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My mother didn’t like me hanging around with Jack. She sensed that he lacked a moral compass or control to check his impulses. It was about 1966 when my best friend Philip and I hitchhiked to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, which was then the coolest place for fifteen-year-old Tewksbury, Massachusetts boys like us to hang out, and Jack somehow managed to tag along. We strolled along the boardwalk and met a trio of pretty girls our age.
We made introductions, paired off for walks along the beach, and made a plan to meet back at the boardwalk in two hours. Philip and I got on well with the girls we accompanied, but upon return we saw Jack being arrested. “You’re arresting me for swearing?” Jack said to the cop. “That’s against the law here?”
“Yup,” he said as he walked Jack toward the cruiser.
“He’s a garbage mouth!” said the girl who made the complaint. “Come on,” she said to the girls with us. “We don’t want to be with these guys.” Jack was actually arrested for making making lewd and lascivious remarks in public. Philip and I hitchhiked back to Tewksbury without him and with soiled reputations for being associated with him. It was my first exposure to what we now call sexual harassment.
The way some men act, they should be ashamed but they aren’t, and that’s the problem. When exposed they say they’re ashamed, but are they really? I don’t think so. Jack wasn’t. They regret their facade of respectability is gone, but that’s not shame. Sexual harassment has been around forever but fifty years ago it wasn’t tolerated in the company of good men. Then it was for decades. Now suddenly, it isn’t. Women are reporting it again like that poor girl who ended up with Jack.
The fathers in my neighborhood were role models for us and they treated females with respect — when we were around anyway. Jack’s father, a WWII vet like almost all of them, had died young of a heart attack before I met him and Jack’s widowed mother couldn’t handle him. The rest of us had fathers who enforced codes of conduct. We were interested in sex the way all fifteen-year-old boys are and we talked about it a lot with each other, but not in mixed company. I had older and younger sisters and treated all girls as I treated them. Jack would never have disrespected my sisters because he knew I would pound him. He acted like a gentleman because he had to.
That’s how it was in the mid sixties where I grew up, but the sexual revolution changed things. After a few years it was okay to “talk dirty” the way Jack did to that girl. Whatever the lyrics to “Louie Louie” actually were (and no one could really decipher them), high school boys and girls would sing whatever salacious versions they imagined while dancing. By the seventies and eighties, boundaries dissolved in the name of “liberation” from “oppressive sexual norms.” Sex wasn’t procreation, but recreation. There was birth control for everyone, and if that failed, abortion. It became item one on the list of “women’s rights.” Pregnancy was disease to be “treated” in “women’s health care clinics.”
Men who had been boys like Jack were delighted by these developments. Then one was elected president in 1992. He was a big supporter of abortion and when his sexcapades became public, feminists defended him. It didn’t matter that he was credibly accused of sexual harassment, groping, and even rape. Feminist and journalist Nina Burleigh who covered the White House for People and Time, said in 1998: “I would be happy to give him a ******* just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
Defending her remarks nine years later in 2007 for the Huffington Post, Burleigh wrote: “The insidious use of sexual harassment laws to bring down a president for his pro-female politics was the context in which I spoke.” Pro-female politics? Clearly she meant abortion. If Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas supported abortion, would feminists have tried so hard to block his nomination nine years earlier?
Today Nina Burleigh teaches at the prestigious Columbia Journalism School. The so-called “Burleigh rule” prevailed for nineteen years until Harvey Weinstein’s sexcapades went public. He and a long list of other pro-abortion men in Hollywood and mainstream media have been brought low. What’s going on? Are things changing again?
My friends have not heard from Jack in decades. If he’s still out there I’ll bet he’s concerned.
