, featuring just as much lurid torture porn and sado-masochistic imagery as today's dorky video games. I've read some of the secondary literature on this stuff, but today I finally picked up Seduction of the Innocent, a book that ignited a moral panic over the unwholesome nature of comic books back then, and eventually led to the Comics Code Authority, a censorship board within the industry itself, akin to the Hays Code in Hollywood movie studios.

I plan to post in more detail about comic books in particular, since they really were out there back then, and along with radio they were the dominant form of mass media entertainment for young people, like video games today (movie-going was dead, and TV was either non-existent in the earlier part, or slowly gaining viewers by the mid-'50s). But for now, have a look through an online gallery of comic book covers from those days -- and that's not even including the full story inside. The butt-kicking babe, bondage, gore, role-playing as the clever criminal, the intended lack of sympathy running through it all -- it could be straight out of today's youth culture.

Seduction of the Innocent is also available free online; most of the images are not those from the original book, but similar ones that still prove the point. Skim through the chapters named "I Want to be a Sex Maniac" (about the bizarre sexuality so often shown) and "Bumps and Bulges" (about the ads -- increase your bosom size, use this telescope to peep on your neighbors, etc.). You'll never think of the '50s the same way again.

Last, it should go without saying, but "unwholesome" is a property of the cultural item itself -- it doesn't matter what broader social consequences it has. I'm more aware than anyone else of how the violent crime rate kept falling during the mania for lurid S&M comic books, as well as during the neo-sleazy renaissance of the past 20 years. Whether the crime rate shot up or bottomed out in response to comic book sensationalism, the things themselves can't but strike you as unwholesome and sleazy, something that would appeal to weak, passive, anti-social minds.

Unwholesomeness is deplorable not because of its effects or non-effects on material well-being and safety, but because of what it says about our social and psychological health. It triggers our disgust mechanism, not our harm-avoidance mechanism, but that doesn't make it any less important.

The sex trade and inequality, 1920 to present

In earlier posts on the historical cycles of perversion, I looked at how popular culture revealed the audience's preferences. See here for a list of posts on the unwholesome mid-century. Briefly, in times of cocooning people show a lurid interest in sexuality, and in outgoing periods, a jocular attitude.

I'm most interested in what made people tick in different time periods, so I look at the demand side. The supply side is complicated by technological progress, which moves independently of the social-cultural zeitgeist. And in any case, I don't find the production or business side of pop culture as fascinating as what some phenomenon reveals about everyday people.

But for some phenomena, you might have to take into account what factors motivate the people on the supply side. Not so much "what attitudes to business owners and managers have?" but more like what would lead the actual workers to take part in the business that creates the product. Those choices could also reflect the cocooning / outgoing trend, but decisions about economic life will probably respond more to the status-seeking / status-ignoring trend.

Turchin's work on the dynamics of inequality puts status seeking, over-production of aspiring elites, and intra-elite competition behind inequality (an effect of those divisive processes). See this post of his on the topic, using lawyers as a case study. I'll refer to status-seeking or rising-inequality depending on which aspect seems to be more important.

Something I could never explain using just the cocooning vs. outgoing framework is why the mid-century sex culture, while just as lurid as ours is, nevertheless did not specialize in pornographic photography or movies, lapdance clubs, 1-900 phone sex services, and so on. It was more lurid comic books and pulp novels, voyeuristic girlie shows (with no contact or proximity), and the incredibly rare stag film (hardcore). *

The state of their technology allowed for all of our forms of commercialized vice, yet they didn't make nearly as much use of it (they didn't even take a stab at inventing phone sex). So the answer must lie more with economic motives of the workers themselves.

During the Great Compression of circa 1920 to 1970, young women showed a declining interest in climbing up the status ladder as fast as possible and in financing the acquisition and display of luxury by earning quick-and-easy money. Their increasingly modest tastes made them feel more comfortable with a slow-but-steady typing job. Sure, a stint as a pornographic actress could have raked in a lot more dough than that, but what would she do with all that money? She wasn't going to stain her feminine honor just to add unnecessarily to her bank account.

This shows the importance of looking at both supply and demand. The demand was there, but in those days it just wasn't true that "everybody has their price," or that demand would have been met.

Beginning in the '70s, and becoming more and more visible over the '80s, women shifted their priorities, becoming more fashion and status-conscious. Their interest in fashion was more fun-loving in the '70s and '80s, and not so hostile like it became in the '90s and 21st century, when the separate shift toward cocooning made them less interested in getting along with others on an interpersonal level.

