Ideally not asking for specific events. More like shifting cultural trends, outlooks, inconveniences etc.

46 comments

  4. Sexism was very prevalent and encouraged. Granted we didn’t really realize it at the time.

  5. Much higher crime rate especially in cities like NYC and LA. People talk about the crime rate now but don’t see just how bad it was before. There was a time where the yearly murder rate in NYC was in the 2ks, now it’s around 500. Still bad, but a major improvement over the last few decades.

    [https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm](https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm)

  6. Anyone who acts like political gridlock and Democrats and Republicans seeming to exist only to make sure the other party doesn’t accomplish ANYTHING do not correctly remember the 90s.

    A lot of media depictions of gay people from the 90s would cause modern audiences a heart attack. Nevermind shit like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

    Race relations were worse than today. Improving at the time, but we’ve made more progress than people give society credit for.

    Seriously, to me, modern times are surprisingly like a return to the 90s, but with social media which, thank FUCK, we didn’t have back then.

  8. I was a lesbian teen in the 90s. You’ve got no idea how amazing it felt when, at the very end of the 90s, there were a small handful of openly gay characters on TV.

    I lived in a liberal area where I didn’t believe there would be any worse consequences for coming out than dirty looks and name calling, and the name calling only from kids I wasn’t friends with, and if they got caught that audkts would tell them they were behaving badly. That was still more than enough for me to have zero intention of admitting I liked girls. I can only imagine for kids in more conservative areas.

  9. It was a significantly harder time to be young if you were LGBT. Gay was still regularly used as a casual insult and trans people were at best unknown to the general public. Gay marriage was still genuinely controversial and illegal. Sexism was much less extreme than what you might have experienced growing up in the 70s, but kids and young adults could still expect significant social pushback if they didn’t stick within their assigned gender roles. Also the dot com bubble burst and caused a recession in the late 90s and air quality and water quality was generally lower than it is today and childhood lead levels were generally higher. The Oklahoma city bombing as well as a few other high profile terror attacks (unabombings, columbine, the world trade center bombing) all happened in that decade as well.

    I think a lot of reddit romanticizes the 90s because they were small children and shielded from many of the worlds problems. We certainly have new and serious problems today, but the 90s had plenty of problems of their own.

  10. I was a teen in the 90’s. When I was young, everyone romanticized the 60’s. It’s just nostalgia. That’s all.

  11. Not really having ubiquitous internet.

    No GPS (it existed but wasn’t yet ubiquitous). Using paper maps to get to places. Having to call the person you were going to and have them give you directions you wrote down on paper. Having to call a business and ask them how to get there. Or you looked up the address in a big old school phone book and then got out the paper map and used the grid lookup on the back to approximate the address and then drove around looking for the specific address when you were in the right area.

    It honestly made you know the city and streets better.

    Having to use public telephones. If you didn’t have a quarter you we’re screwed.

    Stuff getting shipped took weeks not a day or two.

    No streaming. You had to actually plan around a TV show if you wanted to watch it and if something came up you just missed part of the show because you couldn’t pause it.

    If you needed the phone number for a person or business you had to break out the old school phone book.

    Grocery stores had a lot less variety.

    To listen to music you either had to listen to a super limited selection on the radio or go buy a CD of a full album that you may or may not enjoy with limited options to listen to anything before buying it.

    Dial up Internet was a bitch and connections dropped all the time.

    Making a mix tape involved recording the music on a tape at 1x speed. Even when mp3s and CD burners were available it still was only at like 2x to 4x speed.

    No gay marriage.

    It was still kind of misogynistic and racism was more prevalent.

  12. Rap rock

    Saying goodbye to people forever. When people moved you literally might never speak to them again

  14. The 90s were a transition period for a lot of low income communities. So it was pretty rough in the 90s and still is in most cases, but it’s better overall. You can look up videos from the 70s-90s of NYC. Specifically the Bronx to kinda see what I’m talking about.

  15. People being out of their minds terrified of HIV/AIDS. Before the trend of canceling everybody, if people thought you or someone near you was infected, you could be fired, publicly shunned, etc. Add LGBT (the Q+ came later) and it got pretty ugly for a while.

    Also drive-by shootings were trendy, in a manner of speaking.

  16. The ’90s started with a recession, and people who entered the workforce at that time had a lot of trouble finding jobs. That was the time we first started hearing that Gen X was going to be the first American generation not to do as well as their parents. There was a lot of talk about that.

