Christine Blasey Ford knew that coming forward with her allegation against SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh would open an alt-right hellmouth that would engulf her and her family, but she did it anyway. I think that’s a lot more patriotic than torching a pair of Nikes.
In yesterday’s thread on the topic, I said I thought there was maybe a 5% chance Ford’s revelation would sink the Kavanaugh nomination. Many of y’all were more optimistic. Maybe you were right.
There’s a lot of butt-hurt about the possibility — mostly from men, mostly on the right, but not exclusively. The complaint is that shit that went down in high school shouldn’t haunt someone forever.
To some extent, that’s true. My husband and I were discussing this last night. We’re about the same age as Kavanaugh and Ford. Like most folks in our demographic cohort, we’re glad our youthful exploits weren’t captured on social media.
We discussed many stupid things we’d done and said back during the Reagan administration — shameful, embarrassing, irresponsible shit. But neither of us ever sexually assaulted anyone.
Yes, things were different in the 1980s — go watch “Pretty in Pink” if you want to cringe at outdated sexist and racist stereotypes that were mainstream at the time. But the incident Ford describes wasn’t acceptable back then either, even as our societal consensus on consent was, shall we say, more primitive.
The folks who are mostly arguing in bad faith about Kavanaugh do occasionally raise valid issues about how fair it is to hold people accountable for past behavior that clashes with current mores, and also adult culpability decades later for behavior during adolescence. That’s a conversation worth having.
But as someone pointed out on Twitter, it’s mostly those same people who have no problem with smearing unarmed victims of police shootings with old social media material and think it’s okay to lock teenagers up for life without parole.
Overall, I’m grateful for the progress we’ve made on the consent issue. It didn’t keep a serial sexual predator out of the White House in 2016. In fact, resistance to new norms almost certainly helped propel the orange fart cloud to the Oval Office.
But if it can help keep an ideologue credibly accused of sexual assault from joining a serial sexual harasser on the highest court in the land — a court that issues rulings affecting women’s bodily autonomy — I’ll count it as progress.