And sure enough, that's when hardcore pornographic movies began to grow, continuing upward right through the present. That steady rise since the '70s/'80s is unlike the changes in interpersonal sexual behavior, where folks were more and more connected during the '70s and '80s, but segregated themselves from the opposite sex during the past 20 years and don't get it on as frequently as they used to. You see the same steady rise in lapdance clubs, and virtual outlets like phone sex, nude photos, and webcam girls.

The only area that shows a decline is prostitution, where arrest rates fell by over 40% from 1990 to 2010. I interpret that as a substitution effect from all those other outlets. They're all ways to get relief through transactions rather than interactions, and the men who pay for those things weren't so concerned with making it with a real-life partner that they'd risk disease, arrest, fines, etc.

In periods of rising inequality, the bottom chunk of society feels like the deck is stacked against them. So lower-status men, sensing the widening divide, might reason that it's not worth even bothering with the real-life interaction game, where the available women are already taken by high-status men, or have effectively taken themselves off the market by waiting around for a taken high-status man to become newly available. **

Those lower-status guys still have a libido, though, so they'll drive up the demand for commercialized sex. As long as he has enough cash or credit, his lack of status won't count against him. This effect on males comes more from inequality, while the effect on female sex workers comes more from the status-seeking trend closely related to it. Giving schlubs a lap dance, or shooting a porn scene once a week, is a quick and easy way to finance your conspicuous consumption and student loan debt (the higher ed bubble being another consequence of status-seeking).

All this predicts that we ought to find a burgeoning economy of commercialized sex during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as inequality rose toward its peak in the mid-1910s. Would it surprise you to learn that prostitution was widespread during the Victorian era? Perhaps a more helpful name for the period would be the Victorian-Dickensian era, to remind folks of the heartlessness and the growing disconnect between the upper and lower layers of society.

I planned to review the history before 1920 in this post, but it's already gotten long enough, so I'll save that for a follow-up. It really deserves its own post, too, since all of it will be unfamiliar to today's readers.

* Judging from ubiquitous ads in comic books, teenage boys were eager to buy X-ray specs and pocket spy telescopes in order to see girls naked, or learn the art of hypnosis in order to get her to sleepwalk into their beds and get it on against her will. You didn't see lurid stuff like that in the teenage culture of the 1980s, because boys were more socially connected to girls, went out on dates, and got what they wanted.

** Is economic inequality reflected in dating-and-mating inequality? Hunter-gatherers don't have harem organization, while concubines and other forms of polygyny are often found among more stratified groups like large-scale agriculturalists.

Most users of antidepressant drugs not really depressed, just faking it to take the easy way out

Here is an NYT article covering a new study which shows that most people who are diagnosed with depression -- and who therefore go on to regularly take antidepressant drugs -- do not meet the standards set by the psychiatrist's diagnostic handbook, the DSM.

Well, sure, given that such a large portion of the population is hooked on drugs, it must be that the "condition" they're treating is being way over-diagnosed, and that most folks are just looking for an excuse to take an easy way out of their problems, i.e. by numbing their brain into a state where it feels neither joy nor sadness, where they're just drifting through daily life.

As a reminder, this whole mainstreaming of drugs phenomenon is a note-for-note repeat of the unwholesome mid-century zeitgeist, part of the broader web of dysfunction in cocooning times.

Now, as then, it is primarily driven by surging demand from the public, not doctors luring in people who aren't on the same wavelength. Big Pharma would love to get everybody hooked, and to advertise in order to recruit unsuspecting customers. But after the age of Geritol ended in the 1960s, drug companies couldn't advertise on TV. Not until the '90s, that is, when consumers began wanting to see ads that would tell them what they wanted to hear -- that the normal signs of discomfort that the viewer had were reason enough to go see a doctor and ultimately hook their brain up to a Prozac faucet, whose dials they could adjust according to their want, rather than try to cope with real life like a normal person.

“It’s not only that physicians are prescribing more, the population is demanding more,” Dr. Mojtabai said. “Feelings of sadness, the stresses of daily life and relationship problems can all cause feelings of upset or sadness that may be passing and not last long. But Americans have become more and more willing to use medication to address them.”

Hopefully this study on antidepressants will echo an article from earlier this year, when there were the first signs of a growing openness to talk about the mainstreaming of Adderall and similar drugs. They're like the antidepressants in being stabilizing drugs -- meant to pick up the lethargic or tranquilize the anxious.

