From Anita Hill to the victims of Cosby and Weinstein, women are disbelieved, powerful men excused. When will we learn? asks Rebecca Solnit, the author of Men Explain Things to Me, and The Mother of All Questions, in The Guardian. Read on:
We have been here before. We have been here over and over in an endless, Groundhog Day loop about how rape and sexual abuse happen: offering the same explanations, hearing the same kind of stories from wave after wave of survivors, hearing the same excuses and refusals to comprehend from people who are not so sure that women are endowed with inalienable rights and matter as much as men – or, categorically, have as much credibility. We are, with the case of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee for the US supreme court, who has been accused of sexual assault, revisiting ground worn down from years of pacing. Kavanaugh denies Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that he forcibly held her down and assaulted her when both were at high school. We have only the accounts of the participants, and these, it seems, will always contradict each other. The allegation and the denial put us back in a familiar scenario.
The last five years have been an exhaustive and exhausting crash course in how abusers and rapists (and attempted rapists) and their victims behave, and how they are perceived and treated, but the learning curve of the wilfully oblivious resembles the period at the end of this sentence.
We know that there is virtually nothing that a straight white man can do to discredit himself
We know why victims don’t report rapes. We know that a minority of rapes are reported; and of those, a small percentage result in arrests; and of those arrests, a small percentage result in prosecutions. Only a very small percentage result in convictions and sentences. We know that the woman who accused the basketball player Kobe Bryant of rape years ago received death threats and extensive character assassination, as did some of Judge Roy Moore’s accusers, one of whom had her house burned down after she spoke up.
We know that women have been portrayed, ever since Eve offered Adam an apple, as temptresses, more responsible for men’s acts than men themselves are, and that various religions still inculcate this view, and in recent times various judges and journalists have acceded to it, even blaming female children for “seducing” their adult abuser.
We know that we – well, some of us – are just beginning to emerge from an era of women being routinely discredited, shamed, blamed, and disbelieved when they speak up about sexual assault. We are, of course, seeing it again with Professor Ford. Her credibility and character were being preemptively attacked even before we knew who she was; she was promptly doxxed when the Washington Post revealed her identity. We know why the more than 60 women who say Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them, from the 1960s through recent years, mostly didn’t speak up before 2014, and how those who did were disbelieved and punished while Cosby’s career sailed on. We know why Harvey Weinstein’s alleged victims didn’t speak up, and how a whole apparatus existed – of threats, lawyers, spies – to keep them silent. We know that the teenage victims of the gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar who spoke up were, for the most part, not believed by the school, by the police or even by their parents. We know that a groundswell of feminism made it possible for many women to be heard for the first time, starting last October with the cataclysm of testimony we call #MeToo. Why should we now expect an ordinary schoolgirl to have succeeded where Olympic athletes and Hollywood actors failed to get a hearing or justice?
We have seen this all before. We saw it 27 years ago with the discrediting and harassment of Anita Hill. Hill was called “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” for testifying against the supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas, and that one of the ways she was smeared was as a fantasist: “Do you think it a possibility that Professor Hill imagined or fantasised Judge Thomas saying those things she has charged him with?” said Senator Arlen Specter. “Her story’s too contrived. It’s so slick it doesn’t compute,” said Senator Orrin Hatch, blaming her for being coherent, as he would have undoubtedly done for being incoherent, and then he offered some truly loopy reasons why he thought she fabricated her reluctantly told tale. Some of the same people – notably Hatch – are now gearing up to attack Ford.
We know that the worst things that happen to us can be among the most indelible, so the argument that the accuser can’t possibly remember events from the early 1980s doesn’t hold up. In the late 1990s, I knew a Marine lieutenant colonel who was haunted by the civilian he had, under direct orders from a general, shot during the Korean war more than 40 years before, in circumstances he described in detail to me. A few years ago, a woman in her 60s, moved by the feminist conversation we’re having now, wrote to me in detail of her rape in the 1960s – the first time she had unpacked the trauma she couldn’t escape.
I asked David J Morris, the Marine corps veteran and author of The Evil Hours, a powerful book on PTSD, about trauma and memory, and he replied: “Most men have no idea how truly traumatic sexual assault is. The science on the subject is pretty clear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat. Think about that for a moment – being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater. A traumatic event like the one Christine Blasey Ford is alleging fractures the self, destroys one’s sense of time and place in the universe and generally changes a person completely. It is literally an encounter with death. To suggest that she wouldn’t remember it flies in the face of reason. No sane person would suggest that someone wouldn’t remember the time they were in an airplane crash. From a neuroscientific standpoint, being raped is more traumatic than war, not to mention plane crashes.” Ford reports fearing she might be killed in the conflict.
We know that as a society we hold people responsible for “youthful indiscretions”. The same Republican politicians who have been trying to dismiss an allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh as boys-will-be-boys stuff support a president who, in 1989, placed full-page ads in four newspapers calling for the death penalty for the five non-white boys – two of them 15, one 14 – falsely convicted of the 1989 Central Park jogger rape and beating. (Donald Trump even asserted they were guilty in 2016, long after their exoneration.) We treat many juveniles accused of crimes as adults, sentence some to life without parole, and saddle them with felony convictions and/or put them on registers of sex offenders for life. We do not excuse them for being drunk or high. The infamous Stanford rapist Brock Turner was 19 when he was arrested for felony sexual assault, banned from the Stanford campus, and given a six-month sentence and a lifetime on the sex offenders registry.
