My grandmother –– Nana –– was raised in the Bronx during the early ‘50s when movie dates would cost maybe 45 cents. She never talked about sex with her parents, or her friends who were all expected to be virgins –– and at least claimed to be –– until they married.
After games of spin the bottle and hanging out with her girls in the school yard, my nana had a few boyfriends in her early teens before graduating from high school early and marrying her one and only husband. She would later get divorced and begin dating again.
In discussion with my 83-year-old nana, we compared generational terminology around committed relationships, analyzed why not as many Gen Z-ers may be dating during high school, and considered how the evolution of patriarchal romance tropes in the media have played into different expectations and norms around sex and dating.
Q: What did the word “dating” mean to you growing up and as a teenager?
A: Well, when somebody was dating someone, it usually meant that they were going “steady” and that they weren’t seeing anyone else, unlike if you asked someone, “Well, do you date?” And then if you were seeing more than one person, which was rare in those days, it depended on how old you were. I started dating at 13 or 14 or 15, and that was considered my date, my person. But I really started dating in college when I was about 16. I was young when I entered college, and at that point in time, I wasn’t going steady with anyone yet, but I would go to college dances at NYU, and they would have a dance, and you’d meet someone, and then, if you like one another, you would go out. So it was still considered dating, like I am dating Mike, for example, but then you could be dating Mike and also be dating Larry at the same time if you weren’t going steady.
Q: Do you have fond memories of love and relationships from growing up?
A: It’s fun. I remember having crushes, oh, my God, my heart would be aching. There was one guy, you know what an usher is in the movies. I never got any closer than 25 feet away from him. But every time I saw him, because the movie theater that we went to was enormous, and his name was Mike Padger.
Q: Oh my god, you remember his last name?
A: Oh yeah, he looked like James Dean. And I would die when I would see him.
Q: How do you think my generation and those younger than me differ from your generation in terms of relationships?
A: It seems like my generation was more involved, not sexually, but in relationships. I had a boyfriend, Louis Barbaria was my boyfriend when I was 13 and until I graduated high school, so I was almost 16. My fearless five, my group of five friends, we each had a boyfriend at that time.
Q: What kinds of activities would you do when you would go out on first-dates or early on in a relationship? Dinner? Movie? Shopping?
A: We didn’t really go anywhere. We just hung out. We would only do things like go to the movies or go to the candy store and have an egg cream, or hang out on the block, sit on the stoop. Nobody worked yet so they couldn’t really spend any money on you. Parents wouldn’t give allowances or anything like that. When we were dating, my ex-husband would borrow his father’s car and pick me up, and then we would go to Jan’s, which was an ice cream parlor known throughout the United States for a multitude of flavors. And what they had was called the kitchen sink. It was a tremendous metal bowl with about 100,000 –– I’m kidding, of course –– many, many scoops of ice cream. And even if you were just two people or four people, it was a treat to have it. And you didn’t have a contest to see who would finish it. But that was fun. That was a hot date. And then you’d go to the movies, and you would sit in the balcony and you’d make out.
Q: What were the bases of sex?
A: First base was just kissing, or necking. It was called necking, from the neck up. You could have different forms of second base, which I never thought about because I was a virgin before I met my husband. But I guess you pet and they would touch your boobies.
Q: Was sex something scandalous amongst friends? Would you gossip about relationships in that context?
A: Well, among my friends, we never would talk too much about things. I knew that there were certain things that were out of bounds based on talking to my friends and how we felt about it. So kissing was fine and a little of this and a little of that, but basically, we were all virgins when we got married –– except I found out not too long ago that somebody that I’m very close to in my family, who was also a friend of mine, was not a virgin when she got married, but she only did it once and so she said it didn’t really count. But if you ever found out that somebody was, you know, doing things that were not considered acceptable, they were a whore. And since that wasn’t, I didn’t hang around. The girls that I had in my crowd, to my knowledge, none of them went to bed. And interestingly enough, in talking to people, even of my generation, and just going back and talking about the ‘50s or the early ‘60s when we were dating, maybe they’re not telling the truth, but they say that they were virgins too. But of course, we had the urges, you know, and we would talk about kissing, and that was it. We did play spin the bottle. The first time I played spin the bottle, I was probably 12, and my mother was home. There were about five of us, and we were on the floor, cross legged in the living room, and we spun the bottle. Turned out I had to kiss Eddie. Eddie was ugly, and Eddie stuck his tongue in my mouth. I had no idea what that meant. I thought he was losing his mind. It was the most disgusting kiss.
Q: What would happen in spin the bottle when two girls would have to kiss? What was the perception of that like?
