I can feel the fury in my fingertips over this moment. The clamor is profound and overwhelming, that any of this could happen – that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford could have been so needlessly, flippantly sexually assaulted so many years ago, that Kavanaugh should defend himself in roars before senators, that any of this reached such a nauseous level of colossal, American self-destruction. And here we are to pick up the pieces as each of us screams into the pixilated madness of a television screen that he is a liar or this is a Democratic ploy. There is a sense that something is falling apart, that we shall remember this as long as we live.
If it weren’t obvious, Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday was a heart-rending expression of our political moment. On stage before us was not only the lasting pain of sexual assault trauma, nor the destruction of a nominee’s “good name,” but the trial and exploration of our political moment. We will be forced to confront this moment in both its detached parts and its entirety for years to come – in forthcoming appointments, in court cases that Kavanaugh might rule on, in instances of women alleging sexual assault against men in power (the same way Anita Hill’s testimony rang through Thursday’s hearing).
It had everything to describe our imploding political moment: the #MeToo movement, the expected and helpless partisanship of ever-more extreme politics, the fury of a country pained by the 2016 election, the fury of a country emboldened by the 2018 election, and the dysfunctional way that we can no longer see one another’s pupils.
According to the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN), the National Sexual Assault Hotline received a 147 percent increase in calls on Thursday. On every television network and media outlet, every social media platform – everyone was watching Blasey Ford’s testimony as her voice crackled in anguished memory, remembering the wounds she still nurtures. Victims across the United States were forced to relive their trauma through her, feeling encouraged and compelled to share their testimony with another person. Victims around the United States, perhaps the world, have found support in Blasey Ford’s testimony for coming forward. They have also furiously refuted the President’s erroneous idea that survivors would have reported such violence the moment it happened.
The result is a more public reckoning with #MeToo than any Weinstein accusation could have propitiated. The reckoning of accusations – 36 years ago or last week – have bled into the present. Whether a man committed a sexual crime three decades ago is in fact entirely the point, because it was a crime then as it was now.
The explosion of what Kavanaugh has called “last-minute smears” and alleged victims’ characterizations of his conduct in the 1980s has exposed a crucial element of young male sexual assault: that collegiate, fraternal, brotherly sexual conquest is not for sex, not even for power, but for brotherly validation. Dozens of high school moments in movies and real life emerge of people high-fiving over girls slept with. It is as if the assault that Kavanaugh allegedly committed was so forgettable – or he so drunk – that Kavanaugh is truly innocent in his mind simply by way of the entrenched nature of male perspective on sexual encounters that encourages counting conquests. That outdated coherency of male ambition and aggression in sex is something that does not follow for a Supreme Court nominee. Nominee’s must be judged by today’s cultural standards, regardless of whether his judges are septuagenarians or not.
Kavanaugh became unexpectedly combative, lashing out at the media that “breathlessly and often uncritically” reported on the mounting allegations against him. He was incorrigible in his assault on Democrats, referring to it as a “coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy [his] good name.” The partisanship was unmatched, with Senators on the left and right constantly sniping at one another: Graham’s grandstanding stands out as a blinking highlight. But the shocking level of partisanship Kavanaugh injected into his final words as nominee was unexpected, regardless of what he surely perceived as targeted character assassination. That level of combativeness was likely as much a true expression of his clenched-fist anger as it was a show of strength for those waiting for a reason to pass a vote his way. The remainder is that a supposedly bipartisan trusted institution has been infected by the verbiage of left and right (the practicality of left and right has lived there for so much longer). There is little to do to return from this moment, like an object passing beyond a black hole’s event horizon. Kavanaugh carried that notion forward, accusing Senate Democrats of organizing a “calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election” and “revenge on behalf of the Clintons”. After listening to the hearing and parsing it out, there were moments that I reasoned that two things could be true, that a dichotomy was not the only set of options. Democrats are no doubt still enraged by the 2016 election, but there is also a universe – one that we live in – in which these allegations are true and it fits the moment’s disagreeable narrative that it was a partisan hit.
Likewise, risking being charitable to Kavanaugh, there is a universe that they are both correct – or at least they both believe they are. I believe Blasey Ford “one hundred percent” as she put it. There is also a scenario where Kavanaugh believes, fire-lipped as he is, that he did not assault Blasey Ford, simply by being too drunk or through the meaninglessness of sexual assault to men. The structures of male power over women in sex, were much more pronounced 36 years ago, and what Kavanaugh believes with conviction today, is a simple expression of lasting male aggression and power.
I want to believe that we all have the best intentions, that we all deserve the benefit of the doubt, but there should be no doubts about a nominee’s record or character. What did Blasey Ford have to gain with her testimony? Nothing. Choose someone else, Mr. President.