The Years of Living Hysterically, Part V

Reflections on Joe Biden, Tara Reade, #MeToo, and our Hysterical Culture

I’ve decide to make Part V of this essay free to all of my readers, too. Why not.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

Recall the character of the governess in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. She is from a sheltered, religious background. She is inexperienced, naïve, vulnerable, anxious—a virginal ingenue, susceptible to romantic fantasies, a cliché of Victorian sexual ambivalence. When she encounters danger in the form of a “bold” bachelor with “charming ways with women,” she has romantic fantasies about him. Notably, her fantasies are not erotic.

The governess sees an apparition: a terrifying ghost. She experiences something indescribable, a “bewilderment of vision.”

We’re quite far from the Victorians now, but as Freudian critics of the book have pointed out, this one’s not hard: The ghost is her fantasy of the bold young man, transformed by her fear of male sexuality. Hers is a textbook case of sexual hysteria. 

Freud understood hysteria in the context of his Victorian milieu. It was, he imagined, a psychosexual disorder, chiefly afflicting women with “fine qualities of mind and character.” The cause was the conflict between their sexual impulses and their Victorian values, which called for the vigorous repression of those impulses. The conflict, he wrote, may precipitate “nervous explosion.” His contemporaries described “nausea and vomiting” or an “actual hysterical fit.” 

James’s governess is precisely the kind of woman Freud had in mind. She is superior in character; she is responsible to the point of perfectionism.  We can tell from her preoccupation with the young man that she has strong sexual needs; we can also tell from the girlish way she thinks of him that her need not to be consciously aware of those needs is equally powerful. She is “a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage, in a state of extreme tension.” She is the character you need to imagine if you’re reading Freud and keen to dismiss him as insightful, yes, but no longer relevant because he was writing about repressed Victorians.

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ENTER CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD

Having watched the Kavanaugh hearings in full, I know no more about Kavanaugh’s judicial vision than I would if I had played the tape backward. We have made such a circus out of the confirmation process that no one could be confirmed if he or she spoke honestly about judicial issues, which is in itself nuts. How can the Senate give advice, or consent, if they have no idea what the candidate thinks about anything related to the law? 

I would not have been legally or politically disappointed had Kavanaugh's nomination been derailed on legal or political grounds. But once the Ford hysteria erupted, the Senate had no choice.

The American left proved itself just as capable of morally and intellectually degrading itself as the right. Between the social conservatism of the right and the hysterical neo-puritanism of the Left, women are trapped in a vice.

The stupidity of our national discussion about Doctor Christine Blasey Ford suggests not only the existence of a reverse Flynn effect, but one on a logarithmic scale. How many countless commentators told us that women never lie about sexual assault? How many intoned, “But what motivation would she have to lie about this?” Try changing that question to, “Why might someone have a motivation to see Kavanaugh’s nomination derailed,” and you have the answer to your question. 

Precisely because many people strongly did not want Kavanaugh appointed to the Supreme Court, many were strongly motivation to slander him. If you assert that all women are to be believed at any time about all accusations of sexual impropriety, it increases the likelihood that women will lie about sexual impropriety. This is economics, not sexism. If you reduce the cost of making a false accusation, you will get more false accusations.

Studies of false accusations of sexual misconduct tend to be riddled with methodological errors, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that “studies have shown” women are unlikely to lie about sexual assault. These studies, however, are now out of date. We have in the past year radically changed the cost-benefit ratio of making a false claim by insisting that women never lie. We are enjoined to tell women who say they have been sexually assaulted, “I believe you.” Of course this creates an incentive to lie.

If we fail to accept the proposition that no woman would ever make a false, malicious, or salacious allegation of sexual assault, we will lose our jobs. “Yes, I guess that line really is short like the other one, it’s a weird optical illusion, maybe?”

But which of the following claims seem true to you:

1. No one, male or female, ever makes false, malicious, or salacious allegations.

2. Men sometimes make false, malicious, or salacious allegations, but women do not.

3. Men and women sometimes make false, malicious, or salacious allegations, but women never make them about sexual assault. 

Answers:

1. Patently untrue.  

2. Lunatic on its face. 

So why on earth would we believe the third claim? Why would we imagine that in matters of sexual assault—in this category and only this category of human affairs—women have been administered a magical truth serum? Is there even any kind of theory here?

Of course women have motivation to make this kind of accusation. Notice that this was the accusation that in fact derailed Kavanaugh’s nomination process. Many other arguments—good ones—had been made against his appointment; they had no effect.

Suppose you are a private citizen of little influence or renown who believes that Kavanaugh would rule in a way that is deeply harmful to the American public, and even to the world at large. Suppose you know that an accusation of sexual impropriety, made by a woman, is the only statement that is considered by definition true. Your other options for wielding power are small: You certainly won’t get away with assassinating Kavanaugh. You will not be believed if, absent evidence, you claim that Kavanaugh has stolen your television or sold you crack cocaine; we allow that women do indeed lie about other crimes. No one will pay the slightest attention if you write an article about your opposition to the Judge for your local newspaper. You have no other power or authority. 

