The Language of Dirty Tricks
Last week, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward with an allegation that the Supreme Court nominee du jour sexually assaulted her, at a party in high school. In response, men at the highest levels of government are calling her a liar and equating a sexual assault in which a woman feared for her life to “play” — even in the face of evidence that he may have lied or withheld information about troubling misogyny and patterns of inappropriate conduct. She has turned a spotlight on toxic patriarchy –the line we draw from sexual assault to harassment to hyper-attention / regulation of women’s bodies to the absence of women and people of color in elite spaces to the diminishing of women’s voices so institutionally that collective amplification strategies become necessary.
Predictably, the reaction is running the gamut. Some fail to see a forcible sexual assault of a woman as evidence of biased attitude toward women. Others question whether sexual assault necessarily involves an implicit belief in the dispensability and disposability of women’s bodies. Some deny that these beliefs or actions impact complex decision-making and policy on issues relating to women’s lives. Many, many people recall incidents like this in their own lives and react with terror at how the airing of these truths might play out in their own lives. Does an attempted rape involve a performance of power and privilege that is informed by the belief that women’s bodies are for public consumption?
As the story unfolds, references to Anita Hill’s Senate Judiciary Committee testimony in 1991 abound — some see it as a do-over for women’s dignity, others see it as a tactical maneuver. Some (many of us Black) wonder at the role of race in this sexual assault: how will it impact credibility or popular support? Even today, feminism often fails at its intersections with race. Will the associations with Anita Hill revive the bipartisan disdain used to vilify her sacrifice and which may have delayed this disclosure? Or, when faced with a white victim, can we better understand that sexual assault is not romanticism-gone-bad, but bespeaks an attitude toward women that has ripple effects in decision-making? Black women still remember the lurid questioning and pillorying of Anita.
And things haven’t changed. This week, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board called these women “dirty tricks.” Its language both questioned the tactics of speaking truth to power and characterized these women warriors as unclean, impure, non-innocent vaginas-for-hire.
Amidst a backlash that included death threats, Dr. Blasey Ford is hiding. The threats against her, as well as female senators and staff perceived to be supportive of her, include sexual assault. New revelations suggest that the nominee du jour may have perjured himself repeatedly and that prominent Yale Law professors were complicit in perpetuating toxic patriarchy, informing and preparing their students that the nominee du jour hires a ‘certain type of woman,’ offering to vet women’s interview outfits, and noting it is no accident his clerks ‘look like models.’ His college pursuits included membership in a fraternity made famous for the language, “No means yes and yes means anal,” and a photo of the nominee du jour waving a flag made of women’s thongs and panties.
Considering we are talking about a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land, haven’t we seen and heard enough?
This is more than rapey behavior or objectification of women — adequate reasons alone to tee up the next candidate for the Court. This is also the concentration power, privilege, and patriarchy. The nominee du jour benefited from these “boys are back in town” hijinks and bonding rituals then and now. He was closely associated with proponents of toxic patriarchy throughout his career and he paid it forward in his law clerk choices. Why hire a woman who is ugly, fat, uninterested in a preferred form of gender expression — when someone easy on the eyes can do the same work? “Pretty privilege” is part of toxic patriarchy.
This thunderclap, and its aftermath, has men off-balance. It is partisan politics, they say, maintaining an arms-length distance from an issue women relate to so intimately that we understand the cost involved in coming forward — many of us have made that calculation already… and chosen silence. Of course people lie, but the indicia of truth abound here. The unspoken subtext of the ubiquity of date rape and non-consensual behavior toward women is merely a manifestation of a deeper belief that women should exist — in the office, in the streets, in the sheets — to satisfy the vagaries of male pleasure. But does this #MeToo moment represent injustice to those men who thought their pasts were behind them — or merely unforeseeability?
It was a different time, we like to say, about our shameful histories with slavery and sexual assault (and, even more so, at their intersections). It was a different time — but only in that there was no possibility of accountability. Twenty-five years ago, in my undergraduate days at Harvard, my friends and I were aghast at the finals clubs (the equivalent to Yale’s secret societies), breeding grounds for sexual assault and sexually transmitted disease that simultaneously set the standard for power and privilege in that rarified air. In reality, everyone believes Dr. Blasey — everyone has been there in one role or another. But what is the cost of acknowledging that, or of dismantling it?
Irrespective of the outcome, the nominee du jour will retain his privilege, wealth, and access to power. He will not die violently at the hands of the state, fall prey to mass incarceration, or harbor fears for his teenage sons. His mother will never cry over a broken body, or listen to a judge immunize police brutality from liability. Justice has always been kind to him. In the most Calvinist sense of the word, he is the Saved.
Yet, the demand to acknowledge and examine bias — and particularly collective, well-documented biases against women and people of color — is decried as injustice rather than a course correction. Does a hiccup in an uninterrupted rise to power compare to the measurable racial and gendered injustice codified in the exclusion, marginalization, or diminishing of Black, Brown, female voices? Do the bright futures of the Brocks and the Bretts require bodily sacrifice by the women in their orbits? And even after their “youthful indiscretions” have been weathered, do they see women as anything more than a means to an end?
We understand, implicitly, that language conveys intent. The coded language of patriarchy is often the only evidence of its existence, despite undeniable impact. The nominee du jour’s language reflects patriarchy intentionally. His much-touted claim that “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep,” implies disrespect to women. We know that “what happens in Vegas…” should be hidden from the wives, girlfriends, and mamas back at home. We know the drunken debauchery in these moments involves using and objectifying women sexually, and sometimes paying for that explicit privilege. It may not be inappropriate or illegal always, but it signals power and privilege. The impunity of this language is unmistakeable.
This is a litmus test. We are surrounded by language of complicity and confusion as some men finally perceive personal or professional risk in behavior they previously labeled boyish or boorish. Others construe the qualifications for the nation’s highest court to exclude consideration of sexually assaultive conduct. Still others relate to the nominee’s dilemma, while considering what conduct they previously engaged in or enabled. Perhaps this is the moment when we shake the tree or, as we hear openly in corporate spaces, when we open the kimono and see what’s inside.
This is where #MeToo is taking us. Those who are baffled and worry that these allegations could be credibly targeted to any of them are they very people who operate under a set of norms most associated with toxic patriarchy. These behaviors perpetuate bias and actual injustice in a broad range of milieux. The language of toxic patriarchy may feel familiar and even friendly — until we unpack its assumptions about women’s humanity and disposability. This is a moment to step forward, into new possibilities and new understandings.