Although painfully public, it’s progress
It’s not why didn’t Kavanaugh’s accuser speak up — it’s why would she?
Why did Christine Blasey Ford wait 36 years to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh not only of sexual misconduct but of actions that might have added up to a crime?
Wrong question, folks. That’s man-thought. For women who were young in those times, the question isn’t “Why didn’t she report it?” The question is “Why would she?”
Calling the police because a couple creeps groped you, held a hand over your mouth and tried to take off your clothes at a drunken house party in 1982 would never have occurred to many women. The cops would have laughed. Yet, the question gets asked every time a woman comes forward years later, when even the act of asking implies that the victim must be lying. For shame, folks. Consider that grown men molested by Catholic priests don’t typically get a skeptical reaction when they come forward with their stories of abuse. Why is that? Is doubting a woman’s account of sexual misconduct somehow embedded in the hippocampus?
Let’s hope not, but it certainly has been part of American society for many years. Transport yourself for a moment back to that time of changing norms for genders when Ford, now a university professor and researcher, says her drunk high school acquaintance, Kavanaugh, tried to rape her at a party.
At the time, young women were being brought up with the ideas of the women’s liberation movement, a far cry from how their mothers were raised. Those poor souls couldn’t even get a car
title or checking account in their own name. They stayed home and raised babies. Men held nearly all the power in society.
Ford and Kavanaugh as teens were in a generation to live out these ideas of equality. Newspapers wrote stories about the first woman elected to the town commission, the first woman judge, the first woman police officer in town. There was such marveling because women previously were considered unfit for business or anything else that involved responsibility and solid judgment. They were too emotional and hysterical to survive in a man’s world. Which it certainly still was. The year Ford says Kavanaugh assaulted her the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court was a newbie. A woman wouldn’t serve as U.S. attorney general until more than a decade later.
The balance of power in society may have started to shift away from white guys, but like Civil Rights for people of color, it didn’t happen overnight.
The idea had just begun to emerge that the delicate flowers of society were at least partly responsible for their fate, and that notion added another layer of pressure not to report a sexual assault, which is historically under-reported anyway. Folks, the view of what you “should” do is vastly different when the result of speaking up can mean the loss of a job, the ruin of your reputation and years of harassment.
However, the biggest hurdle to outing the boss because he insistently groped you in a dark hallway at the annual Christmas party was simply this: Men did that sort of thing all the time. Not all men, of course. Plenty were brought up to respect women.
But there were enough that women of a certain age can bring up this topic, and virtually everyone in the room has a story. We remember them with great clarity because the experience was grossly distasteful.
Fanny-patting or breast-groping wasn’t considered OK at the time, but it also wasn’t considered a major deal. A “boys will be boys” mentality was society’s outlook, and there was no point in talking about it.
Confident women learned to brush off aggressive advances — careful not to embarrass him — and skillfully dodged the jerk in the future. They already knew that no good — but plenty of bad — could come of it. Sometimes, the rejected man made the woman’s life miserable, even if she did keep her mouth shut. The Amish figured out several centuries ago that social shunning is a very effective technique. Fast forward to today. A couple years ago, my 26-year-old daughter described to me comments made by a supervisor where she worked. They involved his inappropriate desire to have sex with a colleague’s “hot” sister, whose photo he saw on Facebook. This 61-year-old mother’s reaction would have been: ‘Oh, shut up, dude. That’s creepy.’ Move on.
It was not how her colleague, a guy, played it out. He marched down to the company’s human resources department and relayed the story. That supervisor was in deep trouble, and he eventually was dismissed after HR learned of other similar remarks. Times have changed, haven’t they?
All this brings us to Question No. 2: “Why is she bringing it up now?” And here we are, back at the issue of who holds power in a society.
Those of us who grew up in the decades during which the role of women was evolving may not have forced change as far as it should have gone, but in our defense, first swipes at moving the mountain rarely do. Today, we realize that our unvoiced complaints from then would be considered egregious now.
The time has come when women like Ford know that people with sense will take her allegations seriously.
And regardless of whether Kavanaugh is seated on the Supreme Court, no man with multiple accusers of sexual misconduct likely will get this far again.
This process has been publicly painful, but it’s how we birth the thing called progress.
The time has come when women like (Christine Blasey) Ford know that people with sense will take her allegations seriously.