Brett Kavanaugh: Privilege’s Last Stand?
The Ford-Kavanaugh ‘Showdown’ Put Toxic Masculinity and Entitlement on Display
The Ford-Kavanaugh ‘Showdown’ Put Toxic Masculinity and Entitlement on Display
Brett Kavanaugh was visibly angry. He lashed out. He answered questions with disrespectful questions, spun conspiracy theories, and showed himself to be the bully that Christine Blasey Ford describes.
And yet, we can expect Brett Kavanaugh to win conformation to the U.S. Supreme Court — a lifetime appointment that will give him ample opportunity to press ahead with a virulently partisan agenda that is anti-worker, anti-woman, and deferential to executive power.
The Kavanaugh confirmation, though, is not about that agenda, not with a president like Donald Trump or a conservative Senate majority. The appointment of Neil Gorsuch demonstrated as much. This seat — formerly held by Anthony Kennedy, a conservative who occasionally sided with liberals to tilt the court in a less inhumane direction — will be filled by an arch conservative.
What the Kavanaugh confirmation shows, however, is that women’s voices do not matter. The #metoo movement has been effective in chasing some powerful men from their positions of power, but those instances have featured somewhat powerful women — actresses with a following — or men whom the power structure was comfortable dispatching. Men like Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, and Louie C.K. deserved their rebukes and ultimate exiles, but the real decision-makers in our society, the cabal of privileged white men of wealth or connection, they get protection.
Brett Kavanaugh is the perfect embodiment of this. He attended a tony private high school that The National Catholic Reporter says “historically enrolled the sons of Washington’s elite and now charges $37,215 in annual tuition (a quarter of students receive financial aid, the school says).” The school has been described as having a “bro culture and ‘Animal House’ atmosphere.”
Since Blasey Ford’s allegations were made public, the atmosphere at Georgetown Prep of the 1980s has been depicted as one that catered to entitled young men who drank to excess and bragged about alleged sexual exploits in the school’s yearbook.
“What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep,” Kavanaugh joked at a 2015 event at the Catholic University of America. A slice of jocularity at a friendly gathering among friends? Or an inconvenient truth uttered in a throwaway line?
Georgetown Prep has pushed back against the coverage it’s received in recent weeks. The culture being described, officials say, does not reflect the values of the school — and, anyway, this isn’t much different than what we find elsewhere.
This may be true — though, this strand of argument is problematic in that it attempts to excuse the inexcusable. “It happens elsewhere” should not be an excuse — nor should “ Boys will Be Boys” — so much as a rallying cry to stamp out this kind of behavior and to hold accountable the worst offenders.
At this point, I should make it clear (as if it wasn’t already) that I believe Christine Blasey Ford and the others who came forward. That so many were so quick to impugn their motives, to assume that they were lying, that they were participating in a political hit job or some kid of conspiracy, is an indictment of our broader culture, one that is far too quick to assume the worst about those with whom we disagree. The fact is that our memories are imperfect, especially when trauma is involved. But this imperfection — in the case of Ford, an inability to remember details of an event that happened more than 35 years ago, one she had tried to repress but that she couldn’t — does not mean the trauma isn’t real or that the victim is wrong or lying about the greater details.
Again, I believe Christine Blasey Ford. I believe that what she described happened. I believe she wanted to avoid coming forward, as she said, because it would only compromise her privacy and possibly her reputation, and I believe her when she says she wanted to remain anonymous because it wouldn’t matter, that Brett Kavanaugh was going to be confirmed regardless and that the judge would never be held accountable for what she says he did.
“Once he was selected and it seemed like he was popular and it was a sure vote, I was calculating daily the risk-benefit for me of coming forward and wondering whether I would just be jumping in front of a train that was headed to where it was headed anyway and that I would just be personally annihilated,” she testified yesterday. “I believed that, if I came forward, my voice would be drowned out by a chorus of powerful supporters.”
This tracks closely with the reasons most sexual-abuse survivors are slow to or fail to report their assaults at all. Jean Hannah Edelstein, writing in the Guardian, provides the context, the millions who have been assaulted or raped, and “all the times we chose not to tell anyone …because we were ashamed.”
Because we were embarrassed, or felt we were to blame. Because given the choice between healing our own trauma and reliving it again and again in front of people who were looking for reasons to call us liars: well, very often we chose not to seek justice.
As she makes clear, this is normal for survivors, who are asked to bear their pain in silence in a culture that simultaneously places some women on pedestals and treats others as whores. Women, the culture has long held, are both fragile victims, but also responsible when they are assaulted. Did she drink too much? What was she wearing? What do you expect from teenage boys?
We feign accountability, but only for the street rapist or the black and brown men we love to disdain, and often only when the victim is a well-educated white woman — and this remains true even at a moment in history when harassment and assault on women have moved to the center of debate.
Ford, as Michelle Goldberg wrote in The New York Times, needed “to be nearly perfect” if she was going “(t)o be treated as remotely credible.”
She is a well-educated, blond, heterosexual mother; Republican Senator Orrin Hatch described her as “attractive” and “pleasing.” Her Ph.D. in psychology allowed her to speak fluently about the neurobiology of her own trauma. Because of her expertise, she wasn’t confused or defensive about why she remembered some details of the night in question but not others. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said, recalling the way Kavanaugh and Judge allegedly enjoyed themselves at her expense.
And yet, her perfection does not appear to be enough. Goldberg says it led to a “redoubled rage” as she realized that Ford’s testimony would be overshadowed by the right’s view of Kavanaugh as “martyr to the vicious left, a paragon of a man brought low by the inquisitorial forces of #MeToo.”
I fear she’s correct, even as a full Senate vote has been delayed for an FBI background check — a compromise offered to keep the last-remaining Republican moderates on board.
Kavanaugh does not belong on the Supreme Court. His demeanor at the hearing — he went on the offensive, spouted conspiracy theories, and puffed out his chest in the kind of petulant anger one is used to seeing from one whose privilege is being questioned — is the kind of performance one associates with a prickish teenage bully, answering questions with petulant questions and belittling his female Senate questioners.
Salon writer Amanda Marcotte, in a tweet yesterday, described Kavanaugh’s angry performance as the “fury of thwarted entitlement,” a phrase I think sums up not only the Kavanaugh performance but the GOP agenda, the Trump presidency and the response to demographic changes that are remaking the United States.
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