Was life better in the 1990s?

This piece is the first in an exchange between two writers on the headline question of whether life was better in the 1990s. The response will follow in the coming days.

Dear Jason,

We’re now told that the 1990s were “problematic”, to use the word that defines the prissy, puritanical ethos of our time. It was the age of men’s magazines like Loaded, hard-boozing indie bands and . . . erm . . . the taboo-shattering, offence-peddling sitcom Friends.

But let’s be honest, things were better then; for all those reasons and more.

The UK was led by two centrist prime ministers, long before they were deranged by the people’s decision to leave the EU. Tony Blair, fresh-faced and popular, was yet to involve the country in unpopular foreign entanglements, though by the end of the decade he’d whetted his appetite for intervention, in Kosovo.

To younger people, John Major seemed staid and boring, but Black Wednesday and “bastards” aside, his premiership looks like a sea of tranquillity compared to the choppy political waters we navigate today. The rows back then were about Europe too, but their overtones weren’t quite so existential.

Many of the most serious struggles to create a tolerant society were already won, but, outside a fringe of radical academics, we weren’t exposed to the madness of intersectionality, microaggressions and victimhood culture that dominate debate today.

It was very bad to be racist, and we loathed people who were, but the term was usually reserved for obvious examples of bigotry and prejudice. Most of us thought we should treat everybody the same regardless of colour and strive to leave those distinctions in the past. We didn’t realise that there were “invisible structures” propping up “white privilege” that meant we should be hyper-aware of race at all times.

Attitudes toward sexuality were changing quickly as well. Same-sex marriage was some way off but the revolution that brought it about was in the air. There was an “LGB” community, rather than a confusing alphabet soup, and it was understood widely that people could be androgynous or play with gender, without accepting the dotty notion that sex at birth doesn’t exist.

Today’s feminists now depict the 1990s as if they were a dark decade that saw a revival of unrepentant sexism. That certainly wasn’t the perception at the time.

Whether it was the anodyne rallying call of “girl power” or lager-swilling “ladettes”, the emphasis was on women’s freedom to do what they liked. If that meant they behaved just as badly as men, drinking ‘til they puked and sleeping around, then that was their idea of liberation. It wasn’t imposed on them by a chauvinist society.

We may look back at the era and wonder how people got away with it — how they didn’t constantly cause offence. But that doesn’t prove the 1990s was a licentious debauch. It says more about the new sense of prudery that defines this generation.

Throughout human history, we’ve tended to indulge or even celebrate youthful excess. Only now do the coolest kids declare themselves teetotal, voluntarily celibate and vegan. And most of this ostentatious self-sacrifice is blatantly for display. Social media has made demonstrating one’s virtuousness into the leading youth subculture of the day.

Yet, ironically, the Extinction Rebellion generation does more damage to the planet by travelling in Ubers, gumming plastic coffee cups to its palms and importing avocadoes than its elders ever did by serving up a locally-sourced leg of lamb for Sunday lunch.

And, to leave politics behind for a moment, if that’s possible, music in the 1990s was better too, in that there actually were distinctive sounds associated with the era. In the UK, the latter part of the decade was dominated by Britpop and the defining question: “Do you prefer Oasis or Blur?” I enjoyed those albums and even sported the requisite floppy, Britpop hairstyle for some years, but they weren’t my favourites.

In the early-90s, alternative American bands like Pavement, the Pixies and Nirvana seemed revolutionary to teens who had been listening to Def Leppard or, at a push, U2. Radiohead, Muse and the Manic Street Preachers were closer to that scene than Oasis or The Stone Roses.

A word too about Ash, because it was impossible to ignore them at that time if you came from Northern Ireland. Their chiming guitars, pure melodies and bittersweet lyrics were irresistible for a teenager about to leave school for university. In Ulster at least, they were the embodiment of the late-90s, releasing an album of youthful, love-lorn anthems called “1977”, the year of their birth, and appearing at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall in 1998, urging kids to vote for the Belfast Agreement, alongside David Trimble and John Hume.

You see, it’s probably just an age thing, but I’m almost certain that was a more hopeful, positive time. It even seemed like power-sharing in Northern Ireland might work. Columnists were likelier to reference “Cool Brittania” rather than the break-up of Britain. I might have worn an “edgy” t-shirt with the slogan “UK not ok”, but I didn’t really believe it.

Has that sense of optimism and the rather more forgiving, more relaxed youth culture gone for good?

Yours sincerely,

Owen