In contrast, the drugs of rising-crime times are destabilizing drugs that take your mind into an out-of-the-ordinary state, like pot or coke. Their destabilizing properties cause them to be viewed and taken more cautiously, where folks are apprehensive to start taking them, and then only occasionally or "recreationally," while regular users are well aware of the dangers, and will only make up the smallest fraction of the population (the most risk-taking). The stabilizing properties of drugs that dominate in falling-crime times cause them to be far more widely adopted -- hey, what could possibly go wrong with trying to nudge the brain toward a more normal state?

Unlike users of destabilizing drugs, users of stabilizing drugs ignore or dismiss the possibility of adverse, long-lasting side-effects. In their view, there can be no such thing as bad side-effects to something that makes the brain more normal. Also unlike users of destabilizing drugs, they don't seek to immediately counteract the drugs' bad side-effects -- they don't try to "sober up" when they're about to drive home, run into their parents, etc.

All this stems from their rationalization of taking drugs as a return to a more normal state of mind. In reality, of course, the human mind is not meant to constantly be in a feel-nothing state. That's abnormal, like someone who got a lobotomy. Properly seeing how unusual the mental state is of those who use "stabilizing" drugs, it comes as no surprise that there are all those downsides -- particularly for those who aren't experiencing major clinical depression, but are just looking for the anti-social way out of life's troubles, rather than discuss their problems with others, receive support and care, feel better, and move on with life.

In my experience, the mainstreaming of mind-altering drugs during falling-crime times is the piece of the larger pattern that no one wants to hear or talk about, which is why I continue to cover it and get on my soapbox about it, even though psychiatry is not one of my main interests. Nothing more glaringly characterizes the glib and dismissive attitude, the weakening of moral fiber, and the general degradation, of falling-crime times such as the Victorian era, the mid-century, and the Millennial era, as writing off all objections to the widespread zombie-fication of the population through regular use of psychoactive substances, and even seeking to prevent such objections as though they were Luddite obstacles to the future of trouble-free progress.

Doom vs. GoldenEye in broader perspective

You can learn a lot about social and cultural change from looking at popular entertainment. It takes place within the larger social context, and typically is part of a more general cultural zeitgeist. Few observers or historians include video games within their review of popular / mass culture, even though they're (sadly) bigger than TV and movies for young people, and video game nerds themselves tend to either get all gushy or vitriolic in their reviews, taking things personally rather than charting the course of history.

An earlier post took a look at how shifts in both the visual culture and social interaction were reflected in the dominance of fighting games in the style of Mortal Kombat over the earlier Street Fighter. This post will run a similar comparison between first-person shooter games that shows the same overall social and cultural changes. The most successful early first-person shooter games were Doom and Doom II (1993 and '94), before GoldenEye 007 and its imitators took over (1997).

First, though, it's worth noting that the very popularity of first-person shooter games signals a shift away from sociability, just as the rise of player-vs.-player fighting games did. Throughout the '80s and early '90s, games where you beat up other people had the player beat up characters controlled by the computer, and if another person joined in, they teamed up with the first person to take on the computer. Player-vs.-player fighting games pitted two people against each other.

For games where you shoot people up the whole time, the norm during the '80s and early '90s had you shoot lots of characters controlled by the computer, and if another person joined in, they teamed up with the first person against the computer. This included games like Contra, Ikari Warriors, and Operation Wolf. First-person shooter games grew to focus primarily on player-vs.-player gameplay, where two or more people try to shoot each other up.

When the Doom games came out, there was some interest in shooting up other players, though most people found that boring and wanted to take on the far greater number of enemies in the normal one-player mode. Still, these were the first to introduce player-vs.-player, so even by 1993 the shift away from team gameplay had already begun.

This trend continued with the Quake series, the next series from the developers of Doom. By the time GoldenEye and the similar Perfect Dark took over, I'd say most people chose player-vs.-player if there was someone else in the room to play against. Once home consoles allowed players to shoot each other up over an internet connection in the 2000s, this became by far the most common way that people played first-person shooters.

We can see other major behavioral changes reflected in the replacement of Doom style games with GoldenEye style games, such as the shift toward OCD, collecting/hoarding, and joyless treadmill progress toward 100% completion of boxes in a checklist.

