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They'll be people who will show you old supposed TV shows like Mad Men based on that area where everyone is sleeping around but I can tell you the prohibition against sleeping with someone before you were married was so strong that if you were a man and you were sleeping with a woman you weren't married to you probably get fired from your job because you weren't of the moral character to be working for any company and if you were a woman that was sleeping around and by that I mean had slept with anyone before marriage your prospects if that was known were pretty much nil. It wasn't just that the big bad corporations were trying to keep you down. It was the overwhelming belief by the majority of people that they would not want to associate with you if you had such low moral character and poor judgment and thought so little of yourself.
I just thought I would say that because I want people to know what the truth was. Even though I loved the show mad Men one of the things that really made me angry about it was how they projected today's morality onto a show that otherwise was visually and business-wise so accurate about those times in New york.

It's just interesting when I see people discussing a woman who talks about sleeping with 50 guys etc etc when sleeping with anyone before you were married to them in the 1950s would have made you an outcast.

Even in the '70s if you were divorced your social status as a man or a woman went way down. It was basically like being caught masturbating in a theater. It was pretty much that vibe.

Abandonment or infidelity was the only way you could get a divorce as well. In fact in New York and I know this from family history going back to a grandparent if a woman was abandoned and they wanted to get a divorce they would literally hire a person to appear in their bed for a photograph so they could get a divorce from the husband that abandoned them.

The incremental morality that is debated today is so far from the absolute morality that existed merely two generations ago that we have to be careful not to project that incremental morality of they've only slept with one or two people with what was the morality that kept the family structure together when it worked to the best in American history

The answer is not we need to go to a point where people only sleep with one or two people before they get married. You really have to go back to the absolutist where there is public shaming and a genuine feeling of distaste by society toward people who sleep with anyone before marriage.

I know people have a hard time wrapping their head around it and they think oh no secretly it really happened they just didn't talk about it. Nope.

That really is the way it was.

I remember for example how infidelity would ruin your job prospects by a famous quote from Ross Perot who rather famously ran for president and had a lot of really good one-liners. And he talked about some of the guidelines he had for employees hiring people in his company. And one of the things was somebody asked him well I've heard that if someone has slept around or gotten a divorce that you won't hire them in your company to which he responded quote if your wife can't trust you how can I"

That sense of immorality around infidelity actually really did exist and you were outcast from society and good job prospects if that was how you behaved as either a man or a woman.

I remember as I got older talking to my mom and asking her if she had ever slept with anybody other than my father and she looked at me with the most horrified expression and said no!

And that's there's that famous clip of soon to be president Ronald Reagan I think appearing on Johnny Carson and explaining some basic social things probably in a general discussion and one of the things he mentions is comparing something to a woman who keeps her virtue. Or who guards her virtue. And for those of you who don't know her virtue meant her virginity. Virginity was equated with virtue. If you slept around before marriage you were an unvirtuous person and that was widely accepted.