Triggered, Trolled, and Untethered: Inside the Mind of American Women During the Kavanaugh Confirmation Battle
The headlines and think pieces swirl and you can’t retweet fast enough because you are desperately trying to self care yourself through another day in what has been an excruciating week rivaling that of November 9, 2016. Friends triggered, others offering safe space for anyone struggling with the media frenzy, while the National Sexual Assault hotline sees a 201% increase in calls on the day of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony. Emily’s List, an organization dedicated to electing pro-choice Democratic female candidates, sees more donations pour in on the day following her testimony than any in its history. Meanwhile, an internal debate breaks out as some women change their social media profile pictures to black boxes to symbolize the blackout of our voices and experiences and our collective refusal to be silenced, while others see the move as self-silencing and counterproductive.
Throughout it all, the GOP’s deep bench of conservative white men scoffs at the allegations against their hand-picked-by-the-Federalist Society golden child. They deliver Blasey Ford an ultimatum for which she should be grateful because, as Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT) sees it, “she’s all mixed up” anyway. Her account of her alleged sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh was nothing more than a “little hiccup”, according to Senator Bob Corker (R-NV). But Corker wasn’t worried, “we’ll get through this and we’ll get off to the races” he insisted. And off to the races they went, “unfazed and determined”, in fact, according to Mike Davis, Senator Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) Chief Counsel for Nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee. The hearings that follow are an inconvenient formality that they have so graciously obliged and kudos to them for farming out the questioning to their “female assistant.” Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) goes into a code red panic at the very hint of a crack in the power structure that has protected them for generations and unleashes a theatrical, self-righteous hissy fit to his beloved audience of one.
But, come on now girls, we should be grateful that Graham extended his offer to “listen to the lady” in the first place while, in the same breath, insisting that “we’re going to bring this to a close.” And how? Well, they were going to “plow right through”, according to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY). And plow they did while ghosts from the Anita Hill hearings haunted these lest we forget who’s in charge. No hysterical, pussy hat-wearing mob was ever going to pose a threat to their fait accompli. Indeed, the deal was sealed from “advise-and-consent”, let’s not kid ourselves. Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) threw us a bone so he could lay his head down at night and dream of a 2020 run, but the FBI investigation was a farce and Senator Susan Collins’s (R-ME) mind was made up from the get. Grassley couldn’t be bothered to introduce the witness never mind consider her testimony and the shouts of angry women across the nation first fell flat and then were put through the Trump spin machine to produce a rallying cry to his base that would shift the narrative and maybe the mid-term turn out.
As we got louder they grew deafer and the reality of the balance of power hits us dare we thought progress had been made. Which feminist wave are we even riding at this point? We’ve lost count. But, hey, Blasey Ford was perfect, even “pleasing” to Hatch, which is a far cry from his feelings about the protesters, “I think we ought to have this loudmouth removed. We shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of stuff. I hope she’s not a law student.” Sir, we hope she is.
And as the nation watched, from subway cars to airplane cabins, you vacillate between two polar states — outraged and mobilized to defeated and hopeless. The pendulum swings so violently that your husband and children are dizzy watching. One moment, voraciously devouring every op-ed piece and podcast covering the rapidly developing story while crafting social media posts that tell your allies in the sisterhood that we will get through this and joining them in the exuberant calls to fuck the patriarchy. Then, just like that, curling into a ball of despair over it all and over your own memories and the realization that we will likely see all three branches of government controlled mainly by white men who don’t value us, who aren’t concerned with how we have internalized their disregard or processed their harassment, abuse, and assault, who seek to undermine our reproductive rights and refuse to enact policies that will legislate our equality and humanity.
This shouldn’t surprise us. While still declaring #NotMyPresident, we are scarily accustomed to the Oval Office being occupied by the self-proclaimed pussy grabber with a bizarre affection for his own daughter and a general animosity toward women. We expect little from the swamp that is the GOP-controlled Congress and, determined to alter the party and gender ratio of both chambers, have sacrificed our time and energy to mid-term campaigns throughout the country - 256 of which are being waged by female candidates. And we remain appalled that a man credibly accused of sexual harassment has sat on the esteemed bench of the highest court in the land for decades. Yet it has knocked the wind from our chests to bear witness to the perfect storm of white male privilege, misogyny, and sexism on display in our nation’s capital for the past weeks. Twenty-seven years after the Anita Hill hearing and Clarence Thomas appointment; twenty-six years since the “The Year of the Woman” saw a record-breaking number of women elected to both the House and the Senate; a year and a half since the Women’s March became a force to be reckoned with; one year into the #MeToo movement, which itself derived from the pioneering work of Tarana Burke who coined the term and founded the movement over a decade ago, and here we are.
What the actual mother fucking fuck??