But there is one accusation you can make—no matter who you are—that will stop this nomination in its tracks. Any woman can now accuse any man of sexual assault, absent any evidence, and it will be believed. It is like no other tool. Because we have announced collectively that women never lie about sexual assault, we’ve created a massive incentive to lie about it. In no other way could a private, unelected nobody hope to wield so much power over the composition of the United States Supreme Court. Provided she’s willing to accept notoriety, death threats, and the invasion of her privacy, every woman in America now has an independent veto over any male nominee. Do we really believe no woman would want this kind of power or be willing to pay that price? 

We were told incessantly by Trump-supporting conservatives that despite his manifest unfitness, Trump’s power to appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court was reason sufficient to vote for him. Never mind that a senile cretin would be in charge of the United States’ nuclear arsenal. The most significant power of the presidency, we were told incessantly by pundits on both the right and the left, was shaping the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh’s was a lifetime appointment, we were told daily, and every significant right we enjoy hung in the balance. This isn’t so far off the truth that we cannot imagine why an American citizen would feel motivated to lie about Kavanaugh, or to exaggerate about him, in the hope of keeping him off the court. It is childish—or a form of thinking even more primitive than a child’s—to think otherwise. The most expeditious lie, the one most likely to succeed, would be that one. This is the only crime where our default assumption is supposed to be, “believe the woman.” 

Does this mean she was lying? Of course not. But it means the claim that she has “no reason to lie” is nonsensical. The reasons she might lie include these: She would by virtue of such a lie become more powerful than the President of the United States, the Senate, the American electorate that had with their votes put the President and the Senate in office by a longstanding and legitimate Constitutional process, and a man who would otherwise become a Supreme Court justice. 

Do we really believe that women have no will to power? So Freud was right. If you believe no woman could want power that badly—and that is the assumption inherent to the suggestion that “no woman would lie to achieve power”—why wouldn’t you conclude that Greer was wrong about the nature of women? No, they don’t really want to be in charge. They are by nature meant to be adored children, cherished wives, mothers and homemakers. And whiners, for that matter, since they had exactly what women really want, back in the 1950s, and all they could do was complain to Betty Friedan that they had a problem with no name. (Incidentally, Ford has since raised nearly a million dollars on GoFundMe.)

Thus a crucial nomination on the swing vote for the Supreme Court became something it should never have been: a referendum on whether #MeToo had become so destructive a force that it might be used as a political weapon. Kavanaugh, I assume, perjured himself about his sexual purity, although I don’t know for sure—none of us do—and I do not care if he perjured himself about Renate, just as I did not care if Bill Clinton perjured himself about a blowjob.

Kavanaugh fanned partisan hysteria, showing himself to be a man who could cry and rage in public as well as any woman. Under normal circumstances, this would have properly soured us all on his fitness to serve on the Supreme Court. He allowed himself to be pulled into a perjury trap much like the one he set for Bill Clinton, another point that would normally have soured us all on his nomination—and caused us to laugh ourselves half to death. Had he answered the questions honestly, I suspect he’d have said, “Of course we had adolescent attitudes toward women. We were adolescents.” 

But in this climate, those words alone would have done him in—having adolescent attitudes about flatulence is acceptable, but not adolescent attitudes about women, not even in adolescence. Then we’d have rejected a Supreme Court justice for reasons unrelated to any meaningful or relevant juridical qualification, but on the basis of someone’s adolescent scribblings in his high school yearbook. The Senate, at that point, did have an obligation to subordinate the issue of perjury, if that’s what it was, to a larger one. The larger one—although strangely few were able to articulate it, even in the Senate—was that this kind of allegation can’t be allowed to have those kinds of consequences. Once it was clear that no evidence substantiated her claim, this decision became in its cultural significance as important as any legal precedent set by the Supreme Court. By a very narrow margin—one vote—the Senate ruled that no, a man should not be subjected to massive professional or reputational (no less legal) damage on the basis of a 36-year-old allegation of sexual impropriety that cannot be empirically substantiated. 

Kavanaugh’s perjury and his temperament—and public confidence in the legitimacy of the Supreme Court—became secondary moral issues, and much to our loss. But it had to be so. Had he withdrawn his nomination or had the Senate voted not to confirm him as the result of this allegation, it would have meant henceforth that anyone’s career, and most importantly, anyone’s political career, would be subject to an arbitrary extralegal veto. An accusation of sexual impropriety from a single woman, even if it is unclear that the impropriety described was indeed so grievous a matter as “attempted rape,” even if there is no corroborating evidence, and even if the accuser is not especially credible, is enough to end it all. 

