Is American culture less confrontational now?
April 20, 2023 3:33 PM   Subscribe

I know I know, American culture is OBVIOUSLY more confrontational, in a public culture wars, mass shooting, armed insurrection kind of way. But in an interpersonal, therapy, advice column kind of way....have things changed since the 70s and 80s?

I was a young person in those times and my overall impression was that people were advised to be assertive and tell people how you really feel.

I feel like my own personal arc has been from rather unskilled "being honest" "being myself" to a much more sophisticated (I hope) "reading the room" set of skills where I often deliberately craft my affect to get the responses I want from people.

My setting (East Coast American) hasn't changed too much, socioeconomically and geographically I'm pretty much in the same place as childhood. Is this just growing up or learning skills or am I responding to changes in culture?

Now that I think about it maybe it feels to me like the 70s and 80s were more Ask culture..."be direct!" and this current culture feels more Guess...."be skillfull"

Is it all in my head?
posted by Jenny'sCricket to Human Relations (16 answers total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wow, this is a fascinating question! I'm also an East Coast American, almost 40, and my impression that the "interpersonal, therapy, advice column" trend is to be kind and accepting -- or at least tolerant -- AND very direct about asserting our needs and wants.
posted by smorgasbord at 4:09 PM on April 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


I've had a somewhat similar trajectory as you (grew up on the east coast in a very Ask culture family, though in the 80s/90s), and through education my mannerisms are somewhat (not to put them down) more diplomatic than my parents and their friends, though I still am way more comfortable around people who are Ask culture/are a bit uncouth. I can act the part of a polished person who is careful with their words, but it's an exhausting act.

Which is to say, that I think you're hitting on something that's real - but also mainly true of a small slice of the American population. You don't say your political bent, but assuming you're at least left of center, there has certainly been a big push since in the past two decades to consider other people's perspectives. Obviously some people bristle against this - "anti-woke"arguments resonate with a notable chunk of Boomer progressives, and even GenX, whereas the idea that it's good to consider more perspectives than just your own is pretty obvious at this point for most progressives under 45.

I also imagine some of this generational shift has to do with the expansion and destigmatization of therapy. Of my parents and their friends, few have ever been to therapy, and those that have generally entered a therapists office for the first time in their 50s/60s/70s. Whereas a considerable percentage of my social circle has gone to therapy. For some reason I have a distinct memory of a conversation with a friend in 2017 about how many concepts rooted in therapy, like boundaries, had become mainstream. This is just my hunch, but I bet if you polled people "Is it okay to stop answering communication from an old friend, if you deem that friend to have become a toxic influence?" there would be a generational divide, with older generations more likely to say "no."

I also think the degree of confrontation deemed acceptable still varies greatly by class.
posted by coffeecat at 4:14 PM on April 20, 2023 [10 favorites]


I was born in 1958, and my thought is that the idea of telling people "how you really feel" partly came out of 1960s counterculture, when "let it all hang out," was a sort of rallying cry. My parents were born in the 20s, and they did not raise me to be assertive and say what I really thought.

I was thinking that Miss Manners's popularity in the late 70s and early 80s was a sort of response to the counterculture emphasis on a kind of brutal honesty that often disregarded others' feelings. In some ways, manners had gone by the wayside, and she was coming out and saying that telling people how you really feel was not always a virtue. This really resonated with a lot of people at the time. Her column started in 1978. Here's a column George Will wrote about her in 1982, the year her first book on manners was published.

From the George Will column: Miss Manners knows she is leaning into the wind--a sirocco, really--of an age in which disagreeable table manners are considered evidence of democratic sympathies and coarse speech a sign of perfect honesty. In an age absurdly sold on sincerity, Miss Manners is rehabilitating hypocrisy. Without it, people will say what they think and do as they feel--a prescription for civil war.

posted by FencingGal at 5:01 PM on April 20, 2023 [8 favorites]


My impression matches FencingGal's, that boomers think of themselves as the "we tell the truth even if it gets us in trouble...maybe even ESPECIALLY if it does!!!" generation as a reaction to the repressed, conformist society they grew up in.

