Megan Garber at the Atlantic on this whole “all teenage boys try to rape girls, let’s have a little charity here” thing:
Ford’s account of the event has been corroborated by her husband; by a therapist, with whom she discussed the alleged event in 2012; by the notes of a 2013 therapy session, which refer to a “rape attempt” Ford survived as a teenager; and by a polygraph test Ford took on the advice of a lawyer who knows the doubt with which the world, still, reflexively responds to the recollections of women. What the professor describes, in her letter to her Congressional representatives and again to the Post, is by no means the typical stuff of mere youthful indiscretion. What Ford is talking about—what she has been talking about, for years—is not the behavior of kids simply being kids, boys simply being boys. What she is alleging, instead, is cruelty; it is entitlement; it is violence; it is assault.
And it’s not the case that all boys do it or that it’s just a normal part of being a testosterone-addled kid.
The White House—which of course has multidimensional interests in downplaying negative claims about Kavanaugh, particularly those involving sexual misconduct—has thus far defended its nominee in the broadest of terms, claiming its support for Kavanaugh and otherwise offering “no additional comment.” (Donald Trump’s evergreen advice on countering allegations of misconduct: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”) A lawyer close to the White House, interviewed by Politico, reiterated the idea that, regardless of Ford’s claims, Kavanaugh’s nomination would not be withdrawn. On the contrary: “If anything, it’s the opposite,” the lawyer told the reporter Burgess Everett, suggesting that the White House has been, actually, galvanized by the allegations against its nominee. “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”
Really. Saying all males are that violent and entitled? That’s their defense?
And here is the deeper venality of the boys-being-boys defense: It normalizes. It erases the specific details of Christine Blasey Ford’s stated recollections with the soggy mop of generalized male entitlement. What red-blooded guy, after all, its logic assumes, hasn’t done, in some way, the kinds of things Ford has described? Who, as a younger version of himself, hasn’t gotten stumble-drunk, pinned down a woman, groped her, tried to undress her, and then, when she resisted, held his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams? (“It was drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven,” the Fox News columnist Stephen Miller tweeted, derisively.)
Once again, in much of the public discussion, the empathy settles on the man accused. There but for the grace, etc.: If youthful indiscretions like that are allowed to affect the fate of a basketball-coaching, soup-kitchen-volunteering, daughter-nurturing, carpool-driving Supreme Court nominee, whose fortunes wouldn’t be affected? “We’ve now gone from ‘he did this terrible thing at 17’ to ‘he’s a man who treated a woman like that,’” the professor and author Tom Nichols tweeted on Sunday. “Man, I hope all the people who are making this case had spotless lives at 17, because I sure as hell didn’t.”
Exactly. I spent much of yesterday afternoon, as you saw if you were around, disputing that tweet and a string of others defending the basic idea, from Tom Nichols. All his empathy was for the man, and the woman simply disappeared. Many people pointed this out to him, and still he kept on doing it. He can’t grasp that women actually exist even when people are saying it right to him.
The salient question about Ford’s allegations became, in some quarters, not whether they are true, but rather whether they count as allegations at all. The cruelties she describes—the alleged acts of dehumanization that left her traumatized, she says, as a 15-year-old and, still, as an adult—might be “terrible,” yes, but they are also … simply part of the natural order of things. Boys, figuring out how to be men. Locker-room talk, made manifest. “Drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven.” Who wouldn’t be implicated in that? Who doesn’t see himself, in some way, in this age-old story? If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.Americans talk a lot, these days, about norms. What will be preserved, in the tumult and chaos of today’s politics; what is worth preserving; what will fall away. Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was already, in the profoundest of ways, a matter of norms: It will determine, almost inevitably, whether the women of America maintain autonomy over their bodies. Here, though, in Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that a young Brett Kavanaugh compromised her autonomy in another way, another norm is being litigated: the way we talk about sexual violence. Whether such violence will be considered an outrage, or simply a sad inevitability. Whether it will be treated as morally intolerable … or as something that, boys being boys and men being men, just happens.
Tom Nichols repeatedly described it that way – as just a thing that happened between two teenagers. Denial is a powerful force.
