Did we learn anything from #Me Too?
The last few years have been, for those who have cared to learn, a brutal education in how pervasive rape and violence against women is. We saw how the perpetrators are so often believed, the victims blamed and discredited, and how various powers — employers and institutions, universities, media, law enforcement — have protected perpetrators, especially high-status perpetrators and allowed their abuses to continue. Bringing this system to light has changed it — but not enough.
The hearings about Brett Kavanaugh feel like the finale of this education: the test. Will what we have learnt matter? Or will a Republican party that has, with minor exceptions, made itself one with rape culture, prevail?
When the Anita Hill hearing happened 27 years ago, we were as a nation ignorant about the prevalence and nature of sexual harassment. Though many women had experienced it, it had not been established that sexual harassment violated our legal rights and was something that could and should be publicly and officially remedied. It was just something you dealt with yourself or accepted as part of the tax on being female.
The Hill hearings were a huge education in not only the reality of sexual harassment but why women might do nothing about it. You could say of Hill what someone joked about Christine Blasey Ford the other day: “Why didn’t she report it earlier so they could start attacking her earlier?” The way the all-white, all-male senators treated Hill is now widely regarded as despicable; that three of them — Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Patrick Leahy — are still on the committee is dismaying.
It’s worth remembering that, though Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Anita Hill did not testify in vain. The indirect consequences of her testimony included what’s called The Year of the Woman, the 1992 elections that sent more women to the house of representatives and US senate ■ than ever before. That year also saw improved federal sexual harassment legislation passed, which was clearly in response to her courageous testimony. Reports of sexual harassment in the workplace skyrocketed. The seldom remembered Civil Rights Act of 1991 was passed in the wake of her appearance.
Each of the three women who has emerged to accuse supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual crimes has been, as so many anticipated, blamed and attacked and, in the case of Ford, threatened so gravely that she and her family are essentially in hiding.
With the newest bearer of allegations — Julie Swetnick, who on Tuesday claimed she was at about 10 drinking parties with Kavanaugh at which young women were drugged and sexually assaulted — an attack framework appeared so quickly and widely it seemed planned. As one person put it on Twitter: “Julie Swetnick says girls drink spiked drinks, men gang rape, and does nothing, She should be arrested for being complicit and a co-conspirator.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. One quirk is that the same people who insist these things didn’t happen blame the women for them happening — it’s the logical incoherence of multiple contradictory defences common in cases of sexual assault: it didn’t happen and it was her fault anyway. Or perhaps it’s that she’s guilty even if nothing happened and he’s innocent no matter what he did.
But the people who blame the victims for not reporting are ignorant or forgetting what it was and is like: rape has been a crime in which prosecutions and conviction levels are extremely low in this country, women have been disbelieved or punished for coming forward or both. ‘Women have been disbelieved or punished for coming forward or both.’