A: It couldn’t count. No, there was never any discussion about being gay. There were two girls, in high school. One was Diane. She was Italian. She was absolutely gorgeous. She had, I’m trying to think of the name of the haircut. Like a pompadour, a duck’s ass! Anyway, it was obvious that she was probably a lesbian. She dressed kind of boyish. Susan, and I would talk about her because, well, first of all, she hit on my best friend Susan. There was another one that was also very boyish looking, and people would call them lezzies. It was almost like they had a sickness because it was never discussed. We didn’t even understand it. They were accepted as people of course, but you knew they were different. But they were strong, you couldn’t bully them. But I don’t think besides them, I never saw anyone that resembled a gay person because when I got to college, people stopped wearing makeup and they were very bohemian, so it was harder to tell.
Q: Was the standard of virginity the same for men, like would men be criticized if they were rumored to have been having sex with a girl before marriage?
A: Well, it takes two to tango. But that’s an interesting question. We would call the guys “fast.” My group always hung around at the school yard. That was our central place, where we’d sit on the steps and we’d play handball and ride bicycles, even in early teens. And I remember somebody pointing out a guy and saying, “Stay away from him. He’s too fast,” We never knew what exactly he did, but we knew to stay away. So I guess, in a way, if you knew a guy was engaging in sex with girls, if you want to generalize, we wouldn’t think too well of them, but we wouldn’t think too well of the girl either.
Q: What were your parents’ views on dating growing up? Did they have any rules for you?
A: The most important thing that families were interested in at the time your parents, which is probably still today, is make sure you get home by such and such time, otherwise, they sit by the window and worry about you until you come home. You didn’t discuss any of this with your parents. I wouldn’t have wanted to. My mom never asked me if I kissed anybody.
Q: What was sex education like in your school growing up? As a teacher, how would you say it differed at all?
A: There wasn’t any. When I was a teacher, the nurse would take the girls, and I never was in the room, because she would take them herself, and that was a free period for me, so I didn’t have to go. But I know they talked about periods and, you know, babies and whatever, but they were of age already. Sex education, it’s commonplace now, and you can tell from what I’m saying how far we’ve come with being open in talking about the reality of people’s differences and their likes and dislikes and their favoritisms, but there was never a discussion about sex in schools.
Q: How did media (movies, news, etc) paint relationships? Were they private, did lifestyle content talk about them, if so, how in-depth?
A: That wasn’t a big thing, because we didn’t even have those type of magazines. I think they might have been around in the 60s, but nobody that I know ever read them. You know, they have these movie magazines where they would actually you have articles about the individual stars, no, but we did have our heartthrobs. The one that comes to mind, and everybody felt the same way, was James Dean. And when he died, we all felt his loss terribly, and we when we saw him in a movie you kind of personalized it, wishing that you were there instead of the actress. I mean, other than James Dean, Marlon Brando. There was a scene in the bathroom. The movies never, never, ever showed any skin, other than what you would see if a person walked out on the street, maybe with a sleeveless blouse, or maybe a slip. Marlon Brando was having, well, let’s put it this way. He was on the floor in the bathroom with her, okay? And it was so sexy, because when he kissed, and you never saw tongue, but it was so sensual, and the girls were always very innocent. I don’t remember seeing any movies where the girl was a tramp or she was loose, you know, because when Greece came along, I was already an adult, but you had two types of girls there, and they were reminiscent of my age group when I was young.
Q: How old were you when Roe v. Wade was first passed? What were your discussions growing up about abortion?
A: I wasn’t in school anymore. We never discussed abortion because you weren’t going to have sex. I mean, I’m generalizing. Listen, I am sure that in the building next door to me, in the Bronx, there must have been one of the girls who should have been taught more about sex education. If somebody was pregnant, you never heard about it, I don’t remember anyone having to leave school. Now, this is interesting, because when I started teaching again, 33 years ago, I had a job. I worked at the Board of Education, and there was a program for unwed mothers in high school, because you could not stay in school pregnant. So what they did was, when they left, they put in this state provided, meaning this was paid for by all the taxpayers, the women were given an education. I had kids from 13 to 18, and I taught them financial literacy, checkbooks, simple business math. I loved it, because I have a lot of stories that were fantastic, really fascinating stories. They had a nurse there. They had a school psychologist. There were so many unwed mothers, so that was an acceptable thing. I will tell you one story. There were two girls that I had. They were both in love with the same daddy, and he was in jail, and they started a fight. “He’s mine. No, he’s mine.” And I broke them up. I said, “You know what? Sit down and be quiet. Not as a teacher, but as a mother and a concerned citizen, I said, “What is wrong with you, you’re both fighting over that idiot, he’s never going to support you. Don’t you have any faith in yourself?” I mean, we had good times. I used to hold the pails they would throw up in. It was a great job.
Georgie Gassaro is a Junior journalism major who lives for a good lore drop convo! You can reach her at ggassaro@ithaca.edu