EOS/BOF
Oh man. I didn’t want to write about this today… I know better than to get into an internet pissing match, especially one on facebook of all places but I managed to put myself out there today via comments on a post a sweet, thoughtful adult nephew made that linked to an article about a woman who was “date”-raped many years ago and had struggled with the emotional trauma for many years after. Sound familiar?
I am not gonna describe the whole thing that happened today on facebook. It wasn’t pretty and it isn’t over because another (female) person has now asked me why I believe Dr. Ford over Kavanaugh and I am deciding whether I should reply or not. And if I do, what should I reply that won’t inflame things further?
I dunno what happened at that long ago party. Christine Ford says she had one beer. Kavanaugh and Judge were “stumbling drunk”. As goofy as I could get on the occasional beer I managed to get my hands on at the age of 15, I was NEVER drunk enough to not remember what happened in somebody’s bedroom at a party.
But then I didn’t attend mixed parties at 15. The only bedrooms I was ever in were my own and a few of my friends. No boys. No beer. I wasn’t very popular and I think one of the reasons I wasn’t, besides the fact that I was a nerdy introvert 🐽, was that people in my town perceived my family as being privileged. Definitely not privileged like the Kavanaughs apparently were. We lived in a northern outpost city nowhere near the wheeler-dealers of Washington DC but my dad was a respected small town banker and I think teenage boys didn’t really want to mess with him. At any rate I was not inundated with party invites or boyfriends crawling in my bedroom window. I did have a couple of boyfriends and kudos to Bad Boyfriend for being brave enough to call my house!
Eventually I went to enough of those kinds of parties to know what the hell went on at those things. People got drunk (like Kavanaugh and his friend) and people screwed (or fought each other off) in various bedrooms. These were not isolated bedrooms in big fancy houses, like the Kavanaugh crowd probably had. Most parties I attended in Sault Ste. Siberia were in teensy tinesy shabby little houses where you didn’t want to take off your shoes for fear of what might be on the floor and you could hear everything that was going on from everywhere in the house.
This stuff happens. It happens all the time. Young girls who struggle with self-esteem often want to be accepted by the “in-crowd”, which often (but not always) translates to people who have the power that wealth provides. They accept invitations to parties, etc., from people that they don’t know very well because they think those people actually like them and then they are pressured into sexual acts. Or, as in the Ford/Kavanaugh case, they are just plain dragged into a bedroom.
Did he rape her? She says he did not. Did he ASSAULT her? She says he did. We don’t know what happened. Dragging someone into a bedroom and trying to pull their clothing off, etc., is an act of violence against another human being. That is not okay. He denies it. Is he a liar? We don’t know. If he is, that is not okay. I tend to believe her. I know what it’s like to be a teenage girl.
It’s okay with me if Kavanaugh continues to live life as an “esteemed” judge or whatever but I do NOT want him on the Supreme Court!
Updated to clean up sloppy writing and extraneous details. 🐽
September 22nd, 2018 at 6:20 pm
I too have been to those parties, but in college. Everclear was often snuck into punches to get girls drunk enough. You couldn’t taste it but it packed a wallop. I agree that he has no business being a Supreme Court judge. I seem to always miss out on any Facebook “excitement!”
September 24th, 2018 at 8:51 am
I’ve also seen people making a reminder that date rape wasn’t a concept, or was very new in the 80s. I don’t know exactly when it was invented. There was even less avenue than now for young women to report assault (whether or not it ended in full on rape). Of course, I hardly remember because I was a baby, but I know that date rape was a new-ish concept when I was in college 20 years after this incident occurred. I sort of take issue with the concept of date rape anyway, which softens the crime. Plenty of young men know how to behave themselves even when they are drunk, and the ones who don’t tend to be repeat offenders. Rape is rape. In the case of the Ford-Kavanagh incident, it doesn’t really sound like something that happened on a date anyway.
And let’s not forget that most of the time when an assault is reported, nothing ever happens and it’s humiliating for the victim. Rape kits are frequently never tested or followed up on. RAINN offers statistics with citations which I think (hope) help shed some light on why someone might wait decades to say anything. Like, say until they saw their assailant up for a major public office where suddenly the stakes of that person’s behavior are much higher and affect millions of women’s rights, to say anything about it: https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
I refrained from entering that discussion because I was having a hard time figuring out what to say and how, but I think that some of my elders (not you mom), could use a little reflection on the first time they were, oh, I don’t know, let’s say catcalled as an example. Every woman can relate to that highly uncomfortable and often unsettling experience. Did they run home and tell their parents or hope that no one saw it happen?
And no, victims of sexual violence should not be expected to confront their assailants privately. For one thing, it could open them up to further violence or abuse. Would you tell a man who was robbed and beaten to address it with his assailants privately? No, you would tell him to go to the police, who would most likely investigate rather than question the veracity of his story, (well, at least if he were white).