Weinstein reminds folks of an era largely best forgotten

“I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” Harvey Weinstein wrote in his awful pseudo-apology, just before the fake Jay-Z quote and the promise to go to war with the NRA. “That was the culture then.”

Give the devil his due: In certain ways, sexual predation actually was the culture.

When it comes to Weinsteinian behavior and related evils, things probably haven’t ever been as bad in modern America as they were in the 1970s. And if you want to understand our own era’s problems, the specific ways that things were worse back then are worth remembering.

Never so many divorces, never so many abortions, a much higher rate of rape, an STD crisis that culminated in the AIDS epidemic.

But some of it is better grasped through anecdote and social history — particularly the extent to which the ’70s saw the drug-enabled exploitation of kids.

As Matthew Walther pointed out recently in The Week, much of rock ’n’ roll’s groupie culture was a spree of statutory rape.

In the same era’s anything-goes Hollywood, Roman Polanski had good reason to regard sodomizing a 13-year-old as what they let you do when you’re a star, or even when you’re not.

Yes, that was the entertainment business, always sordid and permissive — but the same pattern showed up all over, from posh prep schools to the Roman Catholic Church.

And then — things got better. In the educated classes some restraint has been imposed. And the worldview you might call Polanski-ism, which winked at the use and abuse of teenagers, became disreputable and then generally condemned.

Moreover, this relativeto-the-1970s restraint has held lately, at least provisionally, even as we’ve gone through an aftershock of that social revolution. Old-fashioned mores are not coming back — but neither, for now, is the wild erotic acting-out of the ’70s, their often-cruel dionysianism.

But let us not congratulate ourselves too quickly. Our era is less overtly sexually destructive in part because we are giving up on sex itself, retreating into pornography and other virtual consolations. Abortion rates are down, but suicide rates are up. Hefnerism seems to have led us through orgiastic excess to depressing onanism.

Meanwhile, despite their moral turpitude the ’70s still occasion nostalgia, for bad reasons but also one good one: They featured our civilization’s last great burst of creative energy. Those predatory directors and rape-y rock stars made great movies and memorable music. Our era is calmer and safer and less vicious (Trump and Twitter notwithstanding), but its peace feels like cultural exhaustion.

And Harvey Weinstein is a fitting bridge between that world and ours, both artistically and morally. His independent-film work tried to revive or imitate the ’70s auteur spirit, before giving way to lousy Oscar bait for his companies and endless superhero movies for the system.

Meanwhile, the way he brutalized young women was a very 1970s way to be a movie-business monster.

But the allegation that when balked in his advances, he masturbated into whatever receptacle presented itself ? That’s very 2017.