One of my best students from long ago is wearing out Bill Cosby in no uncertain terms both here on Daily Kos and on Facebook. I agree that Cosby has not evolved with the times and has committed crimes for which he probably will never be punished. In addition, I see a moral failure which infected a great many Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, and may well have improved very little since: It is the lack of empathy.
I don't believe it is possible for a person of empathy to do what Bill Cosby has allegedly done. So how could a person with such keen social observations, which we see in Cosby's comedy observations, have such a lack of empathy? The answer from this history teacher is, the past is like another country--they do things differently there.
We start with segregation below the fold:
People today are incredulous about how much segregation existed between the sexes in the 1950s and early 1960s. Sexual segregation leads, in many ways, to the same lack of understanding of a group that racial or religious segregation does. So many things that seem bizarre to us today were accepted as matter of course back then.
Sunday-school classes were segregated during the Baby Boom years because of size issues as well as people thinking it was normal. Gym classes, lots of academic classes, sports teams, and school clubs were likewise separate--and not equal. Social events in high school were extremely awkward because the boys did not know the girls as human beings, had no training in dancing, and had no way of getting quality education on sexuality issues. Yes, we had sex education, the mechanics, but the knowledge base did not exist until Masters and Johnson, about what a mature and equal sexual relationship should look like. Teachers, at least my teachers, did the best they could with what they had to work with, but there was so much unknown.
Mae West didn't help with her interview in the 1950s when she was asked, "Miss West, If you had a daughter, would you tell her everything?"
--"Nope, finding out is half the fun!"
So by the time a young man went into the military--Bill Cosby was in the Navy--he was surrounded by 100 percent men. Sure, the most entertaining conversation was about women, but a great deal of that was based on misinformation. A few times I saw military woman, from a distance, and for all the men knew, they were sluts or masculine imitations. The old guys had plenty of negative labels to put on these women for the young guys to hear.
Meanwhile, in popular culture, we discovered that Jack Kennedy liked Ian Fleming novels. Soon we discovered James Bond. He seemed to have his way with the women, and we would hear women say, "Hey! If James Bond comes along, he can have his way with me!" It was no political liability for Lyndon Johnson to say, "Heck! I've had more women by accident than Jack Kennedy had on purpose!" Then there was Portnoy's Complaint. Philip Roth had his protagonist harassing women on the streets of New York, but it paid off when he found "the Monkey." She was a one-dimensional sex maniac who could match Portnoy's sex drive. How, before more evidence was available, was a man from a segregated background to know that the Monkey was not credible?
In the midst of all this, Bill Cosby hit the big time. The audiences resembled the thinking that one saw a few seasons back on Mad Men. The interaction between performer and audience should not be underestimated. Bits that got the best laughs would be repeated and improved upon. I cannot remember many specifics other than Lola Falana as "wife of the week." The message I got as a young man was that philandering is funny and no one should take it more seriously than dancing.
I don't know where the popular culture started to change. Certainly, the women's movement was gaining steam after 1963 and increasing numbers of men started to get the word. When sexual segregation ended in much of the military in 1972, when Title IX ended lots of segregation in sports, when the end of the baby boom ended large Sunday-school classes, we started to learn a lot more about the other sex.
I never saw a prostitute while I was in the Army. But I heard plenty of stories. Ten or fifteen years later I had a college teacher who had visited Japanese prostitutes in the 1950s. He seemed damaged to me in the sense that he could never look at the female students as complete human beings. It may have been caused by lots of factors, but he always seemed to think of their sexual function first, and rarely about their other scholarly attributes.
This brings me back to the subject of empathy. It does not seem possible to gain empathy from religion. I believe quality art, screen acting as well as theater, can beget some empathy. But the biggest opportunity for seeing others as human beings is to actually be in a place where interaction with others makes observing their humanity unavoidable. Integrated schools, both racial and economic, had the best chance of changing America for the better. I hope some remnant of that experience can remain in today's backward-moving "reform" of public education.
I regret Bill Cosby's lack of movement into the modern age. I cannot condemn him without passing judgment on my entire generation of men who are approximately his age. But that judgment does need to be passed. All of us, who grew up doing the best we knew how, and seeing a world where women were "different," have a lifetime of recovery to make.