Truth about the old days

I am old enough that I can say what I want to say and I don't need to worry about it coming back to haunt me. I want to tell people the truth about the decades past. Too many of the young people I encounter these days seem to look at the past as if "Leave it to Beaver" and "The Donna Reed Show" are accurate portrayals of the time. I am here to tell you that they absolutely are NOT accurate.

When I was a teenage girl in the early 1950's there were different types of teenagers, different cliques, good and bad, rich and poor, rebels and conformists, etc. I came from a very working class family, none of my neighbors, relatives or anyone else from  my little world ever went to college. My father was a WWII veteran who repaired jeeps in the Army and working in a Detroit auto manufacturing plant after the war all the way up until his death in 1984. Our family all lived in the Detroit suburbs. We considered ourselves middle class but in retrospect we were very lower middle class, working class.

Anyways, I wasn't the prettiest or smartest girl. Certainly not popular or really skilled at anything. The boys and girls who I hung out with were mostly like me. Just kids who didn't have any real dreams of college or making it big, we were just kids doing our school work. Reading cheap dimestore novels, going for rides in our boyfriends cars. Hanging around the garage while our boyfriends worked on their cars.

I don't think that nowadays the young people use the terms "heavy petting" or "parking" but when I was a teenager those two things were always on our lips and minds. "Heavy petting" was a euphemism for what would be more formally called "mutual masturbation." Although to be honest, it was almost always us girls masturbating our boyfriends, nothing much mutual about that. "Parking" was the act of a boy and his girl "parking" their car in some lonely remote location and "French kissing" and oftentimes getting into "heavy petting" and sometimes even sex.

We didn't have much going on in our lives. We weren't part of any clubs, didn't play any sports, I don't remember any of us having jobs really. We would steal booze from our parents and go out to secluded areas and drink it. Usually afterwards we would park.

One time after my boyfriend had drunk a lot of whiskey we were parked alone out on this secluded dirt road. I was masturbating him but he wanted more. I will spare you the details but he raped me. I was 16 years old and a virgin.

Of course I didn't tell the police or my parents. What would I say? To be entirely honest the word "rape" never crossed my mind! Rape was something that happened in a dark alley where some dirty fiend held a knife to your throat. So I shut up about it. And eventually it happened again and over time it became "normal" and I just let it happen although I never initiated it. I didn't know it at the time but the same thing was happening with most of my friends and their boyfriends.

A few years later and my boyfriend and I were married and many of my friends married their boyfriends also. And that was that.

I guess my point is that the sexually repressed 1950's was not all happy families. Behind the scenes there was a lot of brutality going on. I could go on and on about how common spousal abuse was, about my best friends older sister was gang raped or how one of my friends was forced into having sex with her boss or how my younger brother was beaten so badly by his coworkers at the factory he worked at (for no reason other than they thought he was "stuck up" when in reality he was just shy) that he lost the sight in one eye and his jaw could never open wider than about an inch without extreme pain.

The world back then was a different place. It had this facade of pleasantness and an incredibly sick underside. But it seems like now people only know of the facade that we all presented.