In Doom, your only goal in a stage was to reach the exit. In GoldenEye, you were given a list of specific objectives to carry out before reaching the exit. More, you were given the option of three levels of difficulty, so you could complete three different checklists per stage. In Doom, you only had one player you could play as. In GoldenEye, you were encouraged to meet certain characters in the one-player mode so that you could play as those new characters in the player-vs.-player mode. In Doom, special abilities were gotten by simply typing in a cheat code. In GoldenEye, such abilities could only be had by performing certain objectives in a stage, usually under a time limit. Often this meant replaying the same stage over and over, going through the exact same motions, hoping to shave off a few seconds here or there. The now common treadmill practice of "unlocking achievements" began with GoldenEye.

The trend toward over-the-top extreme-ness shows up as well. You only kill aliens and monsters in Doom, although they do look gory when they're dead. GoldenEye has you killing people, and there are far many more opportunities for sadistic humiliation. For example, once they're dead, you can shoot them in the head, sending it jerking back while a pool of blood pours out. Although the entire dead body did not yet resemble a rag doll in this way (as it would come to), you could still pump the corpse full of lead, making it bleed.

You could also torture the enemies to death by targeting a limb and watching them hobble around in pain and frustration, before tagging them again, until they finally took enough hits and keeled over. Players even fucked around with unarmed bystander characters in that way. It was even easier to pull this off when you targeted them through a sniper rifle at a safe distance where they couldn't see you or shoot back.

These features -- torture, sadism, overkill, voyeurism -- recall the unwholesome nature of mid-century comic books, which as a medium video games have largely taken the place of. While they do not lead to higher crime rates, they do warp the minds of young people and encourage them to pretend they're a sick badass when in reality they're just some sheltered dork. None of these features were included in the Doom games.

Another staple of lurid mid-century comics shows up in the GoldenEye and Perfect Dark style games, which is absent in the Doom games -- butt-kicking babe characters, both ones you can play as or play against. I forgot to mention that in the Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter post, but the shift occurs there as well. There's only one girl character in Street Fighter, but several in Mortal Kombat II and later fighter games that offer shower nozzle masturbation material for nerds.

Sportsmanship has fallen off a cliff during the Millennial era, and that's very clear in the course of first-person shooter games. Since most people didn't play Doom as a player-vs.-player, there wasn't much room for poor sportsmanship. But when people played GoldenEye in player-vs.-player mode, few to none of them respected any kind of ground rules.

The most common form of acting like a wuss was when another player re-spawned after dying. When you start out, you have little or no firepower, no shield, armor, or other type of defense, so that if someone else who's spent time collecting those things feels like notching an easy kill, they'll find someone who's just re-spawned. There are only a handful of locations where a player can re-spawn, so it's not hard to hang around them and mow down more-or-less hopeless adversaries. The now common cowardice of "spawn-camping" began with GoldenEye.

You could also booby-trap items that other players would want to pick up, simply by placing a proximity mine nearby. That way, when someone else goes to increase their defense by picking up a vest of body armor, they're blown to pieces instead. Whoever put it there would then cackle like a jackass. They'd also put proximity mines next to the re-spawn points, so that you wouldn't even have a chance to play that life. Right when you re-spawned, you got blown up.

Finally, moving on to the graphics, you see the same change in the overall visual culture reflected in this increasingly popular video game genre. Some of the major changes are explored here. In general, the Doom games are closer to the more striking '80s visual culture, and the GoldenEye type games to the duller '90s and 2000s visual culture.

GoldenEye has minimal contrast in lighting and looks too dark (ex), little variety of color, let alone combining hot and cold hues (ex), occasionally features exotic locations but never the fantastic (ex), the characters are all the same scale (ex of the largest enemy, a tall person), the colors are washed-out (ex), and the environment and architecture has no repeated design motifs (ex). This has to be one of the worst-looking video games ever made, certainly among those that were blockbusters.

The Doom games are hardly spectacular in the character graphics, although some of the environments give a halfway decent impression of an apocalyptic painting by John Martin (ex). You can find light-dark contrast both within the matte-style backgrounds (ex) and within the playable areas (ex). Color variety isn't so great, but there are frequent combinations of blue and red, for both the setting and the characters (ex). The imagery is a mix of familiar (ex) and exotic/fantastic (ex). Enemies range from the size of a human skull to three or four times human scale (ex). Colors are not very saturated, but not washed-out either. The environments show repeated design motifs whether the surface is some weird alien thing (ex) or stone (ex). Simple things like signs of masonry or veins over a natural surface make the Doom environments hold your interest more than the flat and homogeneous surfaces that make up the environments in GoldenEye.

