Gonna talk for a moment here. Watching these hearings today, flashing back to watching the Clarence Thomas hearings, to watching Anita Hill being disrespected beyond belief, which was when I was in my freshman year of high school. You know what else happened in that year?
A whole generation of women learned what would happen if you reported a powerful man for crimes against you. No matter your qualifications, no matter your fierce calm, you'd be seen as hysterical, angry, and insane. You would not get justice, no matter how brave you were.
In my highschool, we were watching those hearings. The girls I knew were learning that reporting rape would ruin them. I was thanking genetics that I didn't have boobs yet, thinking that'd keep me safe. Other girls were getting raped & spending the rest of high school as "sluts."
Someone I knew was raped that year, and though she did not report it - she wasn't a citizen - everyone knew, because tons of boys watched. Because it happened on the football field, under the bleachers. Because she was dating the rapist, everyone decided it wasn't rape.
There were more rapes. i went to a normal American high school. Below working class, mostly. No one I knew had a clue who to report rapes to, because sometimes the police were the rapists. How do you report, when one of your classmates is pregnant by a police officer?
You have no idea - or maybe you do - how many rapes happened at my high school. At parties. In cars. On school grounds. And how, when those girls came back to school, they were treated as pariahs, because the boys saw themselves as good, and the girls as sin.
This was something we all knew. That if we had ever worn lipstick, had breasts, gotten our period earlier than the rest of the girls, been in a car, gotten drunk, trusted a boy, been in love...well, we were the ones who would be blamed.
Those rapes, which were witnessed, most of them, would now very likely be spoken of as not rapes. Because the girls whose lives were ruined by them were easy. Because the girls whose lives were ruined by them should have known not to tempt the boys.
My friend, who was raped, & who was an exchange student, did not get justice. She got discussed. She was clearly a slut, said everyone, because she was pretty, & because her rapist had a lot of power. He was an athlete. No athlete would risk his future by raping.
The idea, even then, that apparently every woman would risk the rest of her life by lying about being sexually assaulted, was deeply with us. We watched the Clarence Thomas hearings. We knew what would happen to us if we reported.
We knew that to report a rape was to risk our lives all over again. That to do it meant we would be known as raped for the rest of time. That if we were going to report, we'd better be ready to be discussed as liars, as stupid, as hysterical, as asking for it, forever.
We knew that if there were witnesses, chances were that they'd say they weren't there, or that it didn't happen, that we were known for being crazy, and that our craziness meant we could not be trusted with truth, ever.
I remember watching Anita Hill, and having a flare of hope, thinking maybe this time it would be a woman telling the truth, and being listened to. It was not. It was the opposite of that. I learned the lesson. I spent years wrangling with my own experience of being a woman.
Myriad assaults, ranging from an extended family member pushing himself on me, and then spinning nearly instantly to tell as many people as he could that I was crazy and had hit on him, that he was a good man, to your basic ones.
You know the basic ones. Shoved up against a wall with a hand inside me, no consent. Running down the street with some dude in pursuit. A stranger informing me that he could climb onto the fire escape outside my bedroom, and showing me he could. You know. Daily sexual assaults.
And so. I look at Christine Blasey-Ford, and I think, my god, you brave, brave woman. You have been here too, You've survived the same things I've survived, and here you are, doing this for all of us, knowing what it will be like. Knowing.
I look at these hearings. Some lessons have been learned in the way men in this room are talking about Christine Blasey Ford. But the key question here is whether she is a person who knows what is true & the key point being made by Republican men in the room is that she doesn't.
That they know better than she does what her body, her eyes, her memory tell her. That they know that a good man would never rape. This is a huge lie. Men who think themselves to be good? Those men are often men who rape.
The level of denial about what consent is, and is not, the level of denial about what boys will do, and cannot keep from doing, and the level of denial about "boys will be boys" is so profound, society wide, that men in their 40's and beyond still call themselves boys.
It's useful to remain a boy. Boys can't help themselves, and they also just wanna have fun, to twist a line. Girls, on the other hand, can help boys, and sometimes, they just choose to ruin their reputations. For fun. Fuck. These. Myths.
These myths are ancient. The myth of the temptress and the man without agency recurs throughout human history, and it is powerful. Usually, when looked at in the light, stories of witches enchanting men are actually stories of women being raped.
The whole society conspires to tell stories about how women actually wield more power than men do, and that's because the fear of equality has always been profound. That's all have for now. I want those years of my life back. I want justice for the women I know and don't know.
I want these men out of power. I want them unable to crush more women. I want them unable to make laws that ruin women's lives. I want them stammering over the word fuck, (please) as they describe their own status. Fucked. Because that's the just punishment for their actions.
