I said by today's standards.. women going home with some random guy without anyone even having a phone number for them. No mobiles, no net, no nothing.
And in most cases that worked out fine, but today people would think it insane to even suggest that.
The enormous amount of fear that has been injected into society, seemingly permanently, disguised as "safety" (i.e. framing a negative as a positive) is one of, or perhaps THE, the most detrimental factors to the health of that society, and is actively harming the development of people growing up within it.
Life is much safer now so mundane relative risks look much worse. When illness or famine lurks a every corner, no one is questioning a kid venturing 3 miles on his bike to buy mom a pack of smokes and buy himself some Cracker Jacks. Now you're considered Satan if you allow that and some prosecutor will ramble about predators and kidnapping at your trial.
999 good or OK outcomes and 1 bad one can still be overall pretty damn bad, when scaled up to the level of a society. It becomes a Something Must Be Done scenario pretty quick.
And I suspect in this specific case, the ratio of bad experiences.. maybe not terrible, but just bad.. was a lot higher than 1 in 1000.
I mean, the flip side of that is, going home with a stranger in a big city is pretty much a total historical anomaly before the 60s sexual revolution (because of smaller communities as well as more conservative sexual attitudes), maybe some of it is just the pendulum swinging back.
I disagree. A few of those 999 hookups will result in marriages and families. Others in relationships. This is arguably the whole point of society, to engage with other people, to be in relationships, to reproduce. What we see now, largely due to unrelenting fear (again, disguised as "safety"), is unhappiness, isolation, loneliness, depression and mental illness all dramatically increasing. This is not a coincidence.
That's true if the only alternative to hooking up with randoms in a bar is staying home.
Same as, until the Jet Age, the only alternative to risky world travel by land and sea was to stay home.. and then we invented jet airliners, which made travel multiple orders of magnitude safer than the Age of Sail.
I'm a neutral observer on this tbh, never had anything against bar culture at the time, but if you were a 19yr old weighing up your options today, online dating looks like the same potential reward without all sorts of down sides. Not just the personal safety stuff, but as a guy not having to run the gauntlet of approaching women and getting shot down (no big deal really, but cultural shifts now frown upon asking at all, whereas it used to be more a case of.. ask away, the important thing was to respect it if you got told no).
The flip side is that online dating results in a much more publicly conservative culture, where even merely flirting is at risk of being reframed as sexual misconduct, people have thinner skins and lower tolerance generally because they've never had to develop a thick skin, it takes some of the beautiful chaos out of the world.. people didn't go about the place constantly looking to hook up (well, maybe some did) but the very possibility added something to the atmosphere, even if the probability was low.
And on the subject of beautiful chaos. Take a look at video footage from major rock, pop and dance concerts/festivals from 2000 ish and today. Watch the crowds, look at their facial expressions, energy level, state of mind.
And in most cases that worked out fine, but today people would think it insane to even suggest that.