Talk to Republicans.
It's actually the same sort of theme: At some point, I need Judge Kavanaugh and his political allies to stop behaving precisely like the guilty.
Consider that the behavior described at the boys' school was not unusual; the problem with rape culture becomes pretty straightforward when the good students with letter jackets are also the sex offenders, because between our American cult of masculinity and propensity for disbelieving women in general, and observant of the justification for sticking oneself into a woman as, "Any excuse will do", nobody really stopped to think about it at the time when parents would point to the clean-cut, all-American football and basketball players with strong gradepoints and ask their sons why they can't be more like that. Just like nobody really stopped to think about the implications of lazy responses to school bullying, telling victims it was their fault and they need to try harder to fit in.
That whole thing with men looking over their shoulders in the #MeToo period when #TimesUp isn't just about the idea that this or that was viewed as somehow acceptable; it was also common and known behavior among the ostensibly admirable. Something I've noticed in the twenty-first century is men of my generation and older putting on weird, puritanistic pretenses about our youth. To the one, it really is creepy the way my daughter's maternal grandfather reminds that he knows how young men are because he was young, once, but I would find it hard to believe this sentiment is somehow obscure. To the other, it does make me wonder when I passed through a weird Venn threshold among my age cohort because, while social circles do change over the years, I'm wondering where these legions of boys were, back in the day, who never ever thought or talked about having sex with girls until one day they fell in love and ... what, were surprised to learn of the pleasures about this thing called intimacy?
Seriously, though, watch men older than about thirty pretend they don't know what rape culture is. It's amazing what they'll say.
When I was thirty, every man I knew recognized lines from
Revenge of the Nerds. These years later, I know some who recognize, "Hair pie? Hair pie?" and, "I thought it was my mother's old douchebag, but that's back in Ohio", and the scraping, inhaling nerd laugh, but pretend to not remember the movie itself. The difference isn't our fading memories, but our unnerved psyches; while T&A comedies of the Eighties were both exemplary and symptomatic of rape culture,
Revenge of the Nerds is one of the explicit fulfillments portraying rape as an act of merit. But male privilege and sexual harassment were not simply common themes, but standard filler.
Stripes is a classic, and has what history will view as an enlightening romantic encounter, as well as a mud-wrestling scene. And there is, of course,
Porky's. It's one thing if few remember
Hamburger: The Motion Picture, but I'll doubt my American-raised cohort if they don't remember
Police Academy, but, to be fair, that one includes a gay rape joke. Actually, multiple gay rape jokes, or that might be over the course of the series, but either way. It's true, though, I give a pass to the bull joke in
Top Secret.
Molly Ringwald, earlier this year, reflected on chauvinism and misogyny about the brat pack films, and one point here about Hughes films in the '80s is to pay attention to high school parties throughout. Because even before Reitman's
Stripes, there was Landis'
Animal House in '78. And yeah, it's one thing to say we get it, but that would be entirely different than pretending the period didn't exist. And if I recall being twenty-six, I just don't recall my age peers scratching their heads at where
American Pie came from.
The difference 'twixt then and now has something to do with rape culture, changing perspectives, and how it feels to chuckle and boast among friends, to the one, or feel badly because nobody thinks it's funny or cool anymore. And right now, there is to the accuser's side the nearly dualistic question of truth or crazy, by which she is either correct or has utterly lost her mind according to the principle that nobody would do this for a lark; Judge Kavanaugh has, to his side, the weight of traditional presupposition, and behavior of the guilty.
It's not simply a matter of rushing to convict; there can be no conviction without particular proof, and that's not the point. In the court of public opinion, the boys' club is under siege, and failing to remember something that would have been far more important to someone else than it would be to one's own drunk ass perfectly and precisely fails to demand innocence. In the question of a Supreme Court justice, this is just one more thing on top of Kavanaugh's record of apparent perjury, and we have yet to get through the differing stories about his finances.
All considered, it is easy enough to accept that someone of Kavanaugh's time and station could behave in a manner we now recognize as sexual assault. This will not be the occasion for scrutinizing the differences of changing standards and watching a man parse that he might have crossed the line of "sexual assault", but, well, he never penetrated her, even digitally, and then trying to make his apologies and ritual amends; there is no statute of limitations on the alleged crime in its jurisdiction, so it's really, really hard at this point for Kavanaugh to take a confessing, mitigating line. Well, that and his denial even as political defenders attempt to excuse the behavior.
A really strange thing about crisis management is how much of it presumes the client guilty. Like I said, at some point I need this sex offenders' cavalcade to stop behaving like gaslights.