The thing was a debacle. It did us grievous national harm from which we won’t recover. That would have been so no matter how the Senate voted. Once the allegation was made, there was no hope for a civil resolution, for there is no way such an allegation can be proven. It is well that the Senate refused—but only by one vote, and it could so easily have gone the other way—to formalize the new standard: “A single uncorroborated allegation of sexual impropriety and you’re finished.” No adult whose life has been recognizably human can withstand that challenge. Even the best of men and women—especially the best—inevitably have enemies, personal or political. If we establish, in custom and law, that one’s enemies may destroy you by means of a woman willing to say, “He sexually assaulted me,” we have handed to every American woman the power extralegally to destroy any man alive.

Worse still, we hand to every American woman the power to stage a coup. Kavanaugh was on the verge of confirmation when Ford “came forward.” Like it or not, he was nominated by an elected and seated President. The appropriate legislative body was poised to offer its consent. The plain folks of the land had at last reached their heart’s desire and adorned the White House with downright moron. We the People—in a (reasonably) free and fair election—said we wanted that judge.

Now, I did not vote for Trump. I worry daily that we will never recover from Trump. But I accept the rules, not least because accepting them is the only way to recover from Trump. They are in the Constitution for all to see. Nowhere in Article II, Section 2, does it say this:

Should a Woman, from time to time, unchosen by the People of the several states and without requisite qualifications, come forth to charge such Appointees with Ravishment, as she alone may define it, the Appointee shall not be judged by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the Ravishment shall have been committed, but by Twitter. Nor shall the Appointee confront the witness against him. The claim of Ravishment as she alone may define it shall be accepted forthwith and without avail to the judicial power that extends to all cases, in law and equity, otherwise arising under this Constitution; and all requisite bills of attainder and ex post facto Laws shall be passed.

I have no special brief for Brett Kavanaugh. You lie down with Trump, you get covered in mud. The GOP invited this when it refused even to consider the appointment of Merrick Garland. Kavanaugh has made a career of marketing himself as a social conservative. I’ve always suspected the social conservatives are hypocrites, or closet cases, with a prurient interest in our bedrooms. 

But the attempt to derail his nomination by means of the claim that he got drunk as a teenager and groped another teenager—36 years ago—rivalled the most grotesque of Trump’s follies in its bad faith, bad taste, and sheer irresponsibility. It was immensely disturbing to watch politicians and the press, both on the left and the right, wallow for days in this preposterous and prurient psychosis—even as our President destroys the systems and alliance upon which great-power peace depends; even as he erodes the foundations of American power and prosperity; even as the world hurtles toward nuclear anarchy; even as 14 million souls in Yemen could be saved from death by cholera and famine with a mere ten minutes of the Senate’s attention. 

[Editor’s note: And even as our pandemic disease preparation languished.]

The most hallucinatory aspect of the circus was the willingness of everyone concerned to indulge the central claim: If Brett Kavanaugh did such a thing, it would be a grievous and serious matter.

It was not a criminal trial. Brett Kavanaugh was not formally entitled to the presumption of innocence. Nonetheless, the principles that govern our criminal law system do so because they are reasonable and fair. There are statutes of limitations on crimes. Human memory is notoriously unreliable. If someone has a political motivation to lie (or just to think poorly of someone), his or her testimony is more apt to be unreliable. We don’t hold teenagers to the standards we hold adults. All of that should be obvious, and to many it is. 

But arguendo, let’s put aside all the evidentiary and judicial scruples that should have enter into our judgment in evaluating a claim about something that happened 36 years ago. What didn’t seem to be obvious to Americans—and this is the most remarkable part—is this: What he is alleged to have done just isn’t a big deal. 

In all that childish, tremulous vocal fry, this stood out: Nowhere in her interview with the Washington Post, nor in her testimony to the Senate, did she say, “I said ‘No.’” 

She did not report saying, “Stop.” 

She did not explain why she thought a kid who was too drunk to get it up was intent upon raping her. She did not say why she thought he would “accidentally” kill her. She seems to have feared the freak accident of the century. Imagine the obituary: Local teen accidentally asphyxiated by horny prep student.  

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AFFIRMATIVE WHAT?

Saying “No”—and unequivocally so—is and must remain the difference between a sexual encounter and an assault. It cannot be the failure to say “Yes.” The idea of “affirmative consent” is absurd. Clearly the people who dreamt up this notion are virgin matrons or lesbians who lack even a passing, anthropological interest in human mating behavior. 

But even if it were perfectly reasonable, no one had heard the words “affirmative consent” in 1982. “Affirmative consent” was signed into law for the first time in 2014, when California established it as the standard for settling disputes about campus sexual assault. It was followed by New York, and that is it. The rest of the world continues to ascertain consent by means of flirtatious glances and laughter; by winks, double-entendres, and emptied bottles of wine; gazes of longing and the way she flushes when you take her hand to show her the view, the languid way she crosses her legs, the meeting of eyes, the pounding of hearts, the lingering at the door while she looks for her keys, the invitations for a nightcap, the blushes and batting eyelashes; by the way she catches her breath and giggles, the way she shivers when you touch the back of her neck, her moans and her sighs.  

