I’m in kinda of a weird position in regards to pop culture and the internet. I did, in fact, grow up in the 90s. I’m a millenial without a doubt. I got all the hallmarks of the generation save the avocado toast, expensive coffee drinks, and exposure to era-defining pop-culture and internet spaces. I was homeschooled, you see, so the only kids I interacted with were the ones from our monthly “co-op” days where all the affiliated Christian families would get together to socialize their children with other god-fearing families and hold regular meetings about permissable skirt length for adult women and if a sleeveless blouse was too scandalous to allow into a building with their children. So I missed out on all the kinds of pop-culture stuff you get by being exposed to a school’s worth of children. Instead of that, I had the kids of half a dozen incredibly conservative families (even in comparison to my own family) to spend time with and one thing I will say about having escaped that kind of life is that they’re all so boring. I’m sure plenty of them went wild as teens eventually, but as kids? We just talked about whatever christian films our parents let us watch, VeggieTales, and our school work. I didn’t know what a forum was until I was in high school, in the late 00s, even though I went to gameFAQs all the time when I was younger for game guides. Somehow I missed the entire forum part of that website. And even when I did get online for other stuff, it was only for the super-niche things I got pre-approved by my parents since the computer was in the family room and going to websites that weren’t pre-approved was asking to get your computer privileges revoked.
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Lasting Lessons And The Impermanence Of Memory
One of the things my parents taught me when I was young was that anything you saw was in your mind forever. This phrase was always part of a moral lesson since the idea behind it, at least as they (and their incredibly conversative religious beliefs) intended it, was that sin and temptation was best avoided entirely because once it had gotten into you, you couldn’t entirely get it out. The only way to stay entirely free of those things was to avoid them entirely. It was a core aspect of why I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV shows on public broadcast television (even one glimpse of a swimsuit or bra, or even two people making out was enough to get it banned in our household the entire time I lived there), why I was only allowed to play video games that didn’t include Suggestive Themes (even though they were apparently just fine and dandy with violence of any kind), and of my complete failure of even an abstinence-only sex education (the perks of being home schooled is that your parents get to fail three times at teaching you about the birds and the bees, call it a complete education, tell you to Just Say No to touching women who aren’t related to you, and then never speak about it again). It even came up a bunch when I finally escaped the isolation of my home schooling and started asking questions about things I didn’t understand in high school. Better to avoid something entirely than to encounter it at all, since that’s how the devil slowly worked sin and evil into your once-pure mind (all of which is a pretty big contradiction of the orthodoxy behind the sacrament of confession in Catholicism).
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