Liberated? Edward Bowen, an adult survivor of alleged abuse at Horace Mann, with a photo of himself at a press conference last month. (Stefan Jeremiah)
Was the widespread sexual contact between students and teachers at Horace Mann in the 1960s and ’70s a crime, or just a sign of the times?
The latter, says Gary Alan Fine, a 1968 Mann graduate. Of the allegations that have recently rocked the prep school, he told The New Yorker: “This was the late ’60s, and what we now think of as rape or sexual assault didn’t quite mean the same thing in that age of sexual awakening.”
What some teachers did “was wrong, absolutely,” Fine allowed, “but there are degrees of wrongness, and what was wrong in 1966 is today much more wrong. I can’t imagine that in the late 1960s anyone would have been terribly surprised had they learned that some faculty were having sexual relations with students.
“Most would not have thought it good, but it was the way of the world.”
You could chalk this kind of statement up to the typical moral relativism of a prestigious academic. But perhaps there is something to what Fine is saying, at least in terms of the effects of the sexual revolution.
A recent New York Times article on the allegations against British TV host Jimmy Savile and a variety of other TV personalities described the accused as pleading that their “gropings, lewd behavior and drunken passes, as well as sex . . .seemed consensual at the time” and that the accusations “have more to do with the anything-goes culture of the era than with any criminal behavior.”
Hmm. Maybe in the name of sexual liberation we opened the floodgates a little too much?
As Kay S. Hymowitz, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, explains, “The sexual revolution was fought and won, if that’s the right word, by young people, many of them barely past adolescence. They were fighting for freedom from traditional limits on sexual behavior.”
But this, she says, also led to the idea that “kids, or at least adolescents, were full individuals and sexual beings. Part of their growing up was ‘exploring their sexuality.’ What was once defined as an adult pleasure became not just available to teenagers, but important for their fulfillment . . . The boundaries between kids and adults was blurred.”
Not a good idea, says Hymowitz, author of “Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Them.”
That blurring between adult and child certainly seems to have been the case at Horace Mann, where more than 30 alumni have made accusations against 18 different teachers. Accounts from the alums and their parents certainly make it sound like school administrators were aware of these situations and dismissed the seriousness of them.
Theodore Dalrymple, British psychiatrist and author of “Our Culture, What’s Left of It,” notes that some of Savile’s groping of teen girls was visible on TV.
It seems hard to believe that in our current era — where a creepy glance by an older man at a girl can get him reported to the authorities — such behavior could have gone on in full view of a national audience.
On the other hand, the show “Britain’s Got Talent” last month featured an 11-year-old singing about a one-night stand, with the lyrics, “You’ve got one night only, that’s all you have to spare, let’s not pretend to care, come on, big baby, come on, we only have ’til dawn.”
Dalrymple notes, “We live in very peculiar times when on the one hand we are extremely puritanical [about these incidents from decades ago] and on the other we live in sort of Gomorrah. It’s a very odd situation.”
Indeed, our elites fully believe that teens are capable of making decisions about sex to the extent that the Food and Drug Admistration has just made the Plan B “morning-after pill” available without prescription or parental notification to 15-year-olds — again sending the message that teenage girls are adults when it comes to sex.
As Hymowitz notes, “We’re really in a state of profound confusion about teens: Are they children or are they almost-adults? When it comes to sex, we assume that kids are engaging in a natural form of self-expression. But that can’t be entirely squared with the fact that we also know that kids are still unshaped, overly influenced by peers and impulsive.”
Maybe 30 years from now, some parents will wonder why we encouraged teens to perform sexually explicit songs on stage or why we gave them unfettered access to “emergency contraception.”
To which, I guess, we’ll have to reply, “Well, there are degrees of wrongness . . .”