SJA #18 - 8 October 2018 - Brett Kavanaugh, Me Too, and Me

Not a Rant
I've been rolling this around in my head a lot. I've had this on my shoulders for years, but the cacafuego of Kavanaugh's confirmation has really weighed heavily on me. I don't want to talk about this, but I think I need to. So there's no doubt, I'll be discussing, albeit not in strong terms nor in detail, sexual assault and aggressive conduct, both drunk and sober.

Obviously, this isn't the first time we've had a shitty person trying for or achieving public power, and as a result it's not the first time I've had my personal demons reflected in a public figure. However, this time it really hits home. In part it's because I've spent years now steeping myself in social justice and intersectionality, but that was also true when Trump was running for office.

No, the reason this is hitting so hard is because Kavanaugh's history is so similar to mine. I grew up privileged, albeit slightly less privileged than Kavanaugh. My parents could have easily sent me to private schools, and at one point seriously considered it when it looked like dad's job might take him overseas long term. So I always attended public schools, but they were the best public schools in the area.

I also attended an Ivy League school (Cornell, and unlike Kavanaugh I actually was the first person in my family to go there) and joined a fraternity. At that fraternity, I drank. A lot. A very lot. And I was an entitled douche to women. I have my #metoo stories, but I'm on the wrong side of that hashtag.

I was aggressive. I crossed boundaries. I made women feel unsafe. I made women unsafe.

Before you put a hole in the wall getting away from me, I never got to the level that Kavanaugh reached. I don't think I got to the level he started at. I never jumped a woman and tried to literally silence her cries for help. I never drugged women and participated in gang rapes.

But I did cross lines. And they're not blurred lines. They're very clear lines. I can recall a number of occasions, and have been told about another, where I can't even imagine what I made another person feel. Was she uncomfortable? Disgusted? Afraid? Terrified? Scarred?

I don't know because these women haven't sought me out to tell me. Some of them wouldn't have known me well enough to be able to seek me out. Also, I haven't made any effort to try and get on the supreme court or run for congress. I haven't tried to position myself as a Sterling moral authority.

I want to clarify, while I did many things I was ashamed of while drunk, not everything I did can be pinned on alcohol. I was immersed in a toxic environment and perpetuated that toxicity. I was bad when I was drunk, but not only when I was drunk. I was just worse when drunk.

In any event, there are differences between me and Kavanaugh as well as similarities, but the biggest difference is that I regret the harm I've done. I've tried to grow, and change, and become the moral exemplar I don't, and will never, claim to be. I sincerely hope that this is clear, not from my words (because a number of men have demonstrated they don't live up to feminist ideals, from Joss Whedon to Louis CK), but from my actions. I hope I lift up the voices of the oppressed, I hope I nurture students instead of shutting them down, I hope people feel safe when I'm around... I hope I'm becoming the person I want to be.

A lot of Kavanaugh's defenders, rape apologists all, have tried to claim that these allegations are so old that they're irrelevant, he was young and now he's mature, we can't hold youthful mistakes against him. Yes we can. We absolutely can.

First, Kavanaugh clearly doesn't regret, doesn't repent his actions. He has vigorously denied the allegations even as he provided the high school calendar that confirms them, even as more and more allegations come out, even as more of his former friends and acquaintances step forward to refute his statements. He has responded with disbelief and anger, not sorrow. He hasn't learned in the last 36 years, he hasn't grown beyond his boyhood rape phase.

Secondly, we have Kavanaugh's long history since college. We know that law professors groomed female law students to clerk in his court. They had to be physically beautiful, dressed to excellence, with perfect makeup. Mere academic excellence was no guarantee of a job with Judge Kavanaugh, not for anyone with a vagina.

And his actions in and out of court also confirm his continued disdain for women. He has made it perfectly clear, using the coded language of Republican doublespeak, that he will repeal Roe v Wade. And yet in 2007, while sitting on the DC Circuit Court, he ruled in favor of forcing two women to have abortions over their objections. He also ruled in that case that a third woman could be forced to have elective eye surgery over her objections. The three women were intellectually disabled and had been ruled mentally incompetent, and thus were being forced to undergo medical procedures without their consent.

If you bought into the lies surrounding the Republican party's position on abortion, you might be confused about a "conservative" judge forcing women to have abortions. However, their smokescreen is meant to hide the truth of their fundamentalist, antediluvian ideals. They view women as less than fully human, perhaps not even human, certainly not deserving of the human rights men possess. They view women as objects, as the property of men, to be transferred from the possession of their fathers to the possession of their husbands, locked away in homes and used however their owner sees fit.