It was not until the 1989 that the Lois Pineau published “Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis,” in Law and Philosophy. Here she ventured the seed of the idea of “affirmative consent.” This was the problem with which she struggled: 

if a man is to be convicted [of rape], it does not suffice to establish that the actus reas was nonconsensual. In order to be guilty of sexual assault a man must have the requisite mens rea, i.e., he must either have believed that his victim did not consent or that she was probably not consenting. 

Unfortunately, she wrote, “the very things that make it reasonable for him to believe that the defendant consented are often the very things that incline the court to believe that she consented.”

Thus the problem, in her view: According to the prevailing criteria, “consent it is implied unless some emphatic episodic sign of resistance occurred.” Indeed, that is correct. That was the prevailing criteria, in 1989, as it was in 1982. And it is still the standard, no matter what rot they’re teaching kids in college these days.  

Pinceau alludes to Glanville Williams’s classic textbook on criminal law, which, note, she describes as a classic textbook in criminal law. It was written in 1983, a year after the teenage Kavanaugh allegedly failed to obtain affirmative consent from Christine Blasey Ford. Glanville advises that if a man known to a woman endeavors to rape her, she must express her lack of consent vigorously “and by all means available to her” if she means to persuade a jury that rape, not seduction, has transpired. Williams quotes Byron, who for this couplet would now be purged vigorously from the world of letters:

A little still she strove, and much repented 
And whispering 'I will ne'er consent' - consented 

To solve this problem, Pinceau decided, Byron, Williams, human behavior, history, and all of our literature must be discarded. The notion of seduction made it too difficult for women to put rapists behind bars. Seduction had to go. By what rationale, she asks, would we assume a woman has given her consent when in fact she would prefer not to? It was all based in this conceit:

The rationale, I believe, comes in the form of a belief in the especially insistent nature of male sexuality, an insistence which lies at the root of natural male aggression, and which is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible to contain. At a certain point in the arousal process, it is thought, a man’s rational will gives way to the prerogatives of nature. His sexual need can and does reach a point where it is uncontrollable, and his natural masculine aggression kicks in to assure that this need is met. Women, however, are naturally more contained, and so it is their responsibility not to provoke the irrational in the male. If they do go so far as that, they have both failed in their responsibilities, and subjected themselves to the inevitable. One does not go into the lion’s cage and expect not to be eaten.

Readers who are nodding, “Yes, that’s right,” should understand that she is deploring this view as fallacious, not explaining the facts of life.

Shakespeare, obviously, wouldn’t last a day under these standards:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight:
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
         All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
         To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell

“The language of seduction,” she continues, 

… is accepted as a tacit language: eye contact, smiles, blushes, and faintly discernible gestures. It is, accordingly, imprecise and ambiguous. It would be easy for a man to make mistakes about the message conveyed, understandable that he should mistakenly think that a sexual invitation has been made, and a bargain struck. But honest mistakes, we think, must be excused.

No more, she argues. There is only one way to solve this problem. Henceforth, seduction must be illegal. I am not kidding, no. 

What’s more, she writes, science concurs. “Sexologists are unanimous, moreover, in holding that mutual sexual enjoyment requires an atmosphere of comfort and communication, a minimum of pressure, and an ongoing check-up on one’s partner’s state,” concurring with “women’s perception that aggressive incommunicative sex is not what they want.” (She speaks, one is to assume, for all women.)

Therefore,

if science and the voice of women concur, if aggressive seduction does not lead to good sex, if women do not like it or want it, then it is not rational to think that they would agree to it. Where such sex takes place, it is therefore rational to presume that the sex was not consensual.

Thus does she propose a new norm:

The evidence of sexologists strongly indicates that women whose partners are aggressively uncommunicative have little chance of experiencing sexual pleasure. But it is not reasonable for women to consent to what they have little chance of enjoying. Hence it is not reasonable for women to consent to aggressive noncommunicative sex. Nor can we reasonably suppose that women have consented to sexual encounters which we know and they know they do not find enjoyable. With the communicative model as the norm, the aggressive contractual model should strike us as a model of deviant sexuality, and sexual encounters patterned on that model should strike us as encounters to which prima facie no one would reasonably agree. …

All that is needed then, in order to provide women with legal protection from ‘date rape’ is to make both reckless indifference and willful ignorance a sufficient condition of mens rea and to make communicative sexuality the accepted norm of sex to which a reasonable woman would agree. Thus, the appeal to communicative sexuality as a norm for sexual encounters accomplishes two things. It brings the aggressive sex involved in ‘date rape’ well within the realm of sexual assault, and it locates the guilt of date rapists in the failure to approach sexual relations on a communicative basis. 

There is the germ of the idea.

