What did I personally like about the 1960s?

There are two ways to look at this. What did I like at the time? and how do I feel about all this now that I have a daughter 18 and one 25 and a stepdaughter about 40 and a God Daughter almost 30?

I'll start with at the time because I was 12 in 1960 and 21 in 1969. So, around 1960s boys were starting to take a piece of building wood, (a 2 by 4) about a foot long and then take a roller skate that attached to your shoes and to separate them. Then they would take the front half of the skate and put it on the front of the piece of wood, put the back part of the skate on the back part of the then 1 foot long piece of 2 by 4 with screws or nails and then ride to school on the new type of skateboard or sometimes they would be towed by other friends on a bicycle sort of like a water skier is. This was very common in Glendale in 1960. Then I saw a girl coming down from UC Berkeley from the university there and girls where I lived always dressed fairly conservatively unless they were poor. But, middle class and upper class girls dressed very conservatively and were conditioned to wait for marriage until they became sexually active and only then for children.

I remember this girl from Berkeley with a Pendleton shirt on (something you would never see then). Then she took off the Pendleton shirt and she had hairy armpits and a strapless top. So, I was sort of overwhelmed by this change because girls just didn't do that yet in Los Angeles.

Then boys with their skateboards since 7th grade boys (I was in 7th grade in 1960 since I was 12) were required at my school (most public schools in the Los Angeles area were like this) to take 1/4 of wood shop, 1/4 of metal shop, 1/4 of Drafting, and 1/4 of print shop. So, during 7th grade boys were always being rotated through all these trade teaching classes then. So, by the time you were in 8th grade you were familiar with saws both metal and wood, electric and hand saws, using nails and screws, planing both wood and metal to make things and even tools. So, during 7th grade wood shop, one of the favorite things for boys to do then was to make surfboard shaped wooden things to turn into skateboards. So, this is where the surfboard shape of skateboards began there in Southern California in wood shops by 7th graders and everyone else who liked the idea of any age. This was around 1960 when this happened for the first time. Within a couple of years companies starting making plastic wheels instead of metal ones for traction in turning as a lot of people were getting hurt on corners or hitting rocks and bumps and going to the hospital then. So, plastic or rubber wheels saved a lot of lives. Also, they were bigger than the metal wheels and were safer in this way too.

Girls started using birth control pills in 1960 and this was a real shock to the older generation because it caused morals to change a whole lot and some women got murdered by their husbands for using birth control pills instead of getting pregnant every year if they were Catholic or something like that.

Also, when abortion became legal some men killed women for having abortions especially if it was their kid being aborted whether they were married or not. So, like I said things changed a lot and people started to behave much differently.

However, thousands of years of things being one way wasn't going to change overnight successfully without problems. Those problems took mostly about 20 years or so to manifest through things like Herpes and AIDS and:

Chlamydia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlamydia

Wikipedia

Chlamydia may refer to: Chlamydia infection, a sexually transmitted infection · Chlamydia (bacterium), a genus of pathogenic bacteria. Chlamydia trachomatis ...

‎Chlamydia infection - ‎Chlamydia (genus) - ‎Chlamydia trachomatis - ‎Chlamydiae

 

Also, people were not prepared for all the emotional consequences of having more than one sexual partner, so all kinds of physical and psychological problems that most people didn't have before much became endemic problems.

 

So, middle class and upper class women went from a state of frigidness by training to something else that got them in trouble in a whole lot of ways more than before. However, one of the other things that came from this was sexual freedom and psychological freedom and physical freedom.

 

It's basically like this: If you don't have to have a baby every time you have sex with someone, this also means you don't have to support that child that you didn't have. It also means that if you want to and can support yourself you can have sex with as many men as you want as a woman as long as you don't get a venereal disease and die or date men that are going to beat you up or kill you. 

 

This really changed the way most women were. It sort of filtered down through the layers of society from the top: college educated women were the first to use birth control pills and then it rather quickly filtered down throughout society. 

 

The sexual freedom era was starting in 1960 and ended around 1980 when AIDS was first discovered. However, it had started to slow down by the mid 70s because of various kinds of venereal disease and people having psychological problems by having sexual relationships with too many people.

 

At the time (starting in 1969 when I was 21) I liked the way women had become that were more open to sexual relationships than in 1960. However, I also found this very confusing until I got married in 1974 on a variety of levels. I would just get used to being with one women when that relationship would end and then I would be in another relationship with someone else. I found this really confusing to the point where I realized at 25 I would rather be married than have to go through this confusion anymore. My son was born in 1974 so I had a whole new project to focus on then to raise him successfully to adulthood and get him educated so he actually wanted to stay alive in his life too.

From 1969 until 1974 I thought it was great that women were so sexually free but looking back now I see it in a different context which is kind of the same problem of alcohol or drugs. Sexual relationships can be like taking drugs or being an alcoholic so "WHY?" you are involved in a particular relationship becomes the most important thing you need to think about. Because if you don't think about the ramifications of all your actions it can be as serious in the short and long run as becoming an alcoholic or drug addict. In other words if you are a sex addict (either male or female) this is very problematic to having a long life.

Also, if you are married with children and are also a sex addict this also can have disastrous results in a person's life. So, thinking about what exactly you are trying to accomplish in any given relationship will help you and the person you are with in staying alive long term. Because you don't want to cause someone to kill themselves because they thought you were serious when you weren't. This is the problem I see with the mores changing in the 1960s to what they are now.