And then those of us raised by boomers, who grew up in the culture they shaped, came to recognize that there are sometimes good reasons not to blast your truth all over the place, and so the culture has swung back in a much more "think before you speak"/"if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all"/"maybe be a little circumspect about your utter contempt for others' feelings and opinions" direction.
posted by potrzebie at 5:50 PM on April 20, 2023 [4 favorites]


Indeed an interesting question. I think race and gender play a role in how one perceives the changes in what is acceptable. For example, a woman in the 70s and 80s, even with the advent of second wave feminism, probably still held her tongue a lot more than a woman today. I would expect that is true for many BIPOC as well.

I think it's harder for white, CIS gendered men to simply skate through life without having their perspective or assumed correctness go unchallenged.

I think there have been changes in that more people are allowed to express the full range of their emotions and experience less of a backlash of being called names (b&*tch, f*ot, etc.) and that's a good thing for all involved. But even as I write this, I want to acknowledge the amount of backlash that people from minority/non-dominant demographics experience as they start to gain some rights, acceptance. We see that with the attacks on Trans-gendered people.
posted by brookeb at 6:29 PM on April 20, 2023 [5 favorites]


Interesting idea. I will say that I knew more people (of all ages) when I was younger (1980's to early 00's) who would say, "I'm just being honest" and "that's just who I am" when they'd say horrible, terrible, abhorrent things. I don't feel like I run into people like that anymore, but it could just be where I live and who I know. Or maybe all that nonsense moved to the internet.
posted by Toddles at 8:52 PM on April 20, 2023 [7 favorites]


I think this is true and can most clearly be seen In the concept of “ghosting”, which is considered acceptable now, but back in the day you actually had to break up with people on the phone or in person, and they would usually demand to know why, and you had to have a reason. Now it’s considered acceptable to avoid the confrontation entirely.
posted by corb at 3:10 AM on April 21, 2023 [5 favorites]


Interesting responses here. I am an elder millennial, but I would say that culture these days is much more direct (confrontational) than when I was a young adult in the 2000s. Particularly since the 2016 election, I have had many more racist comments directed at me than I remember from the 30-odd years of my life before then. Or maybe I am more direct, too, less willing to second-guess myself.

I do remember certain college acquaintances who liked to needle people by playing devil's advocate ("just asking questions!") or priding themselves on being contrarian.
posted by basalganglia at 4:52 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


I think the answer is that while it's always been a bit of a fiction that there's such a thing as "American culture" writ large, it's even more of a fiction now. So the phenomenon that you're seeing is more about the subcultures that you've sorted yourself into now that mass American culture doesn't exist in any significant form, and less about a shift in that culture.
posted by Ragged Richard at 6:55 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]


Seconding the "American culture" is a fiction sort of thing. I grew up in a very Midwestern/Scandinavian family so it was very much know where everyone's at without a whole lot of words. And honestly, modern culture around here in the Pacific NW is uncomfortably... open compared to how I grew up.

Though I think it might be less ask vs guess exactly, like early 2000's popular culture was more in your face. I think it's more like what other posters have said, it's a greater openness to being direct about personal emotional things while holding back a little on things to respect others' feelings.
posted by Zalzidrax at 8:43 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


I think there is some personal experience bias that's going to be hard to sort out here. I relate to your comment about being more skillful and more inclined to use skill/tact and think about my audience, but it's not from a cultural shift, it's from getting older and learning those skills and seeing them at work out in the world. It's from the corporate presentation trainings and customer meeting prep I've been through, where I saw how it can really work to consciously consider your audience and approach your topic from a POV they care about. I think me at 18 now would probably be very similar to me at 18 then. Certainly looking at the youths there's a tendency towards painful brutal honestly around boundaries and the things that annoy you - "we can't hang out if you're going to invite that person" is much more likely to be said outright rather than feel unspeakable. Or so it seems; without more direct studies it's hard to tell the difference between what people say and what they actually would do.
posted by Lady Li at 9:01 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


One would have to fashion a way to measure and define "confrontation" to be more analytical about it, but I do think you've hit on *something*.