Nonetheless, it is not until 2005 that anything like the words “affirmative consent” enter the lexicon. This is when feminist Michele Anderson wrote that according to the prevailing “No Model,” a sexual act is consensual unless the victim says no or resists physically. According to the “Yes Model,” a sexual act is rape unless consent is affirmatively granted. But even the “Yes Model” isn’t good enough for Anderson, because it doesn’t account for situations in which consent is granted and then revoked. Thus,

… the law should define “rape” as engaging in an act of sexual penetration with another person when the actor fails to negotiate the penetration with the partner before it occurs. The law should define “negotiation” as an open discussion in which partners come to a free and autonomous agreement about the act of penetration. Negotiations would have to be verbal unless the partners had established a context in which they could reliably read one another’s nonverbal behavior to indicate free and autonomous agreement. Force, coercion, or misrepresentations by the actor would be evidence of a failure to negotiate.

From there it’s a short step to the Mattress Girl. 

I will not go through the rest of this revolution in thought, save to reiterate that none of it had even been conceived at the time Kavanaugh allegedly groped Blasey without her consent, and ex post facto laws are strictly forbidden by our Constitution, as they have been in every society influenced by Roman law. (The clue: ex post facto is Latin.) The idea that Kavanaugh would have committed a grievous crime by groping Blasey without her affirmative consent is (and remains) nonsensical. 

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DELICATE FLOWERS

Every reasonable question about this allegation was ruled out-of-bounds by the media and even the Senate as “insensitive to victims.” This phrasing itself is a spectacular act of question-begging. The question at hand was whether Ford was a victim. Even those who obviously didn’t think she was credible could not say so, no less say why.

No reputable public figure was willing to doubt that she’d been “a victim of sexual assault,” nor to say that her testimony was “not credible”—though this was the clear implication of the Senate vote, and I would guess a sizable plurality of the American public. Even the Senators who voted in favor of Kavanaugh’s appointment hewed to the Party Line: Ford was a “victim” of sexual assault, and her testimony was “credible,” but there was insufficient evidence to show that Kavanaugh had been the perpetrator. No one was willing to say that it wasn’t at all clear she was a “victim”—of anything—although it certainly seemed she had an anxiety disorder. Trump was willing to intimate it, but he’s not a reputable public figure, nor capable of making any variety of reasoned argument. (That’s of course notable: We’ve never before had a president who can in no way be described as a “reputable public figure.” This, I presume, is one of the primary triggers of this climate of hysteria.) 

No one was willing to say that this incident, even if it transpired exactly as she described, should not have been the source of lifelong trauma. To accept that this would obviously be a traumatic event requires a constellation of odious beliefs about the fragility of the female psyche and the feminine susceptibility to permanent injury simply through fear of unwanted sex. It requires a preoccupation with sexual intrusion so morbid that we take this proposition seriously: to fear one might be raped is an event comparable—to judge by the vocabulary we use to describe it—to surviving combat. We must now pretend it’s reasonable to imagine that the psychological impact of finding oneself beneath a groping, drunken teenager would be much like surviving trench warfare or a terrorist attack. No one was willing to say, “That's quite a bit of carrying on, given that nothing bad actually happened to her.” 

No one pointed out that her initial reaction to this event, as she described it to the Washington Post, was reasonable: “This is nothing,” she told herself, “it didn’t happen, and he didn’t rape me.” Well, quite. 

Nor did anyone note the next sentence: “Years later,” wrote the Post, “after going through psychotherapy, Ford said, she came to understand the incident as a trauma with lasting impact on her life.” 

This is exactly how we got the Satanic daycare and incest panics. A therapist—an authority figure—told her that this was no a trivial incident, but a trauma with a lasting impact on her life. It was a trauma that explained all her failures and weaknesses. “I think it derailed me substantially for four or five years,” she told the Post, which reported that “She struggled academically and socially, she said, and was unable to have healthy relationships with men.” (Unlike the rest of womankind?) “I was very ill-equipped to forge those kinds of relationships.” She also told the Post “that in the longer term, it contributed to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms with which she has struggled.”

I hope her therapist has at least studied the literature enough to know that anxiety is a biological affliction. The predisposition is genetic, or perhaps—interestingly—epigenetic. Prozac is the treatment of choice. Therapy for an anxiety disorder is a waste of money, unless you like talking about yourself so much that it’s worth two dollars a minute to you to do it. I have myself found Paxil even more effective than Prozac. As your psychiatrist will tell you, sometimes you need to try several SSRIs, or combinations of them, to achieve full remission. (I’m unflappable now, so long as I’m not reading about American politics.) Being groped by a drunken guy in high school will not give you an anxiety disorder. If it did, every woman in America would have one.  

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NARCISSISTIC WOUNDS

Nor did anyone remark how strange it is that when asked about her most enduring memory of the event, she responded that “seared into the hippocampus” (not her hippocampus but the hippocampus, an interesting choice of words, surely, for those looking for clues about her mental state and ours: Is she positing some kind of omniscient or universal Hippocampus?)—was the sound of their laughter. Again, this was not only striking for being said, but striking for being unremarked. Her most significant memory, the image for which she reached first, was not pain, horror, terror, or any other word we might naturally associate with trauma. It was humiliation. We no longer seem capable, culturally, of distinguishing between narcissistic and literal wounds.

