Suffer the little children
The 1970s was not a time anyone in their right mind should feel nostalgic for. It’d be a difficult ask if you actually lived through its madness. Maybe you might recall Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies as worthy of note, but I can only watch them in fury today – as I did then.
Starting in the late 60s, the only movie roles for young, attractive women were the gamut of hair colours from blonde to brunette, and various accents and skin colours. They all behaved, regardless of the colour of their wigs, like that male invention, a nymphomaniac, dropping their undies for any cop with a swish-back hairdo and a big handgun.
The effect was comedic; the intention not even ironic. Feminists who dared to call for equality were portrayed as monsters. Clint couldn’t stand them.
It seemed like everyone was slavering after young women who were ‘‘on the pill’’, the notorious new gateway to much bad sex. Hugh Hefner was taken seriously, even in his pyjamas.
And in New Zealandwe had Bert Potter’s Centrepoint commune. I look back on that experiment as a turning point for middle class values that left a legacy of unhappiness and regret.
Just how a former pest controller (no irony there either) came to be a guru of human sexuality can never really be explained, but Centrepoint was covered by a tame media as a credible pathway to the fully realised life, kids watching the adults in action, the old boy himself living his personal pornographic fantasy, while otherwise intelligent people joined up to be liberated from bourgeois hang-ups like fidelity and privacy.
It ended in crying. In a courtroom fun looks so different, and excuses echo hollowly.
I expect there’s embarrassment among many former livers of that dreamwho’d rather forget. I know there was real harm done to children, some of whom were fed ecstasy to make them co-operate with Centrepoint men. And their parents thought that was OK. Or didn’t think. There wasn’tmuch thinking happening.
My point is that although Centrepoint may only have involved a few hundred people, it was a symbol of away of thinking that made life insidiously more difficult for kids, who now looked like legitimate game. The same philosophy was being preached in movies, other communes, and many well-thumbed paperbacks.
Which brings me to the allegations this week, dating back to the 70s, of sexual abuse and violations at Auckland’s Dilworth School. What could be more depressing than a school founded by idealists to offer care and free education to vulnerable boys, under the guidance of the Anglican church, failing children in its care?
If there was no active oversight, professional training and monitoring of men who had easy access to the boys, that was reckless. If the school had an all-male staff, that was amistake. If the boys had no-one on staff they could trust to talk to, that opened up the chance for predators to ‘‘befriend’’ them. With predictable results.
It’s an immutable rule that wherever there are vulnerable children there are predators, and they’re active. Benign neglect creates opportunity. Let’s not be naive again.
Potter died in 2012. At the funeral his son John described how, ‘‘From the vacuum cleaners in the 50s, to carpet care and pest control in the 60s, to free love and personal growth in the 70s and 80s, he . . . pursued a career of talking people into buying whatever he was selling.’’
As Frank Zappa put it in 74, ‘‘Don’t eat the yellow snow.’’
But they all did, and the snake oil too.