People from older generations go through great lengths to save face in front of people - often because certain behaviors/outcomes had social, professional and other sorts of consequences if they didn't.
People had sex out of wedlock, there were lesbians and gays, people got knocked up on accident.
Ok - so there might have been slightly less anal sex, BDSM, sex toys and such. But all that existed too.
But it's just this thing for older generations to save face.. and i suppose set a 'good example' for the next generations. My grandmother, still does this in a modern way. My uncle... is a piece of shit. He's a creep, scum, you name it. You know how everyone has that creepy uncle who tries to near molest nieces and such? Yeah. That's him. Never been able to hold a job his entire life - usually b/c he gets fired for mouthing off. Has 2 adult kids who don't want anything to do with him b/c he's such a neglectful piece of shit. He's been married three times. Gone through bouts of alcoholism. Doesn't have a penny to his name. Even at 65, he runs around fucking women just as disgusting as he is (often they are married). Even though he's racist as fuck, he fucks this black girl from a gas station he used to work at and refers to her as an "N". He used to have relations with a parapalegic too - purely sexual, not romantic. He'd stick his dick in a dead goat if no one was looking.
He can't ever dress himself appropriately. Last thankgiving dinner he came to my folks house in sweat pants, left midmeal to go pee, came back with pee dribble all over the front of his pants and then proceeded to use his bare hands (that he didn't wash) to smush his stuffing ball on his plate. He lost his dentures in the floor board of his disgusting car for weeks, and jokes they must have fallen out when he was eating out some girl he picked up from the bar.
He has ED issues too. and jokes openly about this injecting he puts directly into his dick to get hard just before sex. Or how about this one. He went out with my dad for BBQ one day, then they went to a store to buy something and he ran off to a bathroom. I guess he didn't make it in time or something - but he shit all over himself. Somehow it got all over the front of his pants and shirt. No idea how that even happens but it did. Getting him out of there tactfully was impossible.
He lives in my grand mother's basement. He doesn't shower. He smokes cheap cigarettes like a chimney in her house even though she's never allowed it. Refuses to work a real job. He cuts grass for some neighbors and takes care of my grandmother's yard. She pays for his food, she pays for his car, she pays for everything for him. Or he'll drive her car and he burns her seats with cigarettes, runs into things b/c he can't see for shit and knocks off the rear view mirror. He's hospitalized himself a number of time by taking too much of wrong medications. He's a mess.
I got cousins that are about half as bad as this guy that fall on that side too. 4 kids from 3 women in 10 years, dropping out of high school, borrowing money to study for GED tests and then blowing it on something stupid and never paying the borrowers back.
And here's my grandmother - buying this wardrobes of expensive clothes, putting on her jewels, going to church group this, charity group that. She doesn't do any of this shit b/c she's a giving person. She goes to see and be seen, to snicker with other old ladies, to show off her new purse and snicker about other people with that whole "oh bless his heart" shit. She goes to amazing lengths to paint her entire family (uncle included) as amazing and her self as this upper crust matriarch. No one does any wrong. Everyone's transgressions swept under the carpet. I mean - it's done with the skill of a politician. It's amazing to watch her talk up low life, users and abusers in our family like they're respectable angels. She's got her own skeletons she just ignores too - even in private to all of us or to her immediate kids/family.
And she just keeps on operating as if she lives in the world she's rather exist, rather than one that does. And has the audacity to tear people down in her upturned nose sort of way.
Her ability to rationalize anything and everything - whether stuff she's done, or stuff people in the family has done, is phenomenal.