At its heart, the Kavanaugh mess is about controlling women’s bodies
Women see many things when we look in the mirror at our bodies.
If we’re fit after working hard at it, what we see makes us proud — stronger, sculpted arms and legs, a satisfying sense that not all has gone to wrack and ruin.
If we’ve survived a serious illness, we see both its ravages — a long scar perhaps, a lopsided shoulder where some lymph nodes were removed — but also the undeniable evidence that we’re still alive.
And almost always, we look in the mirror and ruefully see our body’s imperfections — a stomach that could be flatter, those extra pounds we failed to lose, a body that no matter what our age, isn’t sexy enough, slim enough, good enough.
What we don’t often do is look in the mirror and see our bodies as constructs in certain political agendas, a commodity politicians want to control.
In the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination mess in the U.S., surely control over women’s bodies is the pivotal issue.
His proponents — President Donald Trump and the Republican party — have been moving as fast as they can to confirm a man who they believe, despite his careful statements during his confirmation process, will help roll back abortion rights by repealing Roe v Wade, the 1973 law that affirmed the constitutional right to access safe, legal abortion.
But their nomination of Kavanaugh, a husband and father who trotted out a girls’ basketball team he coaches in front of the judiciary committee to showcase his female friendly qualities, is being derailed by first one, then another allegation of sexual misconduct against women when he was in high school or at Yale University.
After much negotiating, California professor Christine Blasey Ford was scheduled to testify this week about her allegation that when she was 15 and Kavanaugh 17, he held her down on a bed during a house drinking party, put his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream, and tried to remove her clothing. She managed to escape but the episode traumatized her for years.
In a second allegation via reporting in The New Yorker magazine by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow, Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh, said that when he was inebriated he exposed himself to her during a dormitory party.
These allegations are not proven. But they shouldn’t bode well for Kavanaugh’s confirmation, despite the protestations of Republicans like Rep. Steve King who said of Blasey Ford’s allegation: “How can you disprove something like that? Which means, if that’s the new standard, no man will ever qualify for the Supreme Court again.”
I have always remarked on the hypocrisy of those male politicians who bleat about the sanctity of life but who then secretly obtain abortions for their daughters, wives or girlfriends.
Republican Jason Miller, a former Trump spokesperson and freshly disappeared CNN contributor, is now denying allegations in a court filing that he slipped an abortion pill into a mistress’s drink.
We should not be smug here about the ages old attempt to control female bodies. Premier Doug Ford has indicated a willingness to pander politically to the fiercely anti-choice religious right.
The #MeToo movement has been
What we don’t often do is look in the mirror and see our bodies as constructs in certain political agendas, a commodity politicians want to control. JUDITH TIMSON
in full explosive force this past year challenging the outrage of men treating women’s bodies as if they owned them, outing powerful predators at the pinnacle of cultural and political life, sharing poignantly personal but still universal tales of sexual abuse at the hands of so many men.
It has brought us to a week in which famed comedian Bill Cosby is sentenced after being convicted of sexual assault. A week during which a seemingly once unassailable Supreme Court nominee will be forced to publicly respond, if his nomination survives until Thursday, to at least one allegation of sexual assault.
In the New York Times, an executive for Planned Parenthood, which opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation from the start, described this pivotal moment as “a distillation of the entire two years trajectory for women in this country.
“Are we respected? Are we believed? Are we equal?”
If the answer to any one of the above is no, and Kavanaugh is confirmed despite credible evidence that he shouldn’t be, then millions of women don’t even need to ask who owns their bodies. It’s obvious, no matter what they see in the mirror, they don’t.