No one was willing to say that she was not credible for the very most obvious of reasons: a woman with a Ph.D. in psychology—a woman, we’ve been told, who “co-authored research papers on brain science during her time at Stanford University” would know all of this. All of these ideas—the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and polygraphs, mass hysteria, suggestibility, the fallibility of memory were, if I rightly recall rightly (and it is highly likely that I do not, because it was a very long time ago) were covered in the Psych 101 class I took at the University of Washington in 1982, the year in which Blasey’s hippocampus was seared like a chicken breast. I could corroborate these memories by looking for the syllabus, though. The idea that she would be unaware of Elizabeth Loftus’s work, for example, is just risible. It is not credible.

We learned nothing about Kavanaugh’s character from that circus. Many men of fine character humped my leg and tried to take off my clothes when I was a teenager. We did learn what we knew already: Kavanaugh and his ilk are hypocrites. Fire-and-brimstone preachers of teenage abstinence and chastity-until-the-wedding-night might want to find a better vehicle for their message, and they’ll probably get one in Amy Coney Barrett, if RBG pops off. I don’t, personally, find much value in that message, but I wouldn’t. I was born in 1968. 

If you think the sexual mores of 1981 were disgusting and should be changed, you may be right. I don’t know. I had a great time, but it sure seems many women don’t agree. When you officially rewrite history, though, you’re in dangerous territory—as anyone who’s studied history knows. What Kavanaugh did was in no way unusual in 1981, and frankly, I highly doubt it’s unusual now. It may sound terrifying to young women now at Yale, in our new Puritan age. But in 1981, this wasn’t a big deal. Every single American man and woman who was a teenager in 1981 knows this—and they are all pretending not to know it. Why?

Perhaps because we’ve all, collectively, decided at some subterranean level that the sexual revolution was such a mistake that we won’t even acknowledge it happened. Perhaps people don’t want their kids to know they behaved that way—and it’s just too embarrassing to discuss it. Perhaps people have forgotten. It’s truly hard to remember what really happened 36 years ago. Men don’t want women to be angry at them. Women don’t want teenage boys to think it’s okay to hump their daughters’ leg and try to get their clothes off. Neither do men, for that matter. It all looks different when you’ve got a teenage daughter, doesn’t it? 

But come on: Let’s debate the sexual revolution, in earnest. And my God, to see the left jump so unwittingly on the same bandwagon, so self-righteous and pure, as if none of them had never drunk themselves into a stupor when they were 17 and humped a girl’s leg? As if they didn’t fight tooth and nail for the rights and risks of a full, realized, adult life that women are now rejecting?

And why, why, why, are we all agreeing that such an experience—if it happened—was of necessity traumatic? What are we teaching young women about sex and men? What are we teaching young men, for that matter? Yes, of course we have to teach young men that they can’t just shove their dicks into anything that moves. That’s part of the civilizing process. But must we tell young women that any exposure to a horny young man doing what horny young men do is traumatic? A natural source of PTSD, at that?

Let’s take Christine Blasey Ford’s—excuse me, Doctor Ford’s—account at face value. (Calling yourself “Doctor.” anything if you weren’t a medical doctor was considered, by my generation, absurdly pretentious. If social norms have changed, they’ve changed. Whatever. But call me Claire.) Since she’s made her therapist’s notes available to the public, I’d like to know whether her therapist asked the obvious question: “Why did you find this so upsetting?”

Yes, that’s right, why?

How can I even ask such a thing? She feared she would be raped. Imagine her powerlessness, her terror: She feared she would be raped by an elite frat boy. 

But why did she fear that? By her own account, he was too drunk to get it up. She was not, in fact, raped. She feared she would be. Why did she fear that? Because the music was loud? Because he “pinned her to the bed?” Let me explain this again for women who still aren’t getting my point: Men are on average bigger and stronger than women. If they’re on top of you on a bed, you’re pinned. 

What was it about her childhood, about her parents, about her education, that caused her to interpret this situation as terrifying? We’re enjoined to respect her privacy and refrain from casting aspersions on her sanity, but the account she herself provided doesn’t sound sane—and she was the one who handed the Washington Post this account. If she feels entitled, on this basis, to suggest that Brett Kavanaugh is a sexual predator, I am entitled to ask why she felt that way. (I notice that she and Kavanaugh both went to single-sex schools. I’ve always been suspicious of single sex schools—against them, in fact. They discourage appropriate socialization between the sexes. You end up with women who are terrified of men, and men who are clumsy with women.) 

She says, “They locked the door and played loud music precluding any successful attempt to yell for help.” The intimation is that they locked the door and played loud music to prevent her from yelling for help. Perhaps they did. But usually, teenagers play loud music because teenagers like loud music. Why did they lock the door? Sounds like they didn’t want anyone walking in. But how did we get from that to, “They were intent upon raping her?” Perhaps they were, but nothing in her own account tells us why she believed that. Her own account is far more consistent with drunk, horny teenagers fooling around in a suburban bedroom in Maryland. 

