Content warning: explicit sexual content, rape, rape culture
When I was 11, I watched Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’ Senate confirmation hearing. It felt like everyone was watching, or at least listening. My parents held a week-long garage sale in the northern Oregon coast house owned by my mother’s mother. Her husband, my grandfather, had just passed away and there was even more to sell, to cut, to excise from our lives. Curious neighbors and indifferent tourists wandered among the trinkets and detritus as Hill’s earnest testimony was met with skepticism from men of both parties. My parents kept the hearings playing on the radio in the back of the garage because they wanted to hear, to stay up to date, and they assumed the visitors to our humble sale did too. They did. We all did.
There are phrases from that era I will never forget. “Who put this pubic hair on my Coke?” is one I’ve never been able to extract from my imagination, to the point where I recoiled from proffered soda cans for some time thereafter. Or Orrin Hatch, who still serves in the Senate today, routinely revisiting the phrase “verbatim from The Exorcist” as a reason to disbelieve Hill’s testimony. I remember how resolute Hill looked on the stand, how quizzical her interrogators, how the country held its breath. How Clarence Thomas managed to make a Black woman’s testimony against him a racial issue and snuck into the Supreme Court. How baffled we all were that after that, after all that, this man would be considered a high arbiter of the law. For life.
You might think it strange that I was so riveted by the testimony at my tender age. For better and often worse, I was no ordinary 11-year-old. I’d spent 1988 obsessed with electoral politics, bolstered by the fact that election season began when we still lived in Washington DC. I wrote a short play about goofball interactions between the Democratic Primary contenders. On our cross-country move back West, I was excoriated by a fellow visitor to Glacier National Park for saying I didn’t like Lloyd Bentsen “because he was too old” (he was 67 at the time; I was just 8). I cried, now in Oregon, when Jesse Jackson dropped out. I was unsurprised when George Bush trounced Michael Dukakis, who always looked more like he was playing at politics than actually engaging in them. I was sure, then and there, that I would major in Political Science, perhaps at William & Mary, the first college I’d ever visited, the year before.
Of course, I’d already been to (community) college by October 1991 and the era of the Hill/Thomas hearings. On the way, I’d spent a triumphant then disastrous trimester and a half at Broadway Middle School, the shortest fourth-grader in Gearhart now enrolled in eighth grade, learning about bullies and puberty and masculine intimidation. They hadn’t thought it appropriate to actually seat me in “Health” (sex ed) class with my adolescent peers, relegating me to study hall in the back of the same library where Health was held. There, I could still hear the video voice-overs describing the lurid facts of life in a droning monotone. I could also hear the nervous giggles of my tormentors, the temporary embarrassment of those who would later throw curse words and punches at me in equal measure.
“What are you going to do when you get to high school?” more worried of my academic peers asked me about the year to come. “The seniors haze you when you get there.”
“Oh?” I asked, unclear what the word meant.
“Yeah, I hear it’s torture the first week! They put condoms on your head.”
“What’s a condom?”
“You don’t know, do you?” Nervous laughter. “It’s, uh.” An elbow inelegantly directed by a peer in the speaker’s ribs. “It’s a shower cap, that’s all.”
I pondered, briefly. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
I didn’t make it to high school then, of course, the product of a memorably violent episode that resulted in a bully’s expulsion and my parents yanking me unceremoniously from middle school just weeks shy of graduation. By the fall of 1991, after an equally unsuccessful (though mercifully less harmful) stint in community college, I was no longer in school. This gave me ample time to focus, with the rest of the country, on whether Clarence Thomas would be deemed worthy of his appointment. I couldn’t comprehend the judgment rendered then, nor do I recognize its logic today. I grew less enamored with politics, with a nation I was already starting to doubt after the turmoil of the Gulf War: a corrosive process that has continued, roughly unabated, to this day.
