Raising our voices

My ex-manager and I had our regular catch-up session yesterday; our first in several weeks, what with one thing and another. At one point the conversation veered onto the Brett Kavanaugh…drama last Thursday, and he asked me my opinion on a couple of related issues.

One was ambient sexism, the double standard for male/female behavior. An egregious example was Kavanaugh’s drama queen performance, flouncing into the Senate chamber and alternating belligerence with sniveling and sobbing. The entirety of the Republican party applauded him and gave him full-throated himpathy, for having his life completely torn apart by not having the greased slide into SCOTUS that they’d all promised one another.

I reported that at GHC last Friday, Anita Hill mildly commented that no female nominee to SCOTUS (or any bench, I’m betting) would have the license to throw a meltdown even vaguely resembling that witnessed the previous day. And therein lies the ambient sexism.

In the business world (and politics, and pretty much everywhere), behavior that in men is considered strong, direct, no-nonsense and effective, in women is seen as strident, angry, unattractive and aggressive. If women don’t speak up they’re mowed down. If they do speak up, they’re too forceful. Performance evaluations will tell women that they’re not assertive enough, while at the same time they’re too bossy.

If a female nominee had pulled a Kavanaugh, Senators would be clutching their pearls and every news outlet in the nation would run banner headlines that include the words “hissy fit”.

Essentially what this ambient sexism does is tell women everywhere that we have no place in the greater world, so we should remain at home; behind; out of sight; silent.

We also discussed this exercise: a professor asked a classroom full of students what tactics they employ generally to avoid sexual assault. Here’s the result:

Men (outside of prisons, I suppose) never think about it; women pretty much always have to. (My manager made a good point: if the professor had gone back and asked white and black men what precautions they take to avoid crime, the white side would probably still be largely empty while the black side would be full. “The resulting table would be full on the black male and all-female sides, while the white male center would be empty. And therein lies white male privilege.”)

That came across my Twitter feed, and I tweeted that, while most of them have been in my arsenal, the one that resonated deeply was the one about never renting a ground-floor flat. I have always steered clear of them. Several people engaged on this, with one pointing out that you have a greater risk of dying in fires if you’re on upper floors. I said I’ve consciously considered that I’d hang from an upper window and drop—not jump—and take my chances.

(I also don’t even have my actual home address programmed into my sat-nav, and even entering it into Uber and Lyft creeps me out.)

But in response to my manager’s question, I said this kind of ambient sexism is like trying to walk in the ocean when the water is up to your waist. The effort to take even a few steps just wears you the hell out before you even get to your destination. And why the fuck are women having to weigh which risk they’d rather live with, death by fire or sexual assault?

Then he asked what my response would have been had Kavanaugh said something along the lines of, “Yes, I drank way too much in high school, and I did things I’m truly not proud of. I don’t recall the incident Dr. Ford describes, but if I did it, it’s an appalling thing, and I apologize profusely for the pain it’s caused her, both then and now in coming forward,” and then proceeded to itemize what he’s done in the intervening three decades to turn his life around and be a net-positive citizen. How would I respond to that statement?

Well, I’d be inclined to accept that acknowledgement and move on to considering other things, like his crackbrained notions about imperial presidencies and whatnot. Because here’s the thing: high school is when kids are supposed to do all kinds of stupid stuff (although you’d hope that assaults aren’t part of the repertoire). They push boundaries, and sometimes they push way too hard, especially where alcohol or other substances are involved. They commit crimes—sometimes felonies—and they make mistakes. Even in college that kind of shit happens, because 18-22 year olds are still trying to transition from children to adults. If every kid who did something lamentable during this time had to carry it around his or her neck forever, well, we’d very few of us escape.

It’s what you do after you realize what appalling choices you made (and what harm you've caused) that counts—how you turn your life around, make something good of yourself because of those experiences. If Kavanaugh had taken that approach, I think there would be a lot less derision and contempt, certainly from me.

I mean, I would definitely keep an eye on him, monitor his alcohol consumption and probably never share an Uber anywhere with him, but I’d move on from him being a prize prick in his youth to examine what kind of a putz he’s become since then. And he certainly does not disappoint on that count.

However, as I went on, it’s his arrogant denial that he ever engaged in any kind of non-choirboy behavior—despite his paean to beer—that I find reprehensible and unforgivable. For sexual assault survivors, the denial that the attack occurred (or that they were involved in it) basically constitutes a second assault. It denies us our experience, demands that we pretend it never happened, makes us less-than our attacker, assures us that we imagined it and that there’s therefore something wrong with us even bringing it up, even thinking about it. It also denies us the opportunity to heal fully, because that begins with bringing the pain and memories into the open for validation and when those loud bass voices drown us out, it’s just so much harder.

I did not speak in the first person with my manager, but I felt my throat tightening in anxiety and my eyes beginning to water, so I changed the subject, although I’ve not been able to shake the conversation.

I am grateful for Christine Blasey Ford’s courage, her steadfastness and her grace, which has driven a crack through the wall of belligerent denial and shouting, and released a tsunami of accounts from women of all ages, conditions, locations of their own assaults. As Anita Hill said to Ford, “You will feel isolated, but you are not.” Ford has freed us from our isolation. There are tens—probably hundreds—of thousands of us, and our voices are rising together. We will not be silent ever again. As for strident—these guys ain’t seen nothing yet.