Women's Lives, Rapists' Laws
Remembering who Brett Kavanaugh is, as one of the men now presiding over the bodies of girls, women, and others who can get pregnant.
I want you to remember who he is. I want you to remember the highly credible evidence, thanks to Christine Blasey Ford’s courageous testimony, that one of the Supreme Court Justices, Brett Kavanaugh, attempted to rape her. That this is one of the six men now presiding over the bodies of women, in destroying our hitherto constitutionally protected right to have an abortion, is a parody of justice.
Ford testifies that, when she was fifteen, the then-seventeen year-old Kavanaugh corralled her in a bedroom at a Maryland party. He and his friend, Mark Judge, allegedly turned up the music so her voice would not be audible. Kavanaugh allegedly pinned her to the bed, pressing her body down with his own, grinding his crotch against her, and trying to undress her. Ford believed he intended to rape her. When she tried to scream for help, she said Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth. She said she was afraid for her life then, fearing Kavanaugh would accidentally smother and kill her.
She says she was able to escape only because Judge jumped on the bed, knocking them both over.
Meanwhile, the two boys laughed. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” said Ford, a professor of psychology. And although she was speaking as an expert on the brain, anyone who has been similarly traumatized recognized instantly what she was talking about.
Yesterday, Kavanaugh joined Alito in the court’s majority opinion that overturned Roe and Casey, which will see abortion made illegal for millions in this country. The bodies of girls, women, and other people who can get pregnant—non-binary folks and trans men included—are therefore being policed and controlled by a legally sanctioned, court-appointed, supremely powerful alleged assailant.
And a harasser, in the case of Clarence Thomas. As Anita Hill testified so bravely over 30 years ago, Thomas sexually harassed her when she was his law clerk. It was Hill, not Thomas, who paid for his actions and her subsequent testimony about them. The hearings became a veritable circus, under the mismanagement of none other than President Joe Biden. And, like Kavanaugh after him, Thomas was of course confirmed to SCOTUS.
Do we disbelieve these women, or do we just not care about what they tell us?
I have to wonder this all the more after further revelations about Kavanaugh’s behavior in college. According to Deborah Ramirez, when he was an eighteen year-old undergraduate at Yale, Kavanaugh thrust his penis into her face when drunk at a party, causing