Kavanaugh, she says, was on top of her, laughing. So? If you’ve got a teenage guy on top of a teenage girl, laughing, that could mean any number of things. He could be a teenager having fun (and most of the time that’s just what he is), or he could be a sadistic rapist and a murderer. But the latter is not the default explanation, or at least, it wasn’t, in 1981. “Please Joel, do what they say, just get off the babysitter!” 

She says she found the situation frightening. Believe the woman, we’re enjoined. Fine, let’s believe her. I believe she found that very frightening. But why?  

The idea that this would be frightening occurred to no teenager in 1981, and if I recall rightly—it’s hard to remember, it really was a long time ago, and I really was drunk—not one teenage boy, ever, asked my permission before trying it on. God bless ‘em, teenage boys—they badger, they wheedle, they try to get you drunk, they try it when you’re asleep, they hump your leg, they grope you, they put their hands on your mouth and any other orifice or edifice they can—and now it is all considered sexual assault, But it sure wasn’t then. It was considered “Saturday night.”

This is pervasive rape culture, we’re now told. 

Look, it’s okay with me if young people now want to try defining it that way. My generation didn’t quite get sex right, I have to agree. But that certainly isn’t how we defined it then. And honestly, from the stories I’m reading—from the way that “Cat Person” resonated with so many young women—I’m not sure this generation’s understanding of sex is going to be any more fulfilling. At least we had fun. 

We’re telling teenage girls it’s normal to be this terrified of men, that it’s normal to interpret this behavior as “assault.” We’re telling teenage boys that their sexual impulses are awful, dirty, criminal—and that women simply loathe them and their filthy priapism. What conclusion could a young man draw from the media treatment of this but that women just hate male sexuality, so they’d best never show it—or only show it to hookers? Maybe this generation of women truly does hate it. Maybe they have no use for laughter and clumsy drunken groping and desire and danger. Maybe they just want men to keep it in their pants and never let on that they can’t look at a woman without wondering what she looks like naked. But God, does that sound like a bore.

It’s so strangely dissonant with the reality of our culture, too, where the most vile kind of porn pours endlessly through the Internet and Stormy Daniels is a pop-culture heroine. We seem to know, but we don’t want to know, that young men are horny, competitive, aggressive, and dangerous, which is precisely what makes them so alluring. As Stormy Daniels teaches us, a shrewd woman can make a lot of money from that knowledge. But at any moment, women can decide, retrospectively, that an ambiguous sexual encounter, dredged up from the drunken recess of ancient memory, was a terrifying sexual assault. And everyone will agree that if such a thing happened, it was a very grave crime. Any woman can at any point destroy and humiliate any man by alleging this. Everyone will agree that we must find out if it really happened. We take sexual assault very, very seriously. Any man who questions whether this was really such a big deal—assuming every word of her account is true, that is—is a son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get it.

If you give this kind of weapon to people—women included—they will use it.

Meanwhile, in a parallel world, the one we all live in, we keep flirting and humping and trying to take off each other’s clothes and regretting things we did when we were drunk. How is this supposed to make sense to teenagers who are trying to figure out the world?  

[Editor’s note: I guess we don’t live in that world anymore.]

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THIS IS THE SEXUAL COUNTER-REVOLUTION

I’m one year younger than Christine Ford, and I have no idea what’s going on with kids in America, but apparently one students in five at Harvard is leaving school as a virgin; our birth rate is dropping precipitously, and while everyone is celebrating the decline in the rate of teen pregnancy, it does not seem to me they’re asking the right questions about what happens, long term, when young men and women are so afraid of each other that they do not even mate.

The #MeToo movement is at heart a counter-sexual revolution. The message women are sending to men is clear: No, anything doesn’t go. No, if it feels good, don’t do it. There are rules for approaching women, and you must obey them. You must control your sexual impulses. Indeed, you may not even hint that you have them in the context in which most people spend the majority of their waking hours: the workplace.

If young women want to repeal the sexual revolution, it isn’t for me to quarrel. The next generation will always find a way to scandalize their elders; if this is theirs, so be it. I’ve had my career. I’ve had my freedom. I’ve had my fun. The sexual revolution came at a high cost: No one can argue honestly that it didn’t. It did not, on the whole, make women as happy as they expected. Men behaved—as everyone warned they would—like pigs. Families were destroyed. Women were abandoned with their children and consigned to poverty, or to desperate loneliness and humiliation in their middle age. Men didn’t do that much better. It seems men needed marriage and monogamy more than they thought. They seem literally to die without it. 

