WE’RE IN VIRGIN TERRITORY
It’s been a long time since I last thought about the Technical Virgins Association.
The TVA — which is not to be confused with the people who generate electricity in the Tennessee Valley — was a joke my friends and I made up early in our college careers. It referred to the then-popular idea that girls could go as far as they wanted with a boy as long as everything stayed, um, intact.
All of this brings us to Brett Kavanaugh, who appears to have been a TVA member.
“Never had sexual intercourse with anyone in high school?” asked a Fox interviewer. “Correct,” said a somber Supreme Court nominee, who added that he had maintained that record for “many years after.”
Except maybe not. “Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh was a virgin for many years after high school. But he claimed otherwise in a conversation with me during our freshman year in Lawrance Hall at Yale, in the living room of my suite,” tweeted a history professor at the University of Wisconsin.
The professor, Stephen Kantrowitz, said he remembered Kavanaugh’s account of losing his virginity distinctly “because it was the first time I had had such a conversation with an acquaintance who was not a friend.”
So, people, it sounds as if a young Brett Kavanaugh was bragging — to virtual strangers — about having done the deed. That was, of course, before he was nominated to the Supreme Court and became a charter member of the TVA.
When it comes to the relationship between men and women, we’ve been on a heck of a journey. First, after a long struggle, the nation accepted the idea that women had the same right to education and job opportunities as men. Then we confronted the fact that if women were going to work in every part of society, shoulder to shoulder with men, we had to do something fast about predatory bosses and male colleagues with grabby hands.
Now, it’s sex outside the workplace. Follow the Kavanaugh story and you’re traveling back to the days when men were supposed to try to go all the way and women were supposed to hold the line. If you failed, he got to boast and you were awarded a scarlet letter.
By the time Kavanaugh was a teenager we had, at least in theory, gotten past that point. Clearly, everybody didn’t get the message at Georgetown Prep. And maybe not even today in Washington, D.C.
Where our president, once a proud grabber of private parts, is convinced the charges against Kavanaugh are “a big fat con job.”
And wow, here’s Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-North Dakota, describing the night in which Christine Blasey Ford says Brett Kavanaugh pinned her on a bed and attempted to rip off her clothes:
“They were drunk. Nothing evidently happened in it at all, even by her own accusation.”
Nothing happened at all, since Kavanaugh lost his grip and Blasey escaped. No penetration, no complaints.
Only women can really call up memories like the ones the Kavanaugh hearing is resurrecting — of a double standard so unbreachable Trump’s imaginary wall pales in comparison.
During his historic Fox interview, Kavanaugh repeatedly urged America to listen to 65 women who knew him in high school and signed a letter “saying I always treated them with dignity and respect.” One was Renate Schroeder Dolphin, who did not know, when she attested to Kavanaugh’s good-guyness, that he had reportedly enjoyed trash-talking about her as a teenager and posed with some fellow football players in a yearbook photo of “Renate Alumni.”
“I pray their daughters are never treated this way,” she told The New York Times.
Kavanaugh’s critics may not conclusively prove that he sexually assaulted a teenage girl when he was in high school, or drunkenly waved his private parts in a classmate’s face at Yale.
But he’s still a reminder of the bad old days. The Senate could show the country that even though we’ve got a president who exemplifies all that’s depressing and creepy about male attitudes toward women, we’re still moving on.
Kavanaugh isn’t on trial for his life. The question at hand is simply whether the country should give him an extraordinary honor and lifetime power to make decisions that will affect everybody in the land.
It’s perfectly fair to just say no.