Innocence is dead

Innocence is dead.

We're in the year 2000, and nothing is innocent anymore. This is why I wish I lived in the 1920s. Yes, admittedly, life was not perfect then either, but at least there was some purity then, some sense of virginity and virtue.

Innocence didn't just have a heart attack and expire. It suffered a slow and painful demise, finally to expel it's last dying breath just about the turn of the century.

The disintegration of innocence throught the years is most vividly represented in the different media, which represent (and also have a hand in forming) the inclination of the people. Let's take a look at the evolution of several media through the years:

• Film

  1939 : Gone with the wind (U.S.A)
  1959 : Ben Hur, Some Like It Hot (U.S.A)
  1975 : Rocky Horror Picture Show (U.S.A)
  1987 : Fatal Attraction (U.S.A)
  2000 : Baise-moi (France) - (baise-moi means fuck me in French)
  (All box-office hits)

• Television

  1950's : I Love Lucy
  1960's : Gilligan's Island
  1980's : Love Boat
  early 1990's : Beverly Hills 90210
  late 1990's, 2000 : Oz, Sex and the City

• Music

  1931 : All Of Me (Sung by, among others, Frank Sinatra) - "You took the part that once was my heart, so why not take all of me?"
  1950's : Let's do it (Sung by, among others, Dee Dee Bridgewater) - "Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it... Let's do it, let's fall in love."
  1969 : Lemon Song (by Led Zeppelin) - "The way you squeeze my lemon, I'm gonna fall right out of bed"
  1987 : I Want Your Sex (by George Michael) - "Sex is natural, sex is fun, sex is best for us one on one"
  1994 : Closer To God (by Nine Inch Nails) - "I want to fuck you like an animal, I want to feel you from the inside"
  2000 : Kim (by Eminem) : "Now shut the fuck up, and get what's coming to you....Bleed, bitch, bleed"

Where do we go from here?

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Gamaliel, you're right, to a certain extent. Of course I was taking it to extremities here. I could have put Pocahontas as a 90's movie, but that would have just been silly. I was making a point, only one sided, admittedly, but you do have to admit that Kim would hardly have been possible 15 years ago.

What you’ve charted is the loss of "innocence" in mainstream American media. It is tempting to use that to extrapolate historical trends, as you have, but it is hardly a accurate historical barometer. The changes in media have more to do with what was going on in the media (the Hays Code, movie ratings, the FCC, etc.) than in the lives of people.

Yeah, I want to live in the 1920s too, but not because of the "innocence" of the time, but because it was actually a pretty wild time, with gangsters and flappers and free-flowing gin and jazz and Cole Porter. Don’t use a silent movie to judge the character of the time; look at what actually happened.

Or better yet, go back a few centuries. In Shakespeare, characters are forming "the beast with two backs." Read the raunchy tales of Boccacio’s Decameron, with its frolicking nuns and monks and priests. Then try to tell me that the past is more innocent than today.