    While politics weren’t as toxic as they are today, they were still extremely toxic. You can think of the ’90s as the start of what we have today. The Republicans went on a fishing expedition to impeach a Democratic president that started with an investigation into an old land deal and ended with a trial about oral sex. The Republicans’ leader seriously proposed taking children away from poor people and putting them in government-run orphanages. That was a real policy proposal by the most important person in the Republican Party.

    Civil rights and feminism started to decline. In the ’80s you were considered kind of a monster if you didn’t believe in legislating more rights for ethnic minorities and women. It was taken as an article of faith that progress would continue to be made, even by those who opposed that progress. But in the ’90s it started becoming mainstream to stop or reverse that progress.

    Popular culture, which was very upbeat in the ’80s, suddenly got extremely dark. It was considered woefully uncool to be hopeful or otherwise unhappy in music. Movies were all about angst. In the U.S., between the downfall of New Kids on the Block and the rise of the Backstreet Boys — a timespan of the majority of the decade — straight, unironic pop music was largely absent from the charts. While I’m not bemoaning that, it does reflect the country’s dark mood.

  17. -The crime rate was much worse, it was actually the mid-90s when crime in the US started falling across the board.

    -In somewhat of the same vein, the teen pregnancy rate was much worse.

    -Dial-up internet.

    -A lot of the jokes in TV/movies (especially about gay people) would be considered insanely offensive by today’s standards.

  18. For the most part it was really hard to good weed back then. If you could find good smoke you’d pay a ton for a small amount. Like 60$ an eighth.

    I don’t care to ever smoke that awful brick weed ever again.

  19. The rise of school shootings into the public consciousness. Paducah, columbine, Jonesboro, etc. There was a stretch in the mid to late 90s where things got weird and these tragedies seemed to come out of nowhere. We’re still living it today and to some degree have become numb to it. Not back then though, it shook the whole country. Having it happen in my little town really sent shockwaves through this community that are still felt today.

  20. Gay kids getting murdered for being gay, not great.

    LA Riots.

    Murder rate and gang warfare.

    Unbelievable boredom, no great way to communicate with friends.

  21. Lots of folks were still dying of AIDs at an alarming rate as meds were not up to the standards they are today and there was a huge stigma associated with it, and Crack was still a very popular drug with lots of adicts roaming the streets of most major cities without much in the way of support for them or the families they left behind.

  22. If you watch movies geared toward kids- Yeah its all fun make believe fair tales. But if you watch the 90s movies made for adults, youll see theyre all basically saying “Our lives are prisons and we need to break out from them”.

  23. IDK man. The 90s were pretty freaking awesome. Most of the conveniences of the internet, but none of the pitfalls of pervasive social media.

    I was a kid during the 90s, so my perspective is biased by that. But I would say that staying in touch with your loved ones who are far away was a lot more difficult. You wouldn’t know that at the time, of course. You’d think the opposite, considering email was around and instant messaging was quickly coming into the picture. But compared to today, you were relatively isolated socially in that sense.

  25. The fall of the USSR and the resulting “Peace Dividend” had a major negative impact on US military members and unforeseen negative results regarding military contractors.

    You often hear about how many job losses there are when a business or industry shuts down, but there was nary a peep about the “job losses” from the folks in the military who were forced out. Between 1990 and 1995, the active duty population went from ~2.1 million to ~1.6 million — a 24% decrease and ~500,000 jobs. The reductions were indeed warranted, but pretty much no one gave a $hit that all of these folks had to find other employment.

    The resulting drop in spending was also warranted, but the turmoil in the defense sector also saw a high amount of job losses and an incredible amount of consolidation. The reduction in competition and increasingly drawn-out development of fewer and fewer major weapons systems has caused massive increases in acquisitions costs, somewhat disproportionate to the warfighting capability gained by newer systems.

  26. Timothy McVeigh, the Columbine Massacre, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Princess Di’s death, the Nintendo VirtualBoy.

  27. Crime was pretty bad in my city. Areas that are really nice and gorgeous today, my parents told me you could not imagine walking there alone by yourself even in broad daylight. Now its gentrified, has a Whole Foods, and all the yuppies want to live there.

  28. The crack epidemic, gang violence, more police brutality with broader public support for it, Gary Busey.

  29. I’m reminded of the downsides every time I watch a movie or TV show from the 90s out of nostalgia.

    There is so much blatant bigotry towards LGBTQ+ people in 90s entertainment. It’s killed a lot of shows and movies I had fond memories of from my childhood when I go watch them again for the first time since I was a kid. Then I’m reminded too of how my gay friends were treated back then and it just makes me sad.