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12 responses to “They can see themselves in him but not in her”
For what it’s worth, Nichols conceded last night that he chose the wrong time to make the “let’s not hold high school stuff against people” point — he’s admitted that attempted rape is a different kettle of fish. He deleted the original tweet but left a screenshot up to avoid accusations that he’s trying to memory-hole it.
There’s a popular notion that feminists hate men, think they’re all scumbag rapists. But it’s the Kavanaugh defenders who are defaming men with this lie that every red-blooded male did something like pinning a girl down and tried to rape her while suppressing her screams. Where are all the #notallmen folks now? Why aren’t they all speaking up to say hell, no, I didn’t do anything remotely like that, and stop engaging in #misandry!
“Youthful indiscretion” can explain things like drunk and disorderly conduct, a little petty vandalism or fisticuffs. Even things with potentially tragic consequences like drunk driving. But trying to pull the clothes off a girl who is struggling against you, and your response is to clamp a hand over her mouth so she can’t scream for help, to look in her terrified eyes and think not “what the hell am I doing” but rather “damn, this is so hot!”…. that reflects a level of depravity and a lack of empathy that I don’t think you can just grow out of. Certainly not if you just got away with it and continued to live a life of privilege and be honored with appointment to high office and praise for your integrity and honor.
Maybe if you’d been called to account for it, reckoned with what you did, and spent years of soul-searching and growth, then maybe you could change enough to matter. Enough to no longer be looked at with disgust, that is. Not enough to deserve a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, I think. Even if we limit the scope of possible justices to “politically-connected folks with law degrees from Harvard, Yale, or maaaaaybe Stanford who clerked for big-name judges and then worked in politics and/or big law firms,” (and there’s a good argument that we shouldn’t be limiting ourselves in that way), with the added limitation during Republican administrations of “must be a Federalist Society robot,” I think we can still shoot a little higher on the character front than “rapist, but reformed.” But that’s all moot now anyway, because Kavanaugh is denying it.
I almost forgot this part:
Further confirmation that Stephen Miller is a vile little troll who has no idea what consensual sex is like, because no woman has ever wanted him. And to be clear, I’m not looks-shaming him. Uglier-looking guys than him get laid all the time.
Dahlia Lithwick has another good read on Kavanaugh’s attack: Christine Blasey Ford’s Timing Isn’t Suspect.
Hear, hear.
Sorry for the triple post, but I’ve just now seen the text of the letter to Feinstein, and noticed this part:
I don’t think that’s how “seven minutes in heaven” works….
This wasn’t “date rape,” or a consensual makeout session gone bad, or a “what do you mean, consent from someone too drunk to stand up isn’t really consent?” scenario. Other than the fact that they were at the same party, this accusation is pretty much indistinguishable from the “stranger jumping out of the bushes” scenario that even conservatives acknowledge as being (attempted) rape. (Or, as Whoopi Goldberg put it, “rape rape.”)
“Don’t drag someone into a room and attempt to force them into sex” isn’t some new-fangled moral principle that feminists invented in the 21st century. People knew that shit was wrong in the 1980s; hell, they knew it was wrong in the 1480s.
I know Nichols deleted the original tweet, he did it while all that brawling was going on yesterday, but he went on expressing concern for Kavanaugh and absolutely none for Ford, even when people urged him to, and he continued to use sneaky concealing belittling language (what happened between two teenagers). Deleting one tweet out of all that doesn’t signal that he got the point.
(This is all “dog-piling” and virtue signaling and yadda yadda, I know, but…sometimes the dog has to be piled.)
I’m a man married to a man, as of November 2013, after thirty years of being in a relationship with him. My experience in a same-sex relationship has nearly blinded me to the travails that women go through.
The last couple of years have been quite a lesson for me — and a humiliating one at that, for it has exposed my naivete. How awful, how fucking awful, it is for women in this world, and, yes, how bloody despicable many heterosexual men are.
