from the woodstock festival. 1969
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/auVAAslHotlq-zpAKW2H1kgOy1U=/1400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/18968449/GettyImages_1161372262_deuce.jpg
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When I was a little kid we had no television so in our free time most often we grabbed a cricket bat and ball or a football and went to a nearby paddock and had at it. No charge for the cow shit !
I don't know how young Americans get laid today, looks like a lot of frumunda cheese...
shareYup. Wheat belly has caught up with us.
shareTo be fair, these were kids. At least 90% of that crowd was under 25, and they were students or working-poor kids, most of whom spend what little money they had on drugs and not food.
Also to be fair, the photographer was photographing hotties. Pictures of dumpy girls and skinny-fat boys don't sell.
watch the documentary. people were just thinner
https://media.gettyimages.com/id/96236444/photo/view-of-a-portion-of-the-audience-as-they-watch-a-performance-at-the-woodstock-music-and-arts.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=-zthiwUtqRPqeKVju333DL8TlrQ1gBKsdy8SjfLKjNg=
Again, the crowd at Woodstock was *very* young, poor, and was on drugs, and the guys in the picture were probably the only ones there with any muscle development. They are not a good sample population in a discussion about obesity trends, the Woodstock crowd would have been thinner than the general population.
However, since you can't be arsed to do your own work, I've taken 10 seconds out of my life to find you a better sample picture, here's Disneyland in the late 1960s, which offers a wider demographic sample. Wider spread of ages, more prosperous, less recreational drug use. Still a younger-trending crowd and I suspect the photographer was looking for a crowd with leggy girls in, but most of the people are slim by modern standards.
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180725151620-tease-super-tease.jpg
Here's another picture, sports fans "take over Shea Stadium", and I have no clue why, but it's a random crowd scene from the same year.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V5d_DXHS4Zw/XYV57BWJOGI/AAAAAAABFic/8i_UE3ZnCmopdJ6K5_5BwH2OjVmCBZcrgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1969what.JPG
Yes, slimmer on average than the typical crowd today, although it's possible that the oldies and fatties were staying in their seats and not energetically swarming the field... ANYWAY, if people were lighter then, it's because they weren't eating horrible processed Walmart food stuffed full of high fructose corn syrup and other additives designed to make people keep eating crap and buying more. They also weren't working 2 or 3 jobs just to pay the rent, these were people who had time to cook good honest food and to take a walk after dinner.
where are you getting the notion they were poor. they were mostly college students from the northeast. probably from working class and middle class families. the drugs back then were weed and lsd, not hard drugs.
shareOh for fuck's sake, typical college students *lived* poor back then, unless they were from families that were both filthy rich and generous! The average student who wanted to go to Woodstock would have been strained to come up with enough money for a concert ticket and some gas or dope money for the trip, and getting there might have meant crowding 8 people into a WV Bug, because they only knew one person who owned a car.
And FYI the drug culture of the late 1960s was... expansive and experimental! Yes, weed and LSD were big and got a lot of press, but so were heroin and hashish and MDMA, amphetamines and tranquilizers, and even smoking dried banana peels or oregano, people would try anything that might give their neurons a gut punch. I'm not an expert because I was still in grade school in 1969, and never got into drugs when I was older, but even kids then had more of a clue than you do now.
"Living poor" isn't poor. They were middle-class. Not everyone did drugs in the 60s. Don't believe the hype.
shareAnd that's why I said "living poor" and not "poor". The average college student of the day may have had next to no disposable income, and may have had to make sacrifices to get to a concert, but thats not the same thing as poverty.
And as I myself didn't do drugs in the sixties, being under 10 years old, I'm well aware that not everyone did drugs!
Not really "living poor" if a middle-class person can call mom or dad to ask for money. Their parents likely paid for some of their college tuition or expenses, too. People hitchhiked in the 60s or drove. Money went much further. Even a single person making minimum wage could afford a New York City apartment. Doctor's house call was $5! Try that trick in 2023!
Poor and middle-class experience life very differently. "Living poor" isn't the same since they have knowledge, contacts, resources, skills, etc. denied someone who actually is poor. My college friends who were poor had to drop out of school unlike my middle-class friends.
Teens and adults I knew during the 60s didn't do any drugs. I know there were people who did them, but it wasn't as common as mass media shows. I saw much more drug use during the 70s with my generation.
I guess your parents were squares like mine since neither of us went to Woodstock.
I *said* that "living poor" isn't the same thing as being poor! Right above! But one of the differences between then and now was that parents were much more likely to refuse requests for money and assistance from their kids. If a college kid ran out of disposable income before the next check was due, parents might well refuse any requests for additional money, and tell the kid that it'd build character or teach them to budget or whatever. Hell, parents had no trouble throwing kids out at 18 in those days, mine would do exactly that a few years later.
