Like a lot of people, Brett Kavanaugh's bizarre defense of saying he was a virgin to somehow dispel attempted rape accusations didn't sit right with me. I finally figured out why... 1/ 
Obviously there's the defense here that he was too "naive" to have done anything like this, but that's not really what's being said. What he was arguing was something deeper and more telling about what's wrong with our masculinity. 2/
Like all things right now, this goes back to Donald Trump, the embodiment of American toxic masculinity. To understand this situation, it's necessary to look at this through the lens of the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged that he was a sexual predator 3/
The part that gets lost in that tape is the preamble in which Trump admits trying to have sex with a married woman. The quote is "I moved on her like a bitch." This, Trump explains, is why he didn't succeed. He wasn't forceful enough, he wasn't aggressive enough. 4/
But then Trump pivots when he sees the woman he's about to meet. He talks about how he just kisses them. Grabs them. Does whatever he wants and they let him. This is obviously the antithesis to what he'd said earlier. 5/
In this scenario, Trump lays out a pretty succinct dichotomy in which American toxic masculinity works. Men get what they want because they go out and get it. It doesn't matter what the costs are, what you have to do. Otherwise? You're "moving like a bitch." 6/
Kavanaugh says he was a virgin in high school, and I'm sure, in his mind, this is saying he was naive or that he wasn't sexual in nature, but subconsciously, this is the toxic masculinity at play. He's saying, back then, he couldn't have assaulted her. He wasn't man enough. 7/
Under the surface of this statement, Kavanaugh is essentially saying he wasn't forceful enough to go out and have sex, to go out and get what he wanted, so how could he have assaulted this woman? It's a really, really perverse train of logic. 8/
It's the toxic dichotomy of masculinity. You're either a man or you're a failure. Kavanaugh is essentially saying, at the time, he was a failure to be a man, and if he was a failure how could he have acted as a man, or been aggressive enough? 9/
It's a really twisted logic, but it's the only way that Kavanaugh's statement can hold up because simply being a virgin doesn't mean you couldn't have TRIED to assault someone and failed. There's a whole slew of mental gymnastics at play here and it's really unsettling 10/10