Not that I didn’t know sexual assaults happen all the time. Two females very close to me have confided their experiences with rape and assault. I’m honored to have been trusted with this information. One woman was not specific about her rape, but she mentioned it as a watershed event in her life. The other woman detailed to me how a neighbor walked right in on her while she was taking a bath. This woman happens to be a tough cookie and she repelled that motherfucker but good. There were other allusions and references by other women to attacks by men.
But now, the fucking floodgates have opened.
After working in several places that have sexual harassment codes, my belief was always that, while sexual attacks happen, they are taken care of quietly due to confidentiality laws. Never did I suspect that all these codes of behavior have been a farce, that women are attacked regularly and relentlessly by men in positions of power, and — until now — there has been little the women can do about it.
I have a way of looking at this that makes all-too-clear how terrible the situation is and how weak the minimizing and excuses are. Check this out:
: Imagine that it had been I, Mike B the man-lover, on that bus in Trump’s stead. Imagine that I had been bragging on tape about how easy is it to have my way with the young men at the college where I work. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful college boys — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a teacher, they let you do it for a good grade. You can do anything.Grab ’em by the cock and balls.”
: Imagine if I, Mike B the gay man, had been in Clarence Thomas’ shoes, a candidate for a prestigious promotion at work, and a young male student had come forward and made this charge against me:: “After a brief discussion of work, Mike would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as young men having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises involving various sex acts. On several occasions, he told me graphically of his own sexual prowess. . . . [H]e referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal, and he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to college boys with oral sex.”
: Imagine if nasty faggot Mike B had been in Brett Kavanaugh’s situation in suburban Maryland. I’m drunk, with my gay buddy at a party house, and I follow some jock up the stairs while he’s headed for the bathroom, and I push him into a room, lock the door, throw him onto a bed, and lie on him and begin humping him. I try to pull his briefs down. When he resists, I clamp my hand over his mouth…
Imagine what would have happened.
Imagine me dead.
Or doesn’t care. After all, it’s only women, right? Since when did women have a right to their own bodies? What man gave them that right? These men can’t even imagine the idea of waiting for consent.
Mike B – great post. You hit it on the head. I have seen people do all sorts of things to women and people yawn. Oh, that again? That’s just X being X. Get over it, stop whining. Do something much more minor to a man? Must take care of this right now. We simply don’t value women enough to care.
Also, it’s like the church scandals. Everyone I know thinks it is just a bunch of gay men humping young boys, and that girls are not affected at all. They have no idea that girls (and women) are being molested by priests, preachers, imams, rabbis, pastors, gurus, or other religious leaders (or “thought leaders of the intellectual dark web”) because the focus is always on the boys.
D’ya s’pose if Shermer had assaulted boys, he would be given the same support he has received, the same ongoing defense? Harvey Weinstein is apparently preparing a defense of “Hey, everyone does it, so it’s just our tradition, our culture, it’s just Hollywood, y’know? And the women? They did it by choice, because they love the idea of f***ing some old man in order to get the job they probably deserved anyway”. Try turning that around, if he had been doing that with guys, and see how much people would buy that. “It’s all in fun, they liked it, they took of their own clothes, they threw themselves at me…everyone does it”. Every man who is current defending the Brett Kavanaugh’s of the world would immediately say “Uh uh. Not me. I’m a man, and I don’t do that”.
Thanks, iknklast. By looking at it this way, the boys can see themselves in “her.”
The third person (ok, allegedly) in the room, Mark Judge, denies that it happened. But he may not be the most credible witness:
And he has a positively Trumpian view of women:
But hey, boys being boys, right?
It doesn’t matter #howfewmen, ANY is too many, and the scenario described here is absolutely normal within the culture of male sociopaths. And terrifyingly close to the ‘acceptable’ standards of dating. Drunkenness, coercion, intimidation, are all thinly veneered with normalcy all over popular culture.
http://www.middlebury.edu/media/view/240951/original
Wonderful how the double standard works, no? A woman gets abused while drunk, and it is her fault for getting drunk. A man gets drunk and does something awful, and hey, he was drunk, give him a break, he doesn’t remember it, are we going to run his whole career over one awful thing he did while drunk?
Women are told not to drink so men won’t take advantage of them while they are drunk. Men are given a pass because drunk.