Tasteless

When I was growing up the idea of "bad taste" was commonplace and most people took care not to do or say anything that was "in bad taste".

My parents were constantly telling me I shouldn't do this or that because it would be in bad taste. Anything sexually too explicit, anything that insulted the dead, anything too critical of other people's appearance. All sorts of things were frowned on.

Today the idea of bad taste seems to be fading rapidly. Politicians and celebrities and journalists say the most outrageous things and get away with it. They might be briefly criticised but that's it. On social media there's no idea of bad taste at all and people say exactly what they want, including rape threats, death threats and all sorts of violent intimidation.

In fact for many people nowadays "bad taste" doesn't even refer to questionable behaviour, but only to an unfashionable personal choice, like orange wallpaper or shag pile rugs.

Some people scoff at the idea of bad taste and admire those who "tell it like it is". In practice this just seems to mean pouring out streams of invective against anybody and everybody, and not caring who you're upsetting or belittling.

But I was so thoroughly conditioned by my upbringing to avoid anything that was in bad taste that it's virtually impossible to change. I'm still very careful not to say or do anything controversial, anything that goes beyond the bounds of polite socialising. There's no way I could simply blurt out whatever comes to mind, however shocking or repulsive.

Other people's over-the-top comments never cease to amaze me.

Just say it

One of the big changes in my lifetime has been the loosening of the old taboos about what can be openly discussed and what can't. There are now so many things that are talked about quite freely which in my younger days weren't talked about at all, or only in private behind closed doors, and even then with huge embarrassment and trepidation.

The list of now permissible subjects is pretty long and getting longer - mental health problems, suicide and death, sexual preferences and difficulties, disabilities, domestic violence, sexual harassment, intimate parts of the body, grisly medical treatments and many others.

When I was young all these topics were considered barely mentionable for one reason or another - too morbid, too personal, too squeamish, too upsetting, too graphic, too horrifying - and lips were sealed for fear of causing visible consternation.

The result was that many people grew up totally ignorant of things that could cause serious problems in their life, and had no idea what to do about them. They would think they were the only person in the world with such problems, and would get more and more upset about them.

Now people grow up much better informed, able to air all manner of personal traumas to other people, blurting out whatever's on their mind without feeling like a freak, and with much greater self-awareness.

We can tell the world about our prostate operations or depressive episodes or erectile dysfunction or bulimia and nobody bats an eyelid. The raised eyebrows, warning looks and frosty responses are in general long gone.

Some people of course have never adapted to the new era of uninhibited frankness and are stuck in the old taboos. I think one reason I found it so hard to talk to my mum in her later years was because there were still so many things she couldn't bring herself to talk about.

Tell it like it is - why not?

Keeping mum

Ramana and Chuck have both posted about secrets today, so I thought I'd join in. People have very different attitudes to secrets. Some think it's healthy to get everything out in the open and not bottle things up, others think it's more sensible to reveal the bare minimum and keep the rest to yourself.

Things have changed a lot since I was young. In those days there was no social media to broadcast your every personal quirk to. You might confide something to a family member or one or two friends and that was that. Now you can tell Facebook you're suffering from PTSD and hundreds of people know your secret instantly.

But is that a good or bad thing? The "let it all out" school of thought says that revealing everything, however perverse or trivial or hateful or idiotic, might upset a few people but there's nothing festering away inside to cause inhibitions and awkwardness.

Which is fine in theory, but in practice there are many very good reasons for keeping things secret.

Someone might have told you something in confidence. If you reveal it, others will stop confiding in you. Something might be so controversial or bizarre that you can't face all the possible negative reactions, so you prefer to keep it quiet. If you're a whistle-blower exposing some sort of malpractice, you might find yourself ostracised or even sacked.

Although personally I'd like to be entirely frank about every aspect of my life, it's for reasons like those that in reality I keep many things secret. It would simply be too damaging to lay everything on the line.

My family have always been intensely secretive, telling me what's strictly necessary and keeping everything else under wraps. I know very little about my mother and father because they told me next to nothing. My sister and brother-in-law and niece are equally reticent.

Well, total transparency sounds good but can easily turn sour.

Loosening up

The sixties are always seen as the decade of the "sexual revolution", when all of a sudden people lost their sexual inhibitions and were jumping into bed with everyone left, right and centre.

That may have been true for some, but for me it was quite the opposite. Although I was a teenage boy and supposedly awash with testosterone and erotic yearnings, I was actually totally chaste until the sixties were virtually over.

My various girlfriends seemed to be equally chaste and made no attempt to seduce me. Clearly libidos had not yet run amok in the strait-laced London suburbs.

Though I did know one guy who was assiduously bedding every woman he came across, I had no wish to do the same. He seemed to have little time for anything else but proving his manhood. But there was certainly no shortage of eager women happy to satisfy his urges.

I suppose I never quite saw the point of the so-called sexual revolution. Of course it was a step forward that people were losing their sexual inhibitions and prudishness, but it didn't follow that you had to prove your newly liberated attitude day after day with as many partners as you could handle. Shedding inhibitions was somehow equated with promiscuity and lack of commitment.

I must say it's refreshing to hear younger people discussing sexuality with a degree of candour and directness that would have been unthinkable when I was growing up. That was the age of tortuous double entendres, coy references to "down there" or "consummation", and the elaborately evasive and euphemistic "Carry On" films. Any clearcut mention of sex was enough to traumatise the assembled company and have you frozen out of the conversation.

Certainly I wish I'd been able to talk about sex with the same frankness and in the same detail when I was an innocent and ignorant teenager. It might have saved a lot of confusion and embarrassment in later life when my sexual naivety was all too obvious. And still catches me out even now.

Spilling the beans

In this era of supposed personal frankness, when people gush out their intimate thoughts and feelings to any passing journalist or TV presenter, you might think that no one has anything left to hide any more, that it’s all out there for instant public consumption.

I think not. For every person who spills the beans, there are ten others who’re more reticent and still keep an awful lot to themselves. Most of us don’t trust other people to be sympathetic to our innermost secrets, be they embarrassing, weird, disgusting or just incomprehensible.

The fact is that there are plenty of people only too willing to exploit other people’s weaknesses and eccentricities for their own personal gain or entertainment, and those uninhibited souls who lay their entire life on the table for others to pick at should either have a very thick skin or be prepared for a rather painful public mauling.

Even routine oddities like fear of flying, or fear of public speaking, or a passion for pickled onions, are often concealed in case of scorn or ridicule. As for the more rarified traits like social phobia or aversion to sex or hating to be watched, very few people would be trusted with those. Maybe only our partners, who’re going to find out sooner or later anyway.

It may be that other people are more sympathetic to those things than we imagine, but we daren’t risk telling the wrong person and being treated as some kind of freak show.

It may be that our shameful secrets are not as shameful as we think. But the longer we hide something, the more we prevent others from accepting and neutralising it, the more peculiar and monstrous it becomes, until the very idea of exposing it to others is unthinkable. We convince ourselves we’re so warped that if we confess all nobody will ever speak to us again.

We probably all need a personal therapist, someone we can confide in without fear of a negative reaction, someone who’ll listen without judging, someone who’ll help us to understand what we are rather than expecting us to be normal. With the best will in the world, even the closest and most trusted friend isn’t necessarily that dispassionate and all-embracing.