We know that too many men are full of empathy – for perpetrators, not victims – when stories such as Kavanaugh’s emerge, and that apparently they cannot imagine what it is like to be a woman who has been assaulted, because they’ve never tried. We know that Kavanaugh is not facing punishment for a crime, just consideration of whether he deserves not only a reward but power over the lives of all Americans. This week in the Atlantic, the writer Caitlin Flanagan told of her own near-rape. It was an exceptional story – in that the perpetrator approached her to apologise wholeheartedly when they were both still young. Her story was about an incident in the late 1970s that she remembers with painful clarity – and she says that she believes Professor Ford. I believe in redemption and forgiveness – as things that must come after atonement and transformation.
We know who lies about rape, routinely, regularly: rapists. Criminals tend to deny their crimes. Which doesn’t mean everyone accused is guilty, only that claiming innocence is a habit of the innocent and guilty alike, so it doesn’t tell us much. We know that, on the other hand, false rape accusations are extremely rare (and that they are often lurid stories about recent events, not about a fumbling attempt decades ago). We know this witness was reluctant to come forward and that she was essentially forced out by the journalists pursuing her after details of her letter emerged. We know multiple people vouch that she told the story long before Kavanaugh’s nomination.
We know there is virtually nothing a straight white man can do to discredit himself, especially if he has elevated status. We routinely see plagiarists, domestic violence perpetrators, liars, thieves, inappropriate masturbators, gropers, and incompetent men put forward as reliable sources and respectable citizens. Ken Starr took sexual assault very seriously when he let the Whitewater investigation into Bill Clinton veer over into Clinton’s sexual misconduct. Yet he overlooked sexual assault when, as president of Baylor University, he was responsible for protecting female students. In 2016 the university fired him after an independent report showed a “fundamental failure” to respond to student sexual assault allegations. Now, on Kavanaugh, Starr is treated as a credible source. He told a news site: “I’ve known him since 1994. I’ve worked alongside him – this is so wildly out of character.”
We’ve heard men testify like this before – for example, in 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s pal Bernard-Henri Lévy asserted, “the Strauss-Kahn I know, who has been my friend for 20 years and who will remain my friend, bears no resemblance to this monster” his victim described. Other women came forward to report being sexually assaulted by the monster Lévy had not met. We have been here before.
We are going to go there again, when the case goes to a Senate hearing. Let us proceed to that drama with what we have learned.
We have been here before. We have been here over and over in an endless, Groundhog Day loop about how rape and sexual abuse happen: offering the same explanations, hearing the same kind of stories from wave after wave of survivors, hearing the same excuses and refusals to comprehend from people who are not so sure that women are endowed with inalienable rights and matter as much as men – or, categorically, have as much credibility. We are, with the case of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee for the US supreme court, who has been accused of sexual assault, revisiting ground worn down from years of pacing. Kavanaugh denies Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that he forcibly held her down and assaulted her when both were at high school. We have only the accounts of the participants, and these, it seems, will always contradict each other. The allegation and the denial put us back in a familiar scenario.
The last five years have been an exhaustive and exhausting crash course in how abusers and rapists (and attempted rapists) and their victims behave, and how they are perceived and treated, but the learning curve of the wilfully oblivious resembles the period at the end of this sentence.
We know that there is virtually nothing that a straight white man can do to discredit himself
We know why victims don’t report rapes. We know that a minority of rapes are reported; and of those, a small percentage result in arrests; and of those arrests, a small percentage result in prosecutions. Only a very small percentage result in convictions and sentences. We know that the woman who accused the basketball player Kobe Bryant of rape years ago received death threats and extensive character assassination, as did some of Judge Roy Moore’s accusers, one of whom had her house burned down after she spoke up.
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| Illustration: Matt Kenyon |
We know that we – well, some of us – are just beginning to emerge from an era of women being routinely discredited, shamed, blamed, and disbelieved when they speak up about sexual assault. We are, of course, seeing it again with Professor Ford. Her credibility and character were being preemptively attacked even before we knew who she was; she was promptly doxxed when the Washington Post revealed her identity. We know why the more than 60 women who say Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them, from the 1960s through recent years, mostly didn’t speak up before 2014, and how those who did were disbelieved and punished while Cosby’s career sailed on. We know why Harvey Weinstein’s alleged victims didn’t speak up, and how a whole apparatus existed – of threats, lawyers, spies – to keep them silent. We know that the teenage victims of the gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar who spoke up were, for the most part, not believed by the school, by the police or even by their parents. We know that a groundswell of feminism made it possible for many women to be heard for the first time, starting last October with the cataclysm of testimony we call #MeToo. Why should we now expect an ordinary schoolgirl to have succeeded where Olympic athletes and Hollywood actors failed to get a hearing or justice?
