neeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrddddds – not as innocent as they appear?

when you grown up in the south you see more than your share of racism…

…sometimes it’s that dangerous “if you ain’t like me then swing from a tree” kinda racism, and sometimes it’s just that “grandma’s from a different time” kinda racism. we’re gonna look at an offshoot of the latter, ’cause i’m feeling kinda old right now.

it’s amazing how what passes as harmless fun to one generation deeply offends another. this all arose from me reading this article. when i was younger i watched revenge of the nerds a hundred times. it was funny. it was irreverent. it was lewd and rude but not anything any of us would call “offensive”. there were no protests at the theater and for a while you couldn’t rent it at the video store because it was always checked out…it was THAT popular. and this was before redbox or netflix or anything else on demand or streaming – if you wanted to watch a movie that night you had to actually get in your car and GO SOMEWHERE, possibly even interact with a human or two.

how the fuck would this current generation do it?

but the article linked above kinda explains why, in this day and age, you don’t see it on any of the aforementioned streaming sites – the lead character scores the girl he’s into after filming her naked without her knowledge, selling stills of said nudity to his fellow students, and then having sex with her while donning a mask to conceal his identity and make her think it was her boyfriend when it wasn’t.

and this is just the plot points for the “hero” of the movie. the article above points out other stuff that just would not fly in this day and age.

it’s been interesting, as i’ve gotten older, to see the ebb and flow of pop culture and what it can get away with. for a while it was a “damn the man” kind of attitude as you had 2 live crew and N.W.A. selling tons of albums and that was after we’d sat through all in the family and good times as kids which are shows that played unedited on network TV back then but somehow have to be bleeped for cable now.

it’s like we’ve gone backwards in so many ways it’s kind of frightening. but then again, we haven’t. porn’s worse. a lot of music has gotten worse. but while you can say fuck and show fucking and basic cable will now let all kinds of language fly you can’t say other things. you could say “he got shit on his dick” on basic cable, but add the words “what a fag!” at the end and you lose all your sponsors.

i’ll be curious to see where the morality tide takes us next. i never woulda seen this coming back in the 80’s, where a simple comedic article could so easily point out the “nightmarish” qualities of a teen t&a comedy and have it actually, in 2019 terms, make sense to me. let’s see where we are when i’m really old…like kramer’s age or something!