The Seventies Excuse

How a culture’s silence became the soundtrack of my girlhood

Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

It was a winter day in sunny California in 2017, when I sat underneath the harsh fluorescent lights in a brown Naugahyde easy chair, a paper cup of Japanese green tea on the table beside me. My husband Hugo sat outside the circle of chemo patients and worked on his laptop. I couldn’t focus enough to read or listen to a podcast, so I watched the other patients: one woman, thin and tired, slept curled up like a child under a fuzzy blanket; another woman wearing a baseball cap called the nurse every other minute to adjust the flow of her IV drip or ask a question; one young guy just stared straight ahead, his large brown eyes fixated maybe on thoughts of his wife and kids at home in Chicago.

If my mind wasn’t looping obsessively about dying from cancer, dying from chemo, or some secret cure I could discover to survive, I was obsessing over the headlines about Alabama Supreme Court judge Roy Moore, known for putting a statue of the ten commandments in the state capitol. Moore was running for Congress, and allegations were surfacing that he preyed on fourteen-year-old girls in the 1970s.

The grainy black and white yearbook photos of Leigh Corfman brought up all my anger and sense of betrayal I had carried for decades. I wondered about the Talmud saying, “If you save one soul, you save the world.” Was the opposite true? If you condemn one soul, do you condemn the world? It certainly felt like it.

Watching Roy Moore’s bid for Senate, all I could think about was my own high school coach, the man who helped shape me into an eight-time state champion runner, the man who groomed and manipulated me, who turned the locker room and track into his hunting ground. And I thought about the former headmaster—the one who’d paid for my college trip when my mother couldn’t—who when I asked him in 1991 how the adults could have ignored the damage the coach had done, dismissed me.

As a teenager during the late 70s and 80s, I learned that the gold standard for being desired was to be an underage girl.

It was the measure of youthful beauty, though I wasn’t a beauty, but I was young and vulnerable. I didn’t yet understand the coach’s attraction was his ability to control, manipulate, and ambush me and other girls. When he succeeded, it was rape but justified in his eyes by our being teenage seductresses, neophytes in need of initiation by Dangerous Liaison’s John Malkovich in gym shorts.

That was the air we breathed. Everything was permitted. Roman Polanski had fled the country for drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old. Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan about a forty-year-old man dating a high school student (Mariel Hemingway) won an Academy Award. The fictional character went to Dalton, the school where Jerry Epstein, who idolized Woody Allen, taught briefly. In real life, Allen married his stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

In 1980, Sting’s hit song, “Don’t Stand so Close to Me,” about a teacher lusting after a schoolgirl was released, their first top ten song which earned The Police a Grammy. It was the teacher’s angst at the heart of the song based on Sting’s earlier experience as a teacher. In this narrative, he and the coach became the victim and what was a crime was actually, in my distorted teenage mind, a preference. Just as Elvis had found Pricilla at fourteen at a high school.

When people shrug and say, “It was the seventies. That’s just the way it was then,” Amos Kamil, author of Great is the Truth about the abuse at The Horace Mann School, calls this response “That 70s Excuse” in a 2015 article for TIME magazine. The changing sexual sensibilities of those times has become conflated with the idea that people in positions of authority who didn’t report rape or abuse just reflected the culture, and therefore they aren’t at fault, he says. It was the sexual revolution, and nothing was taboo. Even children.

But the 70s excuse turns institutional negligence into cultural inevitability without accountability while the sexual revolution was largely a perversion in which men defined a freewheeling erotica packaged to consumers through popular movies and magazines.

Even though the average age a survivor of child sex abuse speaks up is 52, over the years, I spoke up thousands of times about what happened at my alma mater during the 1970s and 1980s and even later into the 1990s. In whispered hushes in the teacher’s workroom or grocery aisles, tipsy ramblings at alumni parties, or angry reminders at numerous social gatherings, I discussed the coach’s predatory behavior ad nauseum with faculty, administrators, board members, and alumni. I was seen as a prude, a troublemaker, or a woman hellbent on revenge. In 1998, when a teammate finally confronted the school, the headmaster asked me if a current faculty member had known about the abuse. I said yes. They circled the wagons. He stayed.

That day in 2017, almost thirty years after first speaking up to the school, I sat in that Marriott extended stay hotel with its faded gray curtains and dark red walls, and Hugo told me about the phone call. The board chair had called to ask questions about what I knew and let us know the school was launching an investigation into a current faculty member—the very man who had denied any knowledge of the coach’s abuses years before. By the next year, he would be escorted off campus for his own offenses.

Because of the arbitrary statue of limitations for child sex abuse, it was too late for me. Too late for the girls who had graduated damaged and silenced. Too late for an entire generation of silenced men and women. Too late to retrieve the decades we carried the weight alone. And when the school’s investigation concluded, it was the usual institutional sleight of hand—a report meant to protect the school, not the survivors.

That night at the Marriott, while Hugo prepared spaghetti with zucchini noodles, the progress of the nearby relentless wildfires scrolling across the news feed, I realized despite how the 1970s had shaped me to see my body through the eyes of men, to believe being young was the only currency worth having, and that silence was safer than telling the truth, I would no longer stay silent. If the Talmud is right and saving one soul saves the world, then I knew now continuing to speak up and connecting with other survivors would crack it open and let the light in, so the real healing and work could begin. Because the Talmud also says, “It is not incumbent on you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.”

Copyright 2025, All Rights Reserved