A decade now remembered for its dirty old men was also the one in which courageous young women called them out
I have a strong memory of queueing to see a movie at the university film club in around 1974 and a doctoral student behind me, recently arrived from Cambridge, patting my bottom. When I turned to snarl at him, he said: "Stop being so uptight, baby." For in the 1970s, not to want to be touched up was to be accused of repression and frigidity. "Aren't you supposed to be a liberated chick?" It was a climate in which sexual exploitation by older men like Stuart Hall and Jimmy Savile could flourish. These men, born in the 1920s, were a product of more repressive times and they were taking advantage of the sexual revolution, regarding all younger women as easy meat for exploitation. The younger you were the more attractive and more powerless. Male predators could embarrass and bully you into believing that fending off unwanted advances was something your grandma had to do to protect a modesty and virginity now out of date.
Younger men assumed that women their own age were on the pill. There was no Aids, little venereal disease to worry about, and female consent was not considered to be relevant to the quest for sexual freedom.
As a student I was date-raped twice, on each occasion with a larger, much heavier man on top of me whom I was unable to push off and the word no, repeated and repeated, was regarded as some form of foreplay. It was only on the second occasion, the following morning, that a friend pointed out this was rape. The phrase we had been using for it was "bad sex".
My mother's generation of women had been terrified of losing their reputation, of being "sullied goods". Middle-class women were commodities to be sold in marriage in exchange for a dowry. Rape in marriage was legal because the marriage contract gave the husband property rights over his wife's body. My mother had told me, on the matter of losing one's virginity, "no one wants a cake with a slice cut out of it". I laughed at this, and said it might be evidence of a very good cake.
The whole point of the sexual revolution was to discard these attitudes, to abolish ridiculous concepts like shame and reputation, to rip up the Victorian contract on sexual morality, to assume that anything goes: underage sex, homosexuality, bisexuality, open marriages, pornography, the struggle for equality hand in hand with exploitation of the vulnerable.
Liberated sex was only possible first with the medical advance in oral contraception, and then its availability to unmarried women through anonymous family planning clinics, instead of having to face the family GP. The pill uncoupled sex from reproduction and made it completely recreational. There was a poster girl for the sexual revolution, and she was known as the dollybird, two non-human diminutives. Dollybirds were "always up for it". If you had the miniskirt and the false eyelashes, then to send out dollybird signals while not being up for it was to earn yourself the label prick-tease.
A Granada television programme called Nice Time now seems to me to be the high water mark of the sexual revolution's innocence, co-presented by Kenny Everett, Jonathan Routh and Germaine Greer. Greer had already been arguing against the constriction of bras and I recollect her dancing around on my parents' TV, exposing her breasts. Apart from the male excitement of undoing them, bras were a symbol of restraint. The braless dollybird was instantly accessible.
A couple of years later, Greer published The Female Eunuch, the first feminist book relevant to my generation, after Betty Friedan had addressed American housewives. Its cover showed the female torso as meat hanging from a rail, with handles to hold on to to fuck it. Soon, she would turn against the pill and its hormonal havoc.
By the early 70s, when men like Savile and Hall – old enough to be our fathers – were hitting on anything that moved (I was recently told of Savile's fumble of a BBC secretary in a car and the incomprehension of her bosses when she complained), feminism was beginning to reassess the sexual revolution.
These all-hands blokes of light entertainment, fumbling and groping and patting and nudging, standing too close, kissing on the lips instead of the cheek, fondling your knee under the table, or getting your back against the wall and lunging, did not decide of their own accord to stop. A decade which is now remembered for being the height of the sexual sleaze scandal in the BBC was also the one in which feminists began to ask whether liberation was worth being pawed at and thrust into without consent.
The term sexual harassment seems to have been coined in the early 70s by American feminist groups. Susan Brownmiller, who wrote the landmark book on rape, Against our Will, one of the first to examine rape as a weapon of warfare, often to subjugate a civilian population or take revenge on it, said that at a meeting in 1975 several phrases were discussed: "sexual intimidation", "sexual coercion", "sexual exploitation on the job". The term arrived in general use in the early 90s, in the most famous case of sexual harassment, Anita Hill's testimony against US supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas.
To me, the 70s were not the dismal era when Savile, Hall and others were at the height of their freedom to fuck women up, but the decade when quite young women, many still in their teens began to grab hold of those wandering hands and force them to be put away. We used to call them dirty old men – it was a term tolerant of a middle-aged man's little foibles.
If the sleaze of the 70s seems so distasteful now, it's because of the challenge to the dirty old men by courageous young women who didn't care that feminist was an even more pejorative term, and still is.