Yes, it’s been triggering. And draining. And maddening. And depressing. So much so that we needed Samantha Bee to post a between-episodes reaction and we needed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to share in our outrage at “the highly partisan show” and we needed SNL to make us laugh at the spectacle that brought us to tears.
Many of us believed Brett Kavanaugh to be a bad Supreme Court nominee before the allegations surfaced. His partisan jurisprudence, his inclination, while under oath, to dodge uncomfortable questions or omit relevant information (the word perjury comes to mind, but the more generous have been calling it simply “misleading”), his complicity with Senate Republicans’ move to withhold the plethora of documents necessary for a comprehensive review of his record, and his stated discomfort with indictments and investigations into sitting presidents (how ever did he get to the top of Trump’s list?) are all cause for alarm. His record indicates that he poses a threat to rights we value — civil, reproductive, collective bargaining, LGBTQ, etc. But then, bad — yet par for the GOP course — nominee becomes credibly accused attempted rapist and the aisle parts the sea of suspicious skeptics to staunch loyalists on the Right vs. opportunists to vehement victim advocates on the Left. One can’t help but imagine a flabbergasted Merrick Garland sitting somewhere shaking his head in dismay.
Recall that when President Obama nominated Garland to the Supreme Court it was Judge Kavanaugh, who sat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals with Chief Justice Garland for twelve years, who said that Garland was “supremely qualified by the objective characteristics of experience, temperament, writing ability, scholarly ability for the Supreme Court.” (Pogrebin and Kelly 4–5, emphasis added).
Fast forward three years — three years consumed by Mitch McConnell’s Supreme Court coup, Donald Trump’s assisted electoral college victory, the Harvey Weinstein revelations, and the eruption of a movement that shifted the national spotlight and conversation to the rampant sexual mistreatment of women in the workplace and beyond. Have we now reached #MeToo’s crescendo or the moment where the movement itself gets persona non grata-ed by the Right?
No comic relief from our brilliantly sardonic Sam Bee, no authoritative observation from our beloved “Notorious RBG”, no comedic bit by Matt Damon can drown our collective screams, diminish our sheer incredulity, or calm our shared rage at the triumph of the culture of entitlement inherent in the disregard of “locker room banter”, the acceptance of the “boys will be boys” trope, or the equation of unwanted advances to mere “horseplay”.
He went to Yale College! Then, to Yale Law School! He got there by “busting” his “tale”! He was Captain of the varsity basketball team at Georgetown Prep! He was entitled to the horseplay at that party, he is entitled to this seat on the Supreme Court. It was, indeed, a spectacle to behold to watch in real time the utter panic as Kavanaugh and his ilk saw the ultimate culmination of his pedigreed upbringing, status, and privilege — and yes, hard work — slipping away before their very eyes because of none other than a liberal and feminist mob-induced public opinion shift over an alleged, decades-old act that, if true, was none other than a boy being a boy.
A drastic recalibration would be necessary to regain control of the debacle that their slam dunk confirmation process had become. Enter Kavanaugh for his turn to testify. I think I speak for everyone on the Left when I say what we were thinking as we watched the Judge deliver his unartful and revealing testimony: “Not our circus, not our monkey.”
Women’s rage is not a new phenomenon, but public take-downs of men who have perpetrated harassment and assault is. We’ve watched as Democrats have held some of our own accountable for sexually inappropriate behavior (RIP Al Franken, now can we talk about Bill Clinton?), while Republicans, instead, offered executive-level endorsements and party-level support and funding to one of their own accused of far worse atrocities (aka Roy Moore). And, more recently, many of us sat in dismay as we watched “Real Time with Bill Maher” and saw Bill’s smackdown of Michelle Goldberg when she (sort of not really) interrupted his ill-timed diatribe demanding that Al Franken be resurrected from the #MeToo graveyard to save us from Trump on the basis that — wait for it — his accusers are liars. A far cry from #BelieveWomen, but Maher will get away with it because Franken remains a third rail in the Democrat’s “big tent” and the decisive issue that separates the purist feminist snowflakes from the suspicious, conspiracy-identifying pragmatists. Call me a snowflake because I am mad at Al. We need him and he did screw up, of course not even remotely on the same scale as Roy Moore or President Trump. So, no thank you, Bill. I don’t want Al — as great a Senator as he was for the State of Minnesota and as promising a future as he had in the Democratic Party — to return with a mandate to save us from Trump. No need to cancel him, but we got this. And as dead on arrival as her presidential campaign, branded by her commitment to and proven record in fighting for women, was because of the infamous Franken choice (in which she was far from alone), I agree with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) when she said, “[W]hen we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping you are having the wrong conversation…You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is O.K. None of it is acceptable…And we, as elected leaders, should absolutely be held to a higher standard, not a lower standard, and we should fundamentally be valuing women, and that is where this debate has to go,”(The New York Times emphasis added).