We have seen this all before. We saw it 27 years ago with the discrediting and harassment of Anita Hill. Hill was called “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” for testifying against the supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas, and that one of the ways she was smeared was as a fantasist: “Do you think it a possibility that Professor Hill imagined or fantasised Judge Thomas saying those things she has charged him with?” said Senator Arlen Specter. “Her story’s too contrived. It’s so slick it doesn’t compute,” said Senator Orrin Hatch, blaming her for being coherent, as he would have undoubtedly done for being incoherent, and then he offered some truly loopy reasons why he thought she fabricated her reluctantly told tale. Some of the same people – notably Hatch – are now gearing up to attack Ford.
We know that the worst things that happen to us can be among the most indelible, so the argument that the accuser can’t possibly remember events from the early 1980s doesn’t hold up. In the late 1990s, I knew a Marine lieutenant colonel who was haunted by the civilian he had, under direct orders from a general, shot during the Korean war more than 40 years before, in circumstances he described in detail to me. A few years ago, a woman in her 60s, moved by the feminist conversation we’re having now, wrote to me in detail of her rape in the 1960s – the first time she had unpacked the trauma she couldn’t escape.
I asked David J Morris, the Marine corps veteran and author of The Evil Hours, a powerful book on PTSD, about trauma and memory, and he replied: “Most men have no idea how truly traumatic sexual assault is. The science on the subject is pretty clear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat. Think about that for a moment – being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater. A traumatic event like the one Christine Blasey Ford is alleging fractures the self, destroys one’s sense of time and place in the universe and generally changes a person completely. It is literally an encounter with death. To suggest that she wouldn’t remember it flies in the face of reason. No sane person would suggest that someone wouldn’t remember the time they were in an airplane crash. From a neuroscientific standpoint, being raped is more traumatic than war, not to mention plane crashes.” Ford reports fearing she might be killed in the conflict.
We know that as a society we hold people responsible for “youthful indiscretions”. The same Republican politicians who have been trying to dismiss an allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh as boys-will-be-boys stuff support a president who, in 1989, placed full-page ads in four newspapers calling for the death penalty for the five non-white boys – two of them 15, one 14 – falsely convicted of the 1989 Central Park jogger rape and beating. (Donald Trump even asserted they were guilty in 2016, long after their exoneration.) We treat many juveniles accused of crimes as adults, sentence some to life without parole, and saddle them with felony convictions and/or put them on registers of sex offenders for life. We do not excuse them for being drunk or high. The infamous Stanford rapist Brock Turner was 19 when he was arrested for felony sexual assault, banned from the Stanford campus, and given a six-month sentence and a lifetime on the sex offenders registry.
We know that too many men are full of empathy – for perpetrators, not victims – when stories such as Kavanaugh’s emerge, and that apparently they cannot imagine what it is like to be a woman who has been assaulted, because they’ve never tried. We know that Kavanaugh is not facing punishment for a crime, just consideration of whether he deserves not only a reward but power over the lives of all Americans. This week in the Atlantic, the writer Caitlin Flanagan told of her own near-rape. It was an exceptional story – in that the perpetrator approached her to apologise wholeheartedly when they were both still young. Her story was about an incident in the late 1970s that she remembers with painful clarity – and she says that she believes Professor Ford. I believe in redemption and forgiveness – as things that must come after atonement and transformation.
We know who lies about rape, routinely, regularly: rapists. Criminals tend to deny their crimes. Which doesn’t mean everyone accused is guilty, only that claiming innocence is a habit of the innocent and guilty alike, so it doesn’t tell us much. We know that, on the other hand, false rape accusations are extremely rare (and that they are often lurid stories about recent events, not about a fumbling attempt decades ago). We know this witness was reluctant to come forward and that she was essentially forced out by the journalists pursuing her after details of her letter emerged. We know multiple people vouch that she told the story long before Kavanaugh’s nomination.
We know there is virtually nothing a straight white man can do to discredit himself, especially if he has elevated status. We routinely see plagiarists, domestic violence perpetrators, liars, thieves, inappropriate masturbators, gropers, and incompetent men put forward as reliable sources and respectable citizens. Ken Starr took sexual assault very seriously when he let the Whitewater investigation into Bill Clinton veer over into Clinton’s sexual misconduct. Yet he overlooked sexual assault when, as president of Baylor University, he was responsible for protecting female students. In 2016 the university fired him after an independent report showed a “fundamental failure” to respond to student sexual assault allegations. Now, on Kavanaugh, Starr is treated as a credible source. He told a news site: “I’ve known him since 1994. I’ve worked alongside him – this is so wildly out of character.”
We’ve heard men testify like this before – for example, in 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s pal Bernard-Henri Lévy asserted, “the Strauss-Kahn I know, who has been my friend for 20 years and who will remain my friend, bears no resemblance to this monster” his victim described. Other women came forward to report being sexually assaulted by the monster Lévy had not met. We have been here before.
We are going to go there again, when the case goes to a Senate hearing. Let us proceed to that drama with what we have learned.
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