I decided that if I were going to be dating in today’s world, I wanted to be “with it,” on par with twenty- or thirty-somethings, and up-to-date on how to hook a man, if I ever found one I thought was worth catching. There was no way I was going to ask my own children what they did on dates. I could Google “dating,” but I’m more of a “picture is worth a thousand words” girl, so I turned to my old educational tool, the TV.
Television in the 1950s was quite tame compared to today’s “bare all and bar none” attitude. There was no sex on any shows I remember from the 1950s. Lucy and Ricky slept in twin beds, Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver never entered a bedroom other than Wally and the Beav’s, and Bachelor Father John Forsythe only had dinner dates.
By the time I was in my teens, television was starting to flirt with more adult-like shows. When The Dating Game first premiered in the late 1960s, the premise appeared to be a bit innocuous. A single young lady had a chance to choose one of three young men for a date, solely by asking questions of them. The catch was that she never saw them because they were seated behind a screen. Innocent enough until the questions and answers started becoming a bit risqué, with innuendos, and lots of laughter from the studio audience. I remember watching an episode where the contestant asked each of the three men what their favorite vegetable was. One answered green beans, but when the next man answered “big cucumbers,” the girl giggled and the audience roared. Not being a veggie connoisseur and not liking the taste of anything remotely salad-y, I didn’t understand what was so funny. I imagined at the time it was a ratings booster.
The television of today contains plenty of shows about dating. They’re called sitcoms or reality shows, and while designed for entertainment, they can also be very educational. Before I let my daughter put me on the social network, I watched episodes of shows I’d never seen before, like How I Met Your Mother, Sex and the City, and The Bachelorette. In the interest of covering all bases, and to see what the men might be thinking, I even watched The Bachelor. Some of these shows made The Dating Game look as tame and innocent as the children’s show of my generation Captain Kangaroo.
Whether it’s for television ratings or the fact that the population of today is more sophisticated—or naughty—the shows of today leave little to the imagination in the world of romance and sex. Take for example, The Bachelorette. When a single lady, called a bachelorette, meets a group of eligible men, I was reminded of my college science class on mammalogy, specifically the part about mating rituals. The human males use their plumage, their grooming, and their physique to try to attract the female. And they do it in ways that would have earned censorship in the 1950s, but that seem to captivate the audience and raise ratings in the twenty-first century!
Sex and the City fascinated me. The fact that four beautiful young women could have sex with so many men, and then talk about their escapades as though they were reporting on something as common as getting their hair done, astounded me. I almost felt sorry for them, thinking that they had so many men instead of being able to find one true love. Almost, I said.
I didn’t learn too much from these shows, except that the standard of good taste has gone south. But I did learn a whole new slew of words and phrases. The best way I can describe some of my new knowledge is to define what the words are not.
In the twenty-first century, “friends with benefits” does not mean someone with a swimming pool or a condo on the beach, or the person who orders an expensive, delicious dessert and then pushes it to you to eat. “Friends with benefits” has something to do with sex with someone you know but don’t love. Evidently, the twenty-first century arrived without the lesson drilled into my parochial junior-high seventh-grade biology class from Sister Mary Andrew: “Sex is for procreation, not recreation.”
In the dating world, “hook up” does not refer to what you do to your TV cable, a trailer, or your bra. I guess it can vary in its meaning to cover “hanging out” with a friend, talking with a stranger, or going at it like dogs in heat!
“DO ME” is not what kids beg when they want to be tossed up in the air, or have their fingernails painted like Mommy’s. It’s sexual. ’Nuff said.