Above all, sustained social scientific research has demonstrated that divorce has a devastating impact on children. The once-popular idea that it is better for the children to have two parents who are divorced but happy than two unhappy parents yoked together in a miserable marriage has been disproven. We now know that children of divorced parents suffer from social and psychological pathologies at vastly higher rates than children of intact marriages, however unhappy those marriages may be. Children of divorced parents are three times (roughly) more likely to drop out of high school. They are 89 percent more likely themselves to become divorced. Boys are twice as likely to wind up in prison. 

The effects of divorce have been harshest upon the lower classes. It has fueled an epidemic of poverty and inequality, a key reason for the growth of the carceral state. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution has concluded that the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s can be attributed entirely to divorce. Almost inevitably, divorce means a serious rupture in the child’s relationship with his father; it remains rare for custody to be assigned to men. The end of the taboo against divorce in effect replaced fathers with the police, courts, and prisons. A generation grew up fatherless. For many, this destroyed their ability to function socially, emotionally, financially. That fatherlessness is terrible for boys has been established again and again.

Girls, it has been suggested, fare better, perhaps because they at least maintain their connection to a stable role model of their own sex. They at least don’t wind up in prison, or killing themselves, as often as the sons of divorced parents do. 

But perhaps we have been mistaken about that. Perhaps it has been just as awful for girls. Perhaps that’s why they grow up to be women who hate men so fiercely. Why wouldn’t they? Their fathers disappeared from their daily lives when most they needed them. I have no data, and can think of no way to find it, showing what proportion of the women fueling this panic grew up fatherless. But I’d like to know.

Recall, too, that for many related reasons, women have been having fewer children. In 1950, census data show, families with four or five children were common. By 1980, families of that size had all but disappeared. So women are also far more likely to grow up brotherless. 

An only child, raised by a single mother, particularly if she has gone to a single-sex school—an idea now growingly in vogue—could not possibly see boys and men the same way as a girl who grew up with a passel of brothers and loving father in her home. My sense that this is an important clue to the panic is only a speculation: I have no data to back it up. But it would be an interesting hypothesis to test. It might help us to answer to the question: Why this panic, why now?

So yes, repeal the sexual revolution if you wish. But please, women. Have a good long think about why—really why—you want to do this, and what you and every generation of women after us stand to lose. Women managed to free themselves from their traditional roles but once in history. Do you think it will happen twice?

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LEX RETRO NON AGIT

I grew up in much the same environment as Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Ford Blasey. I was born in America in the late 1960s and grew up in an upper middle-class suburb. I was, as they say, “privileged,” although back then the word we used was “grateful.” Younger people may not realize this, but what she described happened pretty much every weekend, and it just wasn’t a big deal. That’s right. I genuinely don’t remember the details. But yes, I’d swear on a stack of bibles that along the way—many times—drunk teenage boys humped my leg and tried to take off my clothes without asking first, they jumped on beds and so did I; we ordered kegs despite being underage, we used fake ID, we drank ourselves into total incoherence, there was loud music in the background, and we thought nothing of it.

If this is now “sexual assault,” so be it. It is a massive redefinition of sexual mores, but so was the sexual revolution, and I concede that some kind of redefinition may be a necessary corrective. Women seem to want a return to world with traditional sexual rules. The new rules are much like the old ones. Don’t talk that way when ladies are present. Presume that women, especially young ones, are exceptionally delicate. Presume that displays of male sexuality will scandalize and terrify them, and should scandalize and terrify everyone decent. Teenage girls, particularly, are inviolate. Their virginity and their innocence is to be protected at all costs. Men must not hump a good girl’s leg or grope her through her clothes. That’s what whorehouses are for.

And I figure that’s where they’ll go. You can’t legislate or scold a teenage boy’s horniness out of existence. It’s a force of nature like lava spewing out of Kilauea volcano, and it will go somewhere, be it into a sock or a piece of liver—but it’s going to try it’s damnedest to find a fertile woman. None of us would be here were it not for that. Straight men are born that way. (But then again, when they meet the robots—who knows.)

Yes, I’m sure we’ll be able to put the fear of God back into men to the point that they won’t even try it out on a good girl. It was that way before the sexual revolution, from what I understand, and it will be that way after the counter-revolution. I don’t much care, personally speaking. This is a decision for young people to make; they’re the ones who will live with the consequences. 

But I care about the bad faith. I care that a country with nuclear weapons and enormous responsibilities in the world has gone insane. The posturing lunacy and calculating cynicism is a sign of a society utterly detached from reality. For God’s sake, can’t we stop pretending that there’s a man or a woman alive of our generation who doesn’t remember an experience, or maybe fifty, like that? Can we not remember the ancient principle—so ancient that it is, again, a Latin legal maxim—Lex retro non agit? If it wasn’t illegal at the time, you can’t get him on it now.

And come on, can’t we be honest? None of that Kavanaugh spectacle had anything to do with real women. You were watching an intra-elite power struggle: it was a tool for one faction of the elite to enlist the masses against the other faction of the elite, and you all fell for it like imbeciles. 

Now watch: You’re doing it again.

Almost done—this way to part VI …