A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

tl,dr; Yesterday was a lot. An angry, spittle-flecked, partisan hack cried, screamed, pouted, spouted conspiracy theories, and most importantly lied under oath, looking every bit like the aggressive mean drunk that his victims told us he was. And Republican men apologized to him—to him!—without saying a single word to the woman he attacked, even as she earnestly, painfully relived one of the worst moments of her life. My write-up: After a harrowing hearing on Thursday, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee look set to advance the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. The vote could come less than 24 hours after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified under oath that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers. Even though two more women—Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick—have accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault on the record and have called for an FBI investigation into their allegations, only Dr. Blasey Ford was allowed to testify. Afraid of...

—September 26, 2018 —   Reliving my own stories of disempowerment and hearing those of so many other women, I wanted to relay a story about one time with a happier ending. When I was a freshman in college, I lived in a dorm with a handful of girls I’m still friends with today. At some point early in the year, the boys who lived on the first floor right by the entrance put up a soft-core porn poster on the outside of their door depicting a college-age girl in a demeaning pose. Every girl who entered the dorm had to walk by that poster just to get to her own bedroom. It was degrading, threatening, disgusting. It communicated: we can do whatever we want and you just have to put up with it. I don’t remember who had the idea but I remember that I was the one who found the replacement poster: a male stripper in a provocative pose completely naked but for a well-placed cowboy hat covering his genitalia. Early one morning, my partner in crime and I crept down to the first floo...

Julie Swetnick A third woman, Julie Swetnick, has come forward alleging sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh and his best friend in high school, Mark Judge. ( Link to the affidavit . Allegations are disturbing so warning in advance.) Mark Judge—now a conservative writer with a long history of making misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic statements—is also a witness and accomplice to the attempted rape alleged by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Swetnick has stated her allegations in an affidavit under oath and is calling for an FBI investigation. Her  allegations align with  those made by Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and  Mark Judge's high school girlfriend . Two quick asides: 1- Swetnick is represented by Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels lawyer, and Republicans are trying to make him the story , instead of responding to what Swetnick has said under oath. 2- After  Ramirez came forward in the New Yorker , the New York Times ran an absolute shit hit piece on Ramirez...

Kavanaugh categorically denies the allegations. His conservative backers think he probably did it anyway. They just don't care. Or care that he could be lying about it now. On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that California psychology professor Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had credibly accused Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault and attempted rape when they were both in high school. As reported in the Post, significant circumstantial evidence supports Dr. Blasey Ford, who described the attack to therapists in 2012 and 2013, long before Kavanaugh’s nomination, and who passed a lie detector test in August. The Senate Judiciary Committee had been scheduled to vote on the nomination today, with a vote in the full Senate planned for next week. At first, Republicans attempted to muscle their way through. When that became untenable, they hastily announced a hearing for this coming Monday, September 24, allowing little time to investigate...

Nobody uses Facebook anymore. Hello! Two teenagers tried to explain Snapchat to me this week. It turns out it's not just for sexting . It's for sexting AND sending your friends pictures that aren't worthy of being kept. Frankly, that sounds even worse. I enjoy Facebook's feed of baby pictures and trip updates, but if you're going to interrupt my day with a picture I can only view for 10 seconds, at least make it worth my while and show some leg. Lord knows I don't need to keep up with what you're eating for lunch today. But I digress. My chief question at the end of the lesson was, "But how do you post articles and essays and have conversations about philosophical questions that are interesting to you but don't involve pictures?" The answer is, you don't. Apparently teenagers are not that big into sharing news articles. What. Ever. On that note, here's an interesting Atlantic article I stumbled across while looking up Cory Booker...

In response to the grand jury announcement in Ferguson, a (white) neighbor posted a meme, “Remember when white people rioted after the OJ Simpson verdict? Me either.” I’ve written extensively here about why memes (from any ideological bent) ruin thoughtful political discourse. Most of the time, I see little value in rebutting the specifics of a meme itself and counsel people (yes, you, Dad!) not to get angry at the unfairness of the meme but to instead highlight its absurdities. In this case, I responded with “No, but I do remember the times that white people rioted over football coaches and pumpkins.” But after some thought, I’ve decided the specifics of this particular meme are worth responding to after all. White people might have been disgusted by the OJ Simpson verdict – another rich and powerful celebrity gets away with murder – but we weren’t personally affected by it. If anyone would have been out in the streets rioting, it would have been victims of domestic violence who on...

The theft of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities’ personal photos has prompted a now-predictable online discussion about victim-blaming, with self-appointed moralists condemning Lawrence for taking nude or sexually-explicit pictures in the first place and her defenders objecting to any discussion of taking reasonable precautions against becoming a victim. It’s a repeat of the societal conversations we have around rape, and while I get it, it wears me down. The Huffington Post posted a tweet from Farhad Manjoo , “I’ve never heard anyone respond to financial hacking by saying, Just don’t use online banking. That’s what you get for using credit cards.” But the truth is that we blame victims—of crime, of misfortune—all the time, blaming them for risky behavior, for bad one-off decisions, even as we ignore how many risks we take ourselves, or how many of our own stupid decisions turn out well when they might just as easily have been deadly. And here’s a test case: If you hear that s...