I don't think I'll do another extended comparison since the iconic video game genres of the '90s and 21st century were player-vs.-player fighting games and first-person shooters, respectively. So as far as looking at video games to see how broadly the social and cultural changes have reached, that seems to cover the big picture.

Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat in a broader perspective

A reversal of direction in the zeitgeist shows up in so many areas of the culture. That's why it makes sense to talk about a zeitgeist in the first place. To show just how broadly a change in the social-cultural atmosphere can reach, let's take a look at a mass phenomenon in youth culture of the early-to-mid-1990s -- the explosion of video games where two players fight against each other in a best 2 of 3 format. It was comparable in intensity to the Davy Crockett craze of the '50s.

First, the player vs. player genre as a whole was a qualitative change from the '80s, where video games that involved beating people up had both players teaming up together to beat up hordes of enemies controlled by the computer. These included Double Dragon, Final Fight, Golden Axe, and many other quarter-eaters. With greater social isolation, kids weren't as interested in team play, and the player vs. player games sprang up to meet the new demand for anti-social ways of playing video games.

By far the two most popular fighting games were Street Fighter (II) and Mortal Kombat. Street Fighter (1991) had one foot still in the '80s, while Mortal Kombat (1992) was unmistakably '90s and quickly displaced Street Fighter. Contrasting their main features will therefore show how the zeitgeist began to shift. You may recognize some of these changes from other domains, several of which I've covered here as well. It does seem a little frivolous to look for these changes in video games, but in the archaeology of popular culture, I say leave no stone unturned.

Visually, Street Fighter has a more stylized look, and Mortal Kombat a more gritty representational look. Take a look through a whole gallery of screenshots here and here. Notice several things in the comparison below:

Street Fighter looks like the work of an illustrator. The guy getting electrocuted is shown in X-ray view, right out of a kid's cartoon. Mortal Kombat shows digitized "animation" of footage taken of live actors performing their moves. The backgrounds look like digitized photos too. The technology for digitized characters in fighting video games existed earlier, in 1990 with Pit Fighter, but it wasn't very popular. Not until Mortal Kombat.

In Street Fighter, the only effluvia you see is an occasional, cartoony vomit if the guy gets struck really hard. In Mortal Kombat, they try to make the blood look as real as possible, and you see it more often.

This shift from stylized to photorealistic shows up everywhere else in the visual culture. Remember when movie posters and album covers featured illustration rather than photography?

Throughout the game, Street Fighter also shows a broader spectrum of colors, greater use of contrasting colors, and higher saturation levels than the more monochromatic and washed-out Mortal Kombat, which looks like a prelude to The Matrix.

The background environments in Street Fighter are more distinctive: you know you're in a Brazilian rainforest, a Spanish flamenco bar, and so on. In Mortal Kombat, it feels like it's all taking place in a void with a few props thrown in, again like The Matrix. Contrast that with Videodrome, where you get a strong flavor of the city, generally not very palatable. The rise of pure fantasy movies also feel like they're taking place in the middle of nowhere, totally generic, not some distinctive real place that we just haven't been to before.

Mortal Kombat's explosion of gore also puts it squarely in the more unwholesome period of the past 20 years. In the image above, you can see the guy on the left hurling a spear into the other guy's chest, and it's attached to a rope that he's going to use to drag him over in a daze, setting him up for a free cheapshot.

But Mortal Kombat went even further -- everything had to be EXTREME in the '90s -- by adding an element of gameplay that Street Fighter lacked. At the end of your second winning match, it didn't just end there. You were given the chance to perform a special move, called a "fatality," on your helpless opponent. These were so over-the-top, like ripping the guy's head off with the spinal column still attached, blood dripping down, while the headless body slumps to the ground.

This level of goriness heralded the rebirth of mid-century unwholesomeness, which back in those days showed up in comic books. That caused a panic over horror/crime comics, led to Congressional hearings, and ended up with self-censorship (the Comics Code Authority). The exact same course played out again in the '90s, with the panic over violent video games, Congressional hearings, and self-censorship (the Entertainment Software Rating Board).

Come to think of it, we looked forward to pulling off one of these ultra-gory, humiliating fatality moves more than actually winning the best 2 of 3. It was part of the trend away from good sportsmanship and toward that whole "In your FACE, bitch!" and "Suck it!" kind of attitude.