There is definitely a cultural push to let people do their thing without interference, and I think its heavily politicized. A good example is the movement against cops and their constant, violent confrontation with people leading their lives in public. I think this example is a corollary to a more general "let people be who they are" and accept them without demanding they justify their existence (neurodivergent, trans, of color, immigrants, women, femme). While I think that irritates the "just asking questions" crowd and/or more curious/insensitive folks, its fundamental goal is safety.

I'm not sure that's a particularly prominent trend, maybe in urban, queerer, more progressive circles. So it may not be so accurate to suggest "America culture" is less/more confrontational... whatever American culture is, its big and unwieldly and inconsistent and contradictory, made up of a lot of pieces and currents.
posted by RajahKing at 11:45 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


I’d puta prologue to FencingGal’s comment. AIUI, Freud — let alone other schools of talk therapy — had barely made it into US consciousness before WWII. And part of what people took from Freudian theory in the 1950s was that Repression is Unhealthy. That’s the sound bite that made it into pop culture and fed into the 1960s, along with the gleefully shocking reference to anal and oral fixations.
posted by clew at 5:03 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


I think there’s a distinct change that’s different from what you’re asking, that is the internet allows people to find/meet each other much more easily than, say, twenty years ago. Your high school classmates couldn’t just look you up on Facebook, people generally met folks to date in person at social events vs. app dates are nearly all what used to be considered “blind dates” - you’ve seen photos, but don’t have any context for this person. So that’s why ghosting is more acceptable - before the internet, you’d just avoid that person and not give them your phone number, and now the first date is kind of a “zero” date to make sure the other person exists and somewhat resembles what you expect. There’s so many more chances to contact people, that we need to shift the boundaries, kind of like friendly small-town folks vs. gruff city people.
posted by momus_window at 6:26 PM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]


I think we're interpersonally more reticent and cautious, but more opinionated and forceful in general.

In interpersonal relationships, behavior like ghosting has become more acceptable, and therapy-esque "stuff" has gotten bastardized and mainstreamed to the point that we're kinda gobbledygooking our way through life instead of directly communicating in our personal spheres.

So instead of your mother in law being pushy, and you telling her to stop bugging you about how to raise your kids, she's a gaslighting covert narcissist etc etc etc etc, and you go low contact without really telling her you've done that.

Meanwhile, thanks to blogging/social media/the internet in general, we take it for granted that we should have soapboxes, and that random opinions and passing thoughts ought to be freely shared. And some people feel free to troll in real life.

I don't recall political opinions getting clonked at me sideways too much, even when I worked in politics, and I find my everyday life pretty much drowning in What Random People Think of Random Topic X. The debt ceiling, whether people should have kids and what public locations are appropriate for them, whether my child in particular should be wearing a coat and if it's appropriate for me to glance at my phone when I'm with my child.

People can be pretty darn confrontational about their opinions and unsolicited advice, to an extent my mother didn't experience. I find the most noisily opinionated people in my community are white Boomers. I say, "thanks but I didn't ask" and move on with my day.

(For reference, I'm on the younger side of Gen X, white-passing mixed race, raised by Silents, live in the Mid-Atlantic, came to the US as a toddler and moved around a lot as a child.)
posted by champers at 3:35 AM on April 22, 2023 [7 favorites]


In the 80s and 90s the worst thing to be was a sell-out. That was the basics of grunge. Don’t sell out. (It changed over night once Madonna schlepped for GAP.)

Then we became more global / Angelina Brad and their brood from all over the world. So we became understanding of other cultures and perspectives. Empathy was huge in kids movies and going to save us all. Validating peoples feelings became a sign of social skill.

Now social media / people became more polite so they don’t go viral or get doxxed but also clearer in their boundaries and self worth. (Or I just got Old.)

Late Gen X perspective.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:08 PM on April 23, 2023 [3 favorites]


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