Kavanaugh views women as objects to be used. As a boy, he used them for his physical pleasure. As a grown man, he requires his female clerks to please him visually, though no allegations have surfaced (yet) that he abused them otherwise. And he has used his position as a judge to push women into the subordinate, purely physical role of making babies for men. They are not human beings to him, with dreams, goals, and motivations, but limited use baby factories.

And those disabled women he forced to receive abortions they didn't want? Damaged goods. Unfit for the use of men because they would produce tainted offspring.

Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh did outgrow his "violent, physical rape phase" from high school and his "drug and gang rape" phase from college. Perhaps he truly has stopped physically, intimately assaulting women in person. But that doesn't mean he's grown into a better person. He now assaults women globally. He now uses his power to strip them of the dignity, equality, and human rights he feels that they, as objects, don't deserve. His position on the rights and dignity of other minorities is just as awful, and for much the same reasons.

Brett Kavanaugh doesn't belong on the Supreme Court. His repeated perjury means he doesn't belong on any court. Brett Kavanaugh needs to stop shouting angrily about his wounded pride, and instead spend a few years listening to the women who have been injured by the toxic culture he represents, that I used to represent. It might do him a world of good. It certainly did for me.

There's something more important to take away from this. Brett Kavanaugh is awful, but he's not a monster. He loves his wife and daughter. He genuinely cares about his daughter's basketball team. He absolutely loves the United States and believes that the terrible, genocidal things he's going to do as a member of the Supreme Court are good things to do. He has a normally functional brain, with the full complement of moral emotions. He's normal.

Brett Kavanaugh is what happens when you take a perfectly ordinary person and raise them in an environment where the most serious crimes face no consequences, and ridiculous non-crimes like "blasphemy" or "disrespect" face severe consequences. When you force a normal, decent person into a perverse environment, the result is a perverse individual. He has spent decades turning into the ingrown toenail of a human being we see today... but he's normal.

And so am I. Somewhat. I've been wrestling with my demons for years now, both the demons foisted on me by culture that led me to do harmful things to others and the demons I was born with that led me to drink myself unconscious every night for ten years. But before I dove into that project, I was just a guy, living the way he had been taught, trying to live up to the mal-formed and ill-expressed set of virtues he'd been fed.

I look back on my past with shame and disgust, and I know there are other men like me who have faced and are facing what they have done, who are learning to live with that shame, and who are trying to build a better world. Because there are other men who will have to face their crimes in the future, men who are still boys, men who are infants, men who haven't been born. Our culture shapes men like Kavanaugh and me, and throws us into the world, weapons intended to dehumanize and subjugate women, forcing them into place as lesser beings, subservient and traumatized.

I can only hope that by sharing my story, by outing myself as a one-time abuser of women, that I can transform Kavanaugh from a distant, monstrous other, into the nightmare next door. Because rapists aren't troglodytes lurking in the bushes. If the women in your life trust you enough to share their pain, and far, far too many of them have pain they're hiding, then you will learn that three out of four rapists are known to the victim. Your rapist is not a stranger hiding in the shadows. Your rapist is your neighbor, your friend, your roommate's boyfriend, your roommate, your brother, your father, your uncle, your grandfather, your teacher, your boss, the kid sitting next to you in math class.

Brett Kavanaugh will never answer for his crimes, not even to himself. A few hours before I recorded this, he was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Even in the most optimistic future, he will never be charged for his assaults and rapes. He will only ever be removed from the court if the United States alters its culture and politics in a dramatic fashion.

Which means we need to work to make sure there are no more Kavanaughs moving forward. We need to act to stop the rapists, the abusers, the harassers in our lives. It's going to be difficult, heart-breaking, and dangerous, but the alternative is worse in every possible way. When you call out a co-worker for demeaning someone sexually, you're not just confronting him; you're confronting everyone who didn't say something. You're encouraging the people who wanted to, but were too frightened, you're discouraging the ones who thought he was funny, you're changing the minds of those who hadn't thought about it before. And they can go out and change the world, too. Your small acts can add up to big changes, but only if they're difficult. The small easy things just keep things the way they are.

Thank you for listening. This may have been hard for some people to listen to. It was hard to say. If you want to share your me too stories, if you want to rip me a new one, if you want to comment or respond in any way, you can do so at my youtube channel, Social Justice Alchemy, or on the blog, surgoshan.blogspot.com. You can also find me on twitter at @surgoshan.

No news this week; I'm going to let this one stand alone. I've included links to some articles about Brett Kavanaugh's behavior and legal decisions below. And remember, these past few weeks have been awful for many people, there are people in your life who could no doubt use some additional kindness.

Amanda Marcotte's article on Kavanaugh forcing women to have abortions
Caselaw: Kavanaugh's decision
Kavanaugh's clerks groomed like models