Innocent, as I've used the term, means that you weren't aware of something or hadn't done something. It isn't to suggest the 1950s were pure in any way, no more than any other decade. Life usually has a dark side. Most of us who lived through the 1950s were children then and saw things as children. There was a lot we didn't know about.
Things have always been changing, not always for the better. Of course, it also depends on your station in life what difference the changes make. Some periods of history were exciting, others just deadly and dangerous, again depending on where you lived. Thinking about different periods in the past is difficult for several things. You lose context, for instance, meaning it is difficult to keep in mind everything that is happening at a given instance and how much difference that makes, if any, to how something should be thought of. Another thing is that historical time gets compressed. We tend to speak of, say, a thirty-year period in a way that makes it more like a few months. Likewise, we sometimes also think that when something happened in the past, everyone knew about it right away and everyone's lives changed. A workable airplane was invented in the first decade of the 20th century and we made it to the moon, what, 60 years later? But air travel for ordinary people like me did not become common until after WWII.
Those men's adventure magazines came and went before I read the first one. I glanced at them on the magazine racks at the drug store but never bought one. I can see their appeal, though. In as sense, car magazines like Road & Track had and have the same appeal.
Things have always been changing, not always for the better. Of course, it also depends on your station in life what difference the changes make. Some periods of history were exciting, others just deadly and dangerous, again depending on where you lived. Thinking about different periods in the past is difficult for several things. You lose context, for instance, meaning it is difficult to keep in mind everything that is happening at a given instance and how much difference that makes, if any, to how something should be thought of. Another thing is that historical time gets compressed. We tend to speak of, say, a thirty-year period in a way that makes it more like a few months. Likewise, we sometimes also think that when something happened in the past, everyone knew about it right away and everyone's lives changed. A workable airplane was invented in the first decade of the 20th century and we made it to the moon, what, 60 years later? But air travel for ordinary people like me did not become common until after WWII.
Those men's adventure magazines came and went before I read the first one. I glanced at them on the magazine racks at the drug store but never bought one. I can see their appeal, though. In as sense, car magazines like Road & Track had and have the same appeal.