By 1993, I was back in school and living in a new state. My parents enrolled me in the elite Albuquerque Academy, a 6-12 private school that I usually describe as “trying desperately hard to be a New Hampshire prep school in the middle of the New Mexico desert.” It wasn’t all-male, didn’t have boarding, and didn’t require uniforms, but every other trope of private privilege you can picture held true. Our lunch tables were randomly assigned each quarter, ten students and one faculty head per table, to facilitate proper lunchtime conversation. We were also assigned turns at serving as the family-style “waiter” of the table, responsible for retrieving food and cleaning up after our classmates. Seniors could sit where they liked… on Fridays.
I was a scholarship kid. My parents could never have afforded the $7,000 annual tuition (they now charge $22,000/year). The school was reasonably generous with financial aid, but there were plenty of rich kids there to keep the rest of us afloat. Some of them were smart, others were either dumb or played dumb to ascend their chosen social ladder. For a school so focused on academic achievement and scholarly rigor, the campus mostly felt like a beautiful larger rendition of a typical high school. There were the jocks and the jerks, they ruled the world, and interactions with them were nasty, brutish, and short.
When I was in eighth grade (again!) at the Academy, I played on the baseball team, the first and last official sport I’d partake in there. Most of my friends were on that team, but we were accompanied by several three-sport die-hards who didn’t want to run track. This was my last close contact with some of these fine gentlemen, despite the tiny size (150 per class) of the school overall. I assure you, the locker-room talk there was steeped in rape culture and often about rape itself. Here the future captains of Albuquerque’s commerce waxed eloquently about sexual coercion, drinks of choice with which to ply their intended quarry, and something nefarious I later discerned to be roofies. After I’d overly bravely said I would report one such particularly gruesome and planned encounter, the would-be perpetrator stuck a baseball bat between my unguarded legs and threatened to castrate me if I ever told anyone outside that room.
I didn’t report anything.
I didn’t stick around locker rooms after that season, though I tried out for JV baseball and got cut. I heard horror stories emanating from the locker room thereafter, though: two of my friends taped together by the football team with their mouths at the other’s genitals, plans for parties with drugs designed to ignite an involuntary orgy, tales of conquests that started with firm delivery of the word no. These memories resurfaced for me when Trump waved away his horrendous “pussy-grabbing” tape as locker-room talk and Facebook friend after Facebook friend testified that this had nothing to do with locker rooms they’d been in or around. My immediate thought and fervent rebuttal: it’s locker-room talk, all right, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t rape culture.
Was mine a particularly dire and/or imaginative men’s locker-room? I doubt it. I choose to believe that, while the privilege and entitlement found in the top social strata of the Academy may have been worse than some, it was surely not much worse than average. And while bravado and exaggeration are common to locker-room talk, so is intent. Maybe you’re bragging to your friends about how you roofied and raped a really hot girl when you didn’t… but at best that makes you an aspiring rapist? Someone who only fails to be a rapist because of lack of opportunity?
Unlike Brett Kavanaugh, I actually was a virgin until just shy of my 22nd birthday. I dated, sometimes seriously, and was offered a few opportunities to have sex, but had firm beliefs about not risking contributing to an abortion, as well as more spiritually motivated perspectives that don’t bear repeating here. I remember developing the phrase “voluntary virgin” just before college and proudly discussing it. I also refused to drink alcohol, a conviction that was bolstered by my alcoholic grandparents, then cemented by a handful of experiences with high school parties. A particularly vivid memory wafts up about as frequently as Clarence Thomas’ tainted Coke can, of a classmate holding a baggie of her own vomit dejectedly as she sat, green and wavering, at a kitchen table. Music bumped around us in the cavernous parentless house, couples sliding into bedrooms and jocks shouting in artificially deep bellows. “This isn’t me,” she said. “Why do I do this? I know this isn’t me.”
I don’t know what she did the rest of the night, but I doubt her consent for it would have been meaningfully offered.
Many of my conservative contacts (“friends” in many cases feels like it’s pushing it) have spent the last fortnight in America wringing their hands, proverbially and literally, about the message we are sending young men. So many men see themselves in Brett Kavanaugh, see their activities as childish pranks that never hurt anybody. They cannot imagine what level of everyday male behavior would be restricted by a world order that censures Kavanaugh, that denies Thomas, that demands affirmative consent before sexual activity. Their point, however abhorrent it may seem, has validity. But it’s not the validity they think, that this overhaul would be so complete as to be unnecessary and overly restrictive. Just the opposite is true: their horror at the depth of change required is evidence of just how toxic masculine American culture has become and how hard it is for its adherents to recognize their own iniquity.
