kontextmaschine

So like in the 90s with “supermodels”, were you supposed to be masturbating to them? I don’t think so. Like, you would acknowledge that Cindy Crawford was famous for her beautiful displays of her body, but then you’d want like, one of the Baywatch girls or Singled Out hosts that had transitioned from photo-not-studio-video porn to B-list TV

Were you supposed to be relating to them as fantasy trophy wives?

Harvey Bullock on Batman: The Animated Series was totally “The Toothpick-Chewing Man”, huh?

For all the wholesome family values throwbackness of the ‘90s CBS family dramas, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was about a woman who was somehow simultaneously a working single mom and a childless professional and Touched By An Angel was really as New Age and more therapeutic than Christian

It’s actually impressive how much of an impact Home Improvement (1991-1999) didn’t leave

Johnathan Taylor-Thomas! And that “rut-roh” as a clear precursor to “git-r-done!”

Between Jeff “Vurt” Noon and Shirley Manson and I guess Irvine Welsh and White Dwarf magazine and Vertigo comics at the comic shop and “English summer of love” rave stuff my late 90s had a weirdly British working class tint, which made them like 4X better

Kind of impressed no one’s yet coined the 90s as “The Age of Silicone and Silicon”

I mean I have the “Oh my God, Becky” bit of Baby Got Back stored in memory but I don’t really remember that being a thing otherwise

prokopetz:

I think the way media depictions are shaping up we’re going to end up with a pop-cultural vision of the 1990s that’s a lot more cyberpunk than it really was.

argumate:

argumate:

argumate:

on the one hand the old game magazines were expensive and contained 75% advertising by weight, on the other hand the articles were also advertisements.

and what advertisements!

a completely different ad for a completely different game but I’m definitely sensing a theme here.

Remember Abercrombie & Fitch? Like in the ‘90s doing big sexy Leni Riefenstahl teenager campaigns, specifically hiring the most attractive kids in your high school to push this mass-market neo-preppy thing? That Was Weird.

Like, is Hollister even still a thing? Aeropostale? If we’re gonna look back and go in over youth pastors and gymnastics coaches and the guy you interned with when you were already out of college, like, what about those guys who had it together enough to manage a mall store but hadn’t gone for a career other than mall retail taking control of these high schoolers’ life schedules and income and making them wear sexy beachwear as a way to make that place seem like a chill 16yo’s paradise?

Remember how Hot Topic started as the place besides concert merch tables to get band t-shirts and years before anyone coined “BBW” or wore problem glasses they dominated the hip-clothes-for-fat-girls market and spun it off as Torrid?

Thinking, as always, about the 90s, Seinfeld, and Friends

Seinfeld specifically was a back-to-the city premise – it’s a place where clever adults always have something to talk about – and an exposition of Larry David’s vision of secular Judaism as a model of urbanity – rabbinically arguing, testing, hair-splitting over everyday life, with Festivus as a feast of the Ordeal of Civilization, where we drop our social facades (airing of grievances) and engage in primal contest (feats of strength)

Friends still the city as setting for the new life stage it’s about

I talk about how Ross is supposed to come off as behind the times, the point is that he never intended to live this life, he expected to be married in the suburbs until his wife broke off their engagement (citing a newly realized lesbianism, which means a 90s sensibility of seeking your true self is the thing that disrupted his happy ending, but also that he really needs to develop a better sense of who would be a good match for him)

Rachel’s marriage was more intended for her than by her, in rejecting it she becomes the 90s spirit of seeking your true self as a disruptive force. Which is what powers the Ross/Rachel central spine, ending, as comedies must, with a wedding.

But afer the curtain falls, once they don’t need a stream of new people to date how long do the married Ross and Rachel stay in Manhattan? Joey went to LA, right, (I guess Mad About You was the married-having-kids version of the back to the city show)

And what about the show has to be in Manhattan? The offscreen recurring joke guy they can see naked in his apartment in the next building? I suppose even a coffee shop hosting uh, coffeehouse musicians was pretty novel in the early 90s. (Cappuccino in wide cups used to have some of the symbolic significance lattes do now but calling back the beatniks, see also Mike Meyers’ So I Married An Axe Murderer)

I’ve talked before and… that’s the second post today I know I made but can’t find… here! about HIMYM as the updated successor and how Friends’ arc is Ross gets engaged like three times by his early 30s and finally it sticks, Ted Mosby’s is he realized one of his friends was his real soulmate but by the time they get through all their preliminary stuff they’re 50

Coulda swore Naomi Klein was editing The Nation for a while, I was going to say it makes sense they turned to the author of No Logo after the only energy in ‘90s left publishing was Adbusters, but I guess I’m confusing Katrina vanden Huevel and the period when Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” stuff was big?

We should canonize bungee jumping as a symbol of the 90s.

I remember the first story I read on alt.sex.stories(.moderated?) in the mid-90s was an installment of a series called “Paisley Pillows” where they fucked in a bathtub and some stuff probably meaningful to the author happened

kontextmaschine:

theevenprime:

kontextmaschine:

Thinking of how specifically 1993 was that bit in The Giver where when adult roles are assigned some of the girls are to be relatively pampered while they bear two pregnancies and then go in the general labor pool

One, in that the measured, proscribed regularity is a sideways reference to contemporary Chinese “one-child” policy

And two, how it casts reproduction as a matter exclusively for lower-class women, who are seen from the narration’s point of view as kind of pathetic for being okay with this life purpose.

This was the decade of the Ricki Lake/Sally Jessie Raphael/Jerry Springer “daytime talk” freak shows, remember

Was it really 2? That’s barely replacement rate for them, let alone the rest of the population.

IIRC the book opens with a delivery of twins that they weigh and euthanize and discard the runtier one, I think it was framed more as a society concerned with overpopulation (but not much justified in worldbuilding, I think more in thematic reaction to 70s fears and the structures created against them)

Like I remember the short story that became Children of Men, “antinatalist dystopia” was very much a thing in the early 90s

Thinking of how specifically 1993 was that bit in The Giver where when adult roles are assigned some of the girls are to be relatively pampered while they bear a few pregnancies and then go in the general labor pool

One, in that the measured, proscribed regularity is a sideways reference to contemporary Chinese “one-child” policy

And two, how it casts reproduction as a matter exclusively for lower-class women, who are seen from the narration’s point of view as kind of pathetic for being okay with this life purpose.

This was the decade of the Ricki Lake/Sally Jessie Raphael/Jerry Springer “daytime talk” freak shows, remember

God remember that part of the 90s where eating disorders were the big thing?

In the early-mid 90s, Generation X was absolutely known for wanting to die and inscrutable reappropriated bits of pop culture