Crossing Lines

After an uneven but not disastrous appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court seemed certain. Then Senator Dianne Feinstein released a letter she had received from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, alleging that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when they attended high school together. The uproar in Congress and the public discourse that followed has asked almost every possible question about the situation except for the ones we ought to be asking.

There has been a comprehensive and devious movement among Republican commentators and several lawmakers to question Dr. Blasey's credibility. The presidential Twitter itself has declared that if the events in question were "as bad as she says" then she obviously would have reported it to police - sexual assaults are incidentally the most widely underreported crimes in the country, for reasons that the response to Dr. Blasey ought to make obvious.

Anyone listening to the chorus attacking her will have heard the melody before. She's seeking notoriety and attention, she's politically motivated, was she drunk too?, why talk about it now?, and on it goes. All of these questions are inevitably directed at the accuser, but how seldom do we inquire with a similar urgency about the behavior of the accused? A woman who has been forced to leave her home after receiving death threats is accused of seeking notoriety while the cult of masculinity that educates our young men goes unexamined.

The fact that Judge Kavanaugh is a public figure has led to predictably ludicrous accusations that Dr. Blasey's story is a political fabrication. Burying women sharing their experiences under charges of partisanship and bad faith is nothing new, and a phenomenon with which the Democratic Party is also quite familiar. The Democrats weren't nearly so unanimous in siding with women when Al Franken stood accused of groping multiple women and harrowing tales of physical and psychological abuse by Keith Ellison became public, and their ruthless defense of Bill Clinton in the 1990s is now justly infamous.

So many of the defenses offered for Kavanaugh are testaments to his private character from individuals who know or have worked with him. What these seem to say, roughly, is that only a horrible person would do something like sexually assault someone, that they don't believe that he is a horrible person, and therefore he cannot have done what Dr. Blasey alleges. It's an argument that suffers from a questionable premise. Is it really true that only those who are utterly depraved, forsaken souls cross lines of consent?

I don't think so. We exist in a culture that will go out of its way to excuse and normalize sexual aggression on the part of men, from something as simple as an inappropriate advance to physical violence. Young people in this country learn very early in their maturity to regard sex as a contest in which a male tries to convince a female to give him something. That framework subtantially colors how we think about issues of sexual assault, consent, and harassment. Instead of asking why a man feels justified taking liscense with someone else's body, we blame a woman for placing her body near him as though his behavior is perfectly acceptable. 

Such a framework also lends itself to the rejection of abuse claims made by male victims who are ridiculed for not being sexually dominant, and ignores the possibility of any other interaction than that between a cis man and cis woman altogether. Because of that focus I am speaking about relationships between cisgendered heterosexual people in this post, but the explicit exclusion of all other relationships from our dominant paradigms of thought should not be diminished, even accounting for such modest progress as has been made in recent times.

The result of those paradigms is a deep tension. On the one hand, almost everyone understands intuitively that sexual assault is a bad thing. Yet simultaneously we try to reject claims when victims come forward because we are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that our society fosters an environment in which something so horrible is so frequent. We don't want the people who cross lines to be people we know and like, and we certainly don't want to find out that we ourselves are guilty.

I am myself quite certain that some of my own actions in the past have made other people uncomfortable. There may be a broad spectrum of kinds of mistreatment, from harassment to abuse and violence, but they are all informed by the same cultural permissiveness and none of us is immune from its influence. Coming to grips with how my personal actions effected other people has been a long and difficult process. I regret my own participation in a culture of sexual entitlement among young men. Men, as a gender, need to have more candid and introspective dialogues - particularly with the women in our lives - about consent and how to combat the harmful effects of our sexual socialization. We have to take responsibility for changing our culture because we are the only ones who can. Honestly acknowledging the social problems that enable damaging behavior forces us to ask questions that make us uncomfortable, but the very fact that they make us so uncomfortable should alert us to the reality of the problem.

That is why the defense of Kavanaugh, dependent as it is on assaulting the credibility of his accuser and denying the event rather than wrestling with questions about rape culture and the presence of alcohol within it, turns my stomach. Not just because it insists that a woman is attacking an upstanding citizen and permanently changing her own life for no good reason whatsoever, but because it pretends that the sort of thing Dr. Blasey describes is in itself not really a problem.

Kavanaugh, if he makes it to the bench, will likely bring with him a background that implicitly expects the sexual subservience of women to men, and that has significant implications for public policy. He does not recognize it himself, or at least does not acknowledge it publicly if his response to Dr. Blasey's allegation is any guide. While that is certainly an issue with someone nominated for the highest judicial seat in the land, it is more importantly a widespread issue embedded in our culture that needs to be systematically addressed.