    There were some good things in the 90s, but there was a lot of abhorrent shit too.

  30. Cities were hollowed out, severely harmed by crime and the crack epidemic, and not to be visited after dark.

    I would do day trips with friends to DC to hit a museum or go shopping in Georgetown, but our parents were adamant that we had to be on a train home by 4:00.

    And it’s not like 90s parents were especially strict, it’s that the city was worrisome.

    Nowadays cities thrive.

  31. Many restaurants still allowed smoking, which was sort of like having a peeing section in a pool

  32. I mean, I remember 2000-2005 as being a great time alive because that was my peak childhood years. For everyone else it was a horrifying mix of post-9/11 paranoia, war, and the dot com bubble.

    People always romanticize their childhood years.

  33. The worst thing about the 90s was My So-Called Life never getting a second season. Or even one more episode. We never found out if Angela chose Jordan or Brian.

  34. I was a teen and young adult who belonged to a small but very visible minority group (Indian) back in the 90s. Racism, sexism, homophobia, sexual harassment, and bullying was more acceptable and more common than it is now.

  35. Rape culture was prevalent, so much more so than today. “she was asking for it” “her skirt was too short” and other victim blaming things were super common and there was very little pushback

    ​

    I remember my 13 year old friend (who developed early) had her breasts groped by our gym teacher. She was told not to press charges because she’d ruin his career, as if a man who gropes children should have a career teaching children. Her and her parents were convinced not to do anything about it, tho

    ​

    Also, years later, I found out that same teacher groped another one of my friend’s cock and balls.

    The school administrators advocated for a molester to stay teaching children. Really fucking sick shit and I think it really helps younger people understand how we got to a place where 156 American Olympians can be sexually assaulted. How people like Jim Jordan can hold office in the US house of reps when he ignored the rampant abuses that happened to kids he was coaching

  36. Kidnapping worries. After Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped walking to the bus stop, parents became utterly paranoid. Many parents refused to let their kid out of the yard and many school districts banned students walking/biking to school.

  37. As someone who lived through the 90’s as an adult, the 90’s themselves were in most major respects a lot better than today.

    Cell phones would’ve been the biggest cultural impact. In the early part of the decade they were fairly rare, by the end they were fairly common. Also their downside (the perception by businesses that you should ***always*** be available) didn’t start until the next decade.

    Looking back I would say that my biggest negative impression of the 90’s is that we sat on our hands and planted the seeds (or allowed them to grow) of major problems we face now. Climate Change, Russia, China, repealing Glass-Steagall (which set the foundation for the Real Estate bubble and crash in the next decade), NAFTA, prioritizing Wall Street over Main Street were all American issues that were either created or known about in the 90’s and we did nothing or the wrong thing.

  38. I suddenly had equal civil rights that were non existent for the 12 years of my life prior. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law in 1990. After the ADA and IDEA legislation passed, all public and private schools were required to make accommodations for students with disabilities. Students with disabilities were not to be excluded from any educational opportunities, denied services, segregated or otherwise treated differently than their non-disabled peers. Although physical accessibility has improved across the country for people with disabilities, not every business follows the law. It’s still hard to find employment as someone with a disability period, because people judge you based on your disability – because of the ADA, they at least have to interview and consider you so I have more access in that way. Employers, local and state governments, employment agencies, and labor unions are expected not to discriminate against qualified individuals with disabilities in job application procedures, hiring, firing, advancement, compensation, job training, etc. The ADA has also made job accommodations for people with disabilities more common. 

  39. The fatphobia, misogyny, and homophobia were real. And there was so much ignorance about trans people.

  42. Ever heard of the Crown Heights Kristallnacht? The violent crime rate was higher than at any point on record (which started at 1900).

  43. The Satanic Panic about Dungeons & Dragons.

    There was a lot of fear and stress about Y2K in the lead up to it, but nothing really happened. People were convinced it would be the end of society and all technology would grind to a halt.

  44. I’m not sure if it was this way everywhere, but at least in my area- it was much more acceptable to hit your kids in the past than today. I’m glad to see that changing.

  45. For the most part the good things were also bad. Mainly around technology. Things like gps, Uber, travel blogs/Instagram, being able to call home or tell your parents where you were or your friends for that matter. Peoples attention spans were bigger but there was a lot of waiting around and time wasted.

  46. Skeleton thin being in sucked. It invaded every part of life. While learning about nutrition in school we were told if we felt hungry we were really thirsty and should just drink water.

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