Whenever people blog about how things were yet they survived

On facebook people so often compare now to when they were kids, talking about seatbelts, helmets, drinking water out of hoses , smoking, and other things that are taboo today. I'm hoping someone will be brave and admit other things kids in earlier times were used to that people will not discuss openly. How about someone born before the 80s saying " when we went to the doctor the doctor would examine us naked or in underwear only with no gown on and no nurse in the room. A physical was actually a physical and not with clothes on. The doctor had seen it all before and our feelings did not matter. We got thermometers inserted up our rectum instead of our ears and mouths. We got rectal exams and enemas or suppositories for constipation. Yet we all survived and our doctors were never accused of sexual misconduct." I'm a child of the 80s and that's how it was for me.

Mark , while I think each of your points have been discussed separately in other threads it has yet to be proposed as you have set it up .

It is quite true how things have changed over the years in a dr's office and hospital setting compared to when I was a child . I would like to also point out that there was never any inappropriateness that I was ever subject to nor did I witness .

A childs modestly was never a thought when I was growing up ( 70's) There was still the old adage " children should be seen and not heard" taking place .

I was hospitalized at 7 yrs old to have my tonsils removed and was placed in a childrens ward , with very young children of say 4 to 10 yrs old . There were curtains but it was not unusual to see a bare bottom with a thermometer sticking out , or getting an injection. The nurses while very nice were no nonsense and didnt put up with brattiness - if you dared .And you clearly could hear what was taking place in the beds around you . Discreteness was not practiced .

Society has changed so much and not always for the good . We need to ask ourselves if we are raising strong independent people or whiners that want a band-aid for every little boo-boo.

We all survived the embarrassing things we NEEDED to have done and no one sugar coated it for us .

On facebook people so often compare now to when they were kids, talking about seatbelts, helmets, drinking water out of hoses , smoking, and other things that are taboo today.

Okay, I get your point about people surviving rectal temps and enemas etc. without a thought about the embarrassment, but I think I should point out that a lot of people didn't survive smoking, or not wearing seat belts. I mean, people have survived being stabbed and shot, but that doesn't make it safe, or advisable!

I did a rotation at a clinic in the bad part of town and discovering all the gunshots some people have had during the history part of the exam is shocking. They act totally normal but are like oh yeah this ones from 2003 went in this side came out my hip, etc... lol. CRAZY!!!

. I'm hoping someone will be brave and admit other things kids in earlier times were used to that people will not discuss openly.

I can tell you i spent quite a bit of time on another website chatting about something with men who are all around 70 years old now. i functioned mainly as an interviewer, asking a lot of questions, mainly of the nature as to how things came about and how they felt about it at the time and also now.

They would tell me about how they became sexually involved with priests as teenagers, and how they were ok with it then and don't feel the least bit scarred about it now. Of course i looked to weed out those accounts that sounded like they really belonged in the fantasy section, just like folks do with some of the posts they read on here. Most of the accounts sounded like they started out innocently and then gradually branched into something more exploratory.

After chatting with several guys about their own individual experiences, I began to think about how society bases things on what they learn from the media, which is limited in their information by what becomes known, public, shared. And that there is a tight lipped community of people out there with angles from the contrary who maintain confidentiality of their own personal experiences that the media never learns about.

I've often said "For everything you know and learn about, there's everything else that you DON'T know & DON'T read about". For everyone that's come out about how they were abused when they were younger and how it scarred them for life, there is a whole population of other people who may have experienced something similar, that even though society would also classify it as abuse, impropriety etc, but that all these years later, these people do not look upon their experiences in a negative light.

What you describe as the norm is somewhat different to my experience as a fellow child of the 80s.

We didn't get physicals, our doctors managed to examine us without being unnecessarily exposed, it was quite reasonable for us to have thermometers in our armpits or under our tongues. My rectal exams were only because I'd had colorectal surgery, and frankly, I dreaded them, they were painful and embarassing.

When my surgeon pulled my underwear down and back it was embarassing and completely unnecessary to look at the full length of a scar which had healed adequately over a decade earlier. He had no clue how to talk to patients, preferring to talk to their parents like he did when first qualifying twenty-five or so years earlier, yet when it came to his examinations they were done behind a curtain separating patient from parent. Misconduct or not, I still have my suspicions about the necessity of what he did and the way that he did things.

Did I survive? Yes. Was it without lasting effect? No. Our feelings did matter.

If you go back to my earliest years, mid-fifties through sixties, coming out of the second world war perhaps, society assigned certain members of it as authority figures. Teachers, ministers, doctors, coaches, etc. With most, there was never any question of abuse of that authority. But, in my case, there was the single, female music teacher who got dressed and undressed (not completely) in a closet within her classroom. There was the family minister who sexually abused me, and other boys and girls in his congregation.

Within the medical professionals, they ordered, we followed. No even shadow of abuse of such authority. But the Y's had us swimming naked, so....