So, sure, we can debate whether cancel culture itself should be canceled, the Democrat’s tendency to eat their own, and whether Senator Gillibrand is merely a political opportunist (like basically all her male peers), but we are still, fundamentally, having the wrong conversation and that conversation doesn’t get us any closer to dismantling a patriarchal power structure that devalues women and disbelieves, disregards, rejects our experiences. The classic questions are raised: what was she wearing? was she flirting? did she say no? how much had she drank? what is her sexual history? does she have proof? why didn’t she tell someone, a friend, the police? who can corroborate? why no rape kit? has she cried rape before? why did she stay with him? why did she continue to love him? What they mean is: “we want a perfect victim.” All the while never equally applying such scrutiny and doubt to men and delivering them the upper hand and benefit of the doubt time and time again. He said, she said. He said.
So, here we are, 27 years after the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearings, and the headlines and Republican rhetoric are perversely and mockingly similar. Whether they are referring to an “unethical sham” a “high tech lynching”, an “intergalactic freakshow”, or a “national disgrace”, it’s all the same - and we agree. We always knew it was never really about seeking the truth because she was always going to be viewed as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” anyway, right? But, if the dizzying insanity that was Kavanaugh’s indignant tantrum juxtaposed to Blasey Ford’s eloquence and poise weren’t enough, we continue to be triggered and trolled in the days after the hearing.
President Trump (himself accused by over two dozen women of sexual assault), after initially remaining unusually quiet and even calling her “credible”, accepts the challenge that his bar can’t go any lower and says — surely to Brett — “hold my beer”. He then remarks with deep regret and outrageous candor that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America.” When asked if he had a message for young women in America, he says, “women are doing great”; and, when the opportunity to grab the narrative, like he would a pussy perhaps, and flip it to rile his base was simply too good to pass up, he stands before a doting pack of deplorables at a Mississippi rally and mocks and ridicules her. And they cheered. They cheered and they laughed at their President’s comedic bit about the victim of sexual assault by a young man who would later be nominated and appointed to the Supreme Court. It was a surreal twist of fate when one recalls her testimony that, “indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”
So, there you have it. A hysterical mob is hurling false accusations at your son. Women are liars and are not to be believed. Boys will be boys. Your story isn’t welcome here. In the shadow of these revelations, Kavanaugh is confirmed and upcoming 5–4 decisions in the Right’s favor may be the least of our problems if the backfire of #MeToo is as imminent as it appears. Already we’ve had to watch some of the most deserving casualties of the movement crawl out of their holes to assert their relevance and declare their re-entry into the public sphere. John Hockenberry, Jian Ghomeshi, Louis CK. #MeToo lite is #SorryNotSorry.
We are fucking exhausted and we have long tired of the notion that when they go low we must rise up in benevolent honor and curtsy our way out of their way. This doesn’t have to be a zero sum game, but it does feel like they have the power and we do not. We vote in gerrymandered districts, we protest in segregated streets, we are silenced in sexist boardrooms, and we donate in a Citizens United-dictated political landscape. The maldistribution of power taunts us and is unrelenting.
Then, he trolls the nation at just the right time with an emergency presidential text message and you can’t get thumb to screen fast enough to swipe away the intended reminder — you are powerless. You can’t decline his text, never mind confront your abuser and be believed.
This isn’t a call to action or a prescription for self care. Both implied and essential. But, while we were taking a break from social media and getting a pedi they were celebrating with #BeersForBrett and mapping out their route to the polls. So, rather than dwell on the dismissal of our voices, the erasure of our experiences, and the Right’s pervasive and pernicious consolidation of power, we must focus on the power we do have and what we need to do to wield it. We must remember what it has felt like to watch this unfold, to hear the testimony, and to witness the way women came together — inside the Hart Senate Office Building, on social media, and across the country. We must remember the outrage, the empathy, the unity, the connection, the courage of Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), the classiness of Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), the fury of Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher, the heroism of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Let those feelings be “indelible in the hippocampus” because there is a long road ahead.
At a recent stop on her book tour, feminist writer Rebecca Traister told the audience that at some point throughout Kavanaugh’s confirmation process she realized that she will have to work until her dying day to get us back to where we were when she was born. The current power structure is built to keep the marginalized on the margins, to silence their voices, and to ignore their experiences, whether it’s women of color, women living below the poverty line, women living within in the vast parts of the country with no access to abortion, women trapped in an abusive relationship or suffering through unbearable workplace harassment, transgender women barely seen as human, women seeking asylum or a better life and separated from their children at our border, indigenous women denied full protections under the law of a country built on their communities’ genocide, women with disabilities that barely register as an interest group, never mind, an equal sector of our population, women making 80 cents on the dollar compared to their male peers, 61 cents in the case of Black women, women whose employers exercise their religious liberty and deny them coverage for birth control, or a woman imminently qualified to be the president of the United States defeated by a man imminently qualified for reality tv. And we will all have to fight until our dying day to change this.
