I’ve noticed a large decrease in interpersonal openness in society, even as we’ve gotten more communications technologies.

This is found society-wide, not just in gender relations – for instance, with how kids generally are not permitted any unscheduled time alone without parental supervision these days.

I remember back in the 80s how very often older girls (13-19 age range) would flirt with younger guys like me to give us practice in dealing with women, and probably to boost their own egos too I’d guess. I’d bet this doesn’t happen at all anymore, and if it does it’s much, much less frequent now. Anecdotally, I saw it frequently in the 80s, and I have not ever seen it since.

Then, it was considered utterly normal and was actually really helpful to me and a lot of men to know how to talk to people to which we were attracted, and not to be intimidated.

These days, it’d probably be considered child molestation or some such bullshit.

I’m not nostalgic for the 80s, but people who do not remember that time well have trouble understanding how vastly different society felt then. Things are definitely better now, especially for gay people and other minorities.

But how to quantify how much more open and approachable people were then? It’s nearly impossible. Because to modern people, it just doesn’t make much sense as the world has changed so much.

I don’t have any real idea exactly why it’s happened, but it definitely has. Things that would have been utterly normal for women or men to do in 1984 would now be likely to get one arrested.

Interesting how society can change so quickly, and how people born after 1980 (who are just slightly too young to have more mature memories of what it was really like) deny that it could have ever really been that way.