… that only Female Privilege could make it shameful? If it happened?
(c) 2018, Davd
A secondary school age boy, drinking at a party, “groped” and attempted to undress a secondary school age girl who was also at that party. Such, the news stories seem to say, is the accusation. The party took place 36 years ago.
A second accusation emerges, of rudeness one year more recent, “at a drunken dormitory party”. It resembles stories i heard last century, about “gross parties”.
Should an alcohol influenced “unwelcome advance”, even two, which stopped, or were stopped, well short of rape, of which the record available shows no recent repetition, bar a man from becoming a member of the U. S. Supreme Court?
If so, to apply a sports phrase, that country’s supreme Bench may get cleared. Nobody, it may turn out, is perfect enough for those exalted jobs.1
I say No not so much to Ford’s accusation2 (though research on memory since 1982 gives significant reason to doubt it3) but to condemnation based on such old allegations, if the recent life of the person being assessed has been worthy of the honour for which [s]he is considered.
The news stories report that people alleged to have been at the party where Ford says she was “assaulted”, do not remember having been there. That is no surprise, it is normal forgetting… the event is too long ago for us or them to know if they were..
Can i remember what i did at parties in 1982? No. I cannot remember what classes i taught that year, nor how many parties i attended, much less the details of any of them. 36 years is a long time — nearly half my life ago, and at least two-thirds of the lives lived so far by the nominee and his accuser. I can remember that i applied for and won promotion from Associate Professor to full Professor, but i stopped and did the arithmetic to verify it happened in 1982.
It doesn’t surprise me, then, that people who might have been at the party might also have forgotten being there. That’s normal.
Under-age drinking is part of news stories about the first accusation (and the second if Connecticut had a drinking age higher than 18). That makes them somewhat illegal, putatively immoral events. If the accusers were “chaste young ladies”, they should not have attended. If each saw that the party was too naughty for her moral standards, she should have left.
The female teenager who grew up to be Dr. Ford, had put herself into “an occasion of sin”, to use an old Roman-Catholic phrase. Likewise to a perhaps lesser extent, for the Yale University accuser. If she went to a party expecting it to be prim and proper, she should have left when she discovered it was the opposite. If she went expecting erotic action and alcoholic drink, that mitigates any complaints if she found some that she decided she did not want.
There are two main points to this blog: First, that the accusations refer too far back in time to deserve much force, unless the accused has behaved badly much more recently. If the boy who became Judge Kavanaugh repented of such drinking [if he was indeed drunk] and behaved well recently; especially, if his work as judge has been superior; that is what is relevant to his nomination. I cannot assess that. The US Senate should assess that — rather than how rowdy or prim he was when still in his teens, two thirds of his life ago.
Second, responsibility for naughty and sinful conduct should be “gender equal”. If a woman were nominated for high office, would it be considered reason not to confirm her, that she had seduced somebody 36 years ago, or merely tried to? That she had dressed immodestly and tempted various men? If men are expected to be prim and proper, women should be expected to be just as prim and just as proper, in ways different accordingly as the sexes are different.
References:
Loftus, Elizabeth, and Katherine Ketchum, 1996. The Myth of Repressed Memories: False Memories and the Accusations of Sexual Abuse . New York: St. Martin’s Press
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Notes:
1. Doubtless some sexually inactive candidates can be found. However, as we Christians say, everyone is some kind of sinner. Look back to adolescence or younger, strictly, and who is totally pure?
2…nor to Kavanaugh’s nomination (I don’t know enough about the other potential nominees to comment on that)
3. “… Elizabeth Loftus … research [on memory] showed that memories of any kind are distorted in about one quarter of the subjects merely through the power of suggestion or if they are supplied with incorrect information. Moreover, says Loftus, violent events actually decrease the accuracy of memory. Memories are weakest when associated with either low levels of arousal (such as boredom or sleepiness) or high levels of arousal (stress or trauma). In short, memory is fragile and disintegrates gradually. It is prone to suggestion, moreover, not autonomous. Loftus and colleagues have also shown that even imagining a false event increases subjective confidence that the event happened and that subjects can confuse dreaming and waking events when presented with a list of them. She writes that “63 percent can ‘recover’ nonexistent memories of being exposed [as infants] to coloured mobiles while in their hospital cribs—a literal impossibility since the nervous system is not developed enough to lay down explicit memories in the first few years of life. ‘[Nathanson and Young, 2006:15]
If incidents like what Kavanaugh actually did were commonplace at parties where he and his accusers went, then others there may have not found them memorable. Had what he did been shocking in context, it would more likely have been remembered.