I’ve never witnessed a rape, nor anything so much as Julie Swetnick’s ghastly line of rapists-in-waiting outside a bedroom door. But a large portion of the women I’ve known closely have been raped. And none of them, to my knowledge, by utter strangers. Those rapes were perpetrated by classmates, by boyfriends, by the men who talked in my eighth grade locker-room about drink and drugs and roofies. Somewhere between the plotting and planning and big boy talk of my contemporary bullies and all those tragic traumatic aftermaths were volitional decisions of actual men who actually followed through and did their worst. I have no doubt that Brett Kavanaugh is among them. And he probably isn’t all that different from his fellows at Georgetown Prep, nor they from my fellows at Albuquerque Academy. But that’s the problem.
My school, like Kavanaugh’s, allowed seniors a section to put whatever they wanted to be remembered by. It was divorced from the yearbook, a separate supplement called Senior Pages, and we were each afforded one 8.5×11 space. No doubt, my all-word small-point offering included innuendo, out-of-context quotations, and inside jokes that sound dubious to an outsider. It even included a sarcastic thank you to an ex-girlfriend for betraying me. There are moments I can shudder at how that page might look to a Senate hearing. I, too, remember what it was like to be 18.
The guy who stuck a bat between my legs offered few words at the bottom of his page. They included “No Thanx to… everyone who went to Ms. Roth before senior year (you are all cowards).” Ms. Roth was the person to whom we reported misconduct at the school. Whatever was reported, small portion though it may have been of his misdeeds, it was insufficient to deny him a Senior Page, or graduation, or ascent up the ladder of Albuquerque society, where he now remains.
Christine Blasey Ford is no damn coward.
When it came time to choose a college, I’d had enough of entitlement. I was likely eligible for about half the Ivy League, but I told anyone who would listen that I wouldn’t apply. From my narrow list of high-tier non-Ivy schools in or near major cities, I began shaving the more I heard about Greek life. An information session on Northwestern, where I was admitted to their prestigious School of Journalism, touted how integral fraternities and sororities were to their campus environment. Georgetown, where I was admitted to their prestigious School of Foreign Service, promised that much networking took place after hours in houses bearing three Greek letters.
Brandeis, on the other hand, claimed to have no frats or sororities whatsoever. As exclusive organizations, they were banned from campus for discriminating among their fellow classmates. When a recruiter from Brandeis slid this into casual conversation, my eyes went wide. College without frats dominating the social stratosphere? Tell me more.
I went there, of course. The scholarship was the biggest factor, again, but that conversation about Greek life really put it over the top. And of course, the sticker price of Brandeis meant that it was hardly less elitist than the Academy or an Ivy League school in many respects. Wealth and entitlement still dripped from the pores of many of my peers. And the Greek life notion proved to be an exaggeration: while the university does not offer official recognition, several frats and at least two sororities do loom just off-campus, deprived of technical status but still throwing parties on weekends. Thankfully, however, their underground status made them more pitiable than desirable. When SAM or SDT all sat in matching sweatshirts in the cafeteria, they were met with quiet derision rather than adoring awe.
It was in that same cafeteria, under the Usdan Student Center, where I met Anita Hill. It was only once and we didn’t make introductions. She was waiting for mashed potatoes and green beans ahead of me in line, just an intensely focused professor grabbing a quick lunch. We talked briefly, made some mild joke about the look of the empty corn tray, shared a smile. I wanted, so badly, to thank her for her courage. To tell her about an 11-year-old who still raged at the injustice she suffered, so publicly, so well.
I had my reasons, sure. I didn’t want to remind her of the worst month of her life that everyone focused on. I didn’t want to reduce her to a moment in time when she was here, an accomplished and admired professor, just trying to eat. I didn’t want to seem like another kid sucking up. Reasons, excuses, justifications, whatever you want to call them. The fact was this:
I didn’t speak up.