Mortal Kombat II from 1993 slathered thick layers of '90s meta-aware ironic dorkiness on top of the finishing moves. They retained the EXTREME fatalities, and added animalities, where you turned into a fierce animal before ripping them in half or whatever. But now you could perform harmless finishing moves, like turning them into a crying baby, or doing overly cutesy friendship things for them, like cutting out a set of paper dolls to offer your defeated opponent. Huh-huh, I get it.

And then there was that fourth-wall-breaking moment when a digitized photo of one of the game designers, or whoever he was, popped in the corner of the screen to yell "Toasty!" every once in awhile. If you pressed the right buttons then, a special level would open up. The main thing you took away from it was, "Huh-huh, this game is so wacky and zany and quirky!" And lame.

To play well at Street Fighter, you only needed to memorize a handful of button combinations to execute certain moves. But you didn't really need these special moves much anyway. The characters were differentiated and specialized enough in their skills that any one you picked had a natural advantage over at least some of the other characters (like fast vs. slow). Not much memorization or repetition required. With Mortal Kombat, the characters are just about all the same in their speed, jumping, and other basic skills. That required you to memorize all of their special moves to gain the upper hand in what would otherwise be a stalemate between clones.

This shift toward memorization, mindless repetition, and checking off all the boxes on a list (of special moves to master) is part of the broader trend toward OCD behavior over the past 20 years. It got even worse with the sequels to Mortal Kombat -- the only person who could master so many moves in Mortal Kombat II was some geek who spent all his free time alone in the movie theater lobby hunched over the arcade cabinet.

That was compounded by the Pokemon-like proliferation of characters to choose from in the sequels. Gotta master 'em all! The first Mortal Kombat had 7 characters, the sequel had 12, the next had 15, and so on.

Because of its more rule-structured, OCD type of gameplay, kids didn't crowd around Mortal Kombat and get as excited as they did around Street Fighter, whose gameplay was more loose. The group of dudes hanging around Street Fighter were always more in worry-free, hanging-out mode; around Mortal Kombat, they were more in high-pressure, test-taking mode. It's like a bunch of friends having a couple beers while shooting the bull on the front lawn, as opposed to following the rules of beer pong or flip cup, with no interaction. Mortal Kombat is more choreographed, not spontaneous, kind of like the fake-looking fight scenes in the new Star Wars trilogy compared to the original ones.

Street Fighter thus also allowed younger kids to play alongside the older ones. When it blew, I was just 10, but the teenage kids didn't mind me hanging around the arcade cabinet with them. At the mall where I played it the most, there was one guy who could kick just about anybody's ass. Usually I didn't even bother putting my quarter next in line on the monitor when he was there. But a few times I did, and one of those I was this close to beating him.

But with Mortal Kombat and its sequels, fucking forget about it. If there was some nerd who'd memorized and practiced the list of moves and knew who to play against who else, there'd be no way a 10 year-old non-fanatic player would be able to hold his own.

Those are some of the major differences I remember, and that echo so much else in the broader changes underway during the '90s. The Street Fighter craze died off pretty quickly after Mortal Kombat came out. My friends and I still played Street Fighter a lot at home -- that was an easy way out of a slump in the course of a sleepover. But I don't remember any of the sequels coming out in arcades at all; they must have been very limited. I remember some of the variations on Street Fighter II coming out for home consoles, not with much enthusiasm from us kids.

Mortal Kombat kept going and going, though. I clearly remember the popularity of II in the arcades, and the snack shop near my freshman dorm had a cabinet for 4. Not to mention the home versions. The Genesis version of the original was particularly popular because they kept the blood in it, and you didn't see that too much on home games at the time.

Both series got feature-length movies, and Mortal Kombat earned $122 million, while Street Fighter took in $99 million. Mortal Kombat also produced a fairly popular, ear-grating techno song, while Street Fighter didn't. It belonged more to the very end of the '80s phenomenon of the action movie that had an engaging, motivational soundtrack (Rocky III and IV, The Karate Kid, Top Gun, and so on).

Guess my boredom with Mortal Kombat was yet another case of not wanting the '80s to devolve into the '90s. Alternative music, saggy jeans, the Jerry Spring Show... and Mortal Kombat. Some of us only flirted with those things and quickly looked to anything cool from earlier times -- punk music, thrift store clothes, the archive at the local video rental store. The birth of vintage mania, as what was new became so boring, embarrassing, and degrading.