And yes, my parents and their suburban friends were total squares, very anti-drug, and terrified that their kids would walk off of immediately start shooting heroin or walk off the edges of buildings if they ever smoked a joint. Of course half their kids were selling dope or cocaine to their schoolmates by 16, I was the exception there.
"parents were much more likely to refuse requests for money and assistance from their kids."
That's more of a working-class and poor thing rather than middle-class. They think they'll spoil their kids. Middle and upper-middle-class parents want to expose their children to more experiences, give them opportunities to succeed and have a better life than they had. They know life is hard and competitive so they want them to have advantages.
In the 60s, apartments were affordable for an 18-year-old and it was considered a sign of maturity. Younger people wanted to be independent and live on their own life, too. That attitude existed at my university where 18-year-olds lived in the dorms and were happy about not having parental rules so they went wild like a guy getting an earring. I never saw any drug use there and it was rare in my high school.
Smoking a cigarette was the big taboo for my parents. Drugs never entered anyone's mind at that time, although years later many kids from my elementary school died from AIDS because they used heroin.
Parental generosity varied then, as now, only then it was socially acceptable for parents to pull the "I'm refusing a reasonable request for your own good" crap with their kids, instead of spoiling them. Nowadays any middle-class parent who doesn't spoil their kid into dependence and entitlement is threatened with CPS, but then there were people who gave their kids as little as possible rather than treating them to new experiences, because they thought it was the right thing to do. They though that it'd make their kids more self-reliant and responsible... and maybe that was true, back in the days when students could live on a part-time job, or an allowance from parents who couldn't afford to give much, as long as their lifestyle was all roommates and canned baked beans.
Well, child-rearing has never been my problem, I'm more interested in the social history of the 1960s than children anyway.
But yeah, drugs were a big bugaboo when I was a kid and a teen, but then I grew up in suburban California where there may have been more drugs and drug worries floating around than in other places.
"parents who couldn't afford to give much"
That sounds like working-class parents. Deprivation and struggle are working-class and poor people's values. Don't spoil the kid.
People ate more real food in the 60s. Processed foods and TV dinners weren't a common thing. I think TV dinners became more popular in the later 60s or 70s when they started advertising them and I had them for the first time.
I don't know anyone who had roommates in the 60s. No need for them. Now, adults have them because apartments are unaffordable and parents chip in.
Middle and upper middle-class don't believe they're spoiling their children by giving them experiences, knowledge and things. Most don't believe in hitting so I used to witness some entertaining child tantrums and fathers pleading with them to behave in public.
Plenty of drugs in my area, but practically no one I knew or know uses them. They're clean-cut, ambitious, independent and religious.
60s were entertaining. Barefoot hippies, banana bikes, metal skates, great music and social upheaval. Groovy time!
they weren't from poor undernourished families from west virginia. they were from working class families from the northeast and had plenty to eat.
shareNo, college students of the day weren't malnourished or mired in generational poverty, they just spent a lot of time being short of cash and maybe running out of grocery money before the end of the month and having to live on peanut butter and canned peas.
Having little disposable income was typical, and buying weed might or beer may have meant skipping meals.
Hell, that was how it was in college in the 90s still. Ramen casserole ruled the day, which is Ramen noodles with a can of tuna thrown in.
shareMaybe it still is, for those who don't stay at home through college. I HOPE it is, because if a kid is taking out student loans for college living expenses, they actually need to live on ramen and never splurge! Every little luxury paid for with student loans is another nail in the coffin of forever debt.
I didn't get a chance to be a full-time student until I was older and knew how to budget. So I lived in one room and I'd make thinks like big pots of salmon chowder - which is one little can of low-quality salmon in with a big pot of potatoes, milk, water, and an onion. That, and fresh $1 bauguettes from the Vietnamese place.
Have you ever been to a modern multi day music festival? Similar demographic as Woodstock, yet many more fat people.
shareTell me where I said people aren't heavier now.
shareI'm mostly talking about the demographics who attend these festivals. Kind of like a modern day Woodstock, yet the difference in bodies is night and day.
shareYeah. The number of hefty kids does worry me, they're being fed unhealthy processed foods and prevented from doing normal kid things like playing outside or walking from place to place.
But I still say that the pic above isn't even representative of the Woodstock crowd as a whole, those guys are muscular and hot, while the average college student or counterculturist would be more like what we call "skinny fat" these days. Here's a different crowd shot, nobody's very big but nobody's visibly muscled either.
https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.3ad6b086c46db457af976a769ec62c2a?rik=jGQdF4AiE7OOkQ&riu=http%3a%2f%2ffolklife.si.edu%2fMedia%2fDefault%2fTalk+Story%2fwoodstock-crowd.jpg&ehk=ycbmO%2fLyJUGHi2aN5vFQUwI8y0ddGmXh9mh0Mcr93dM%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0
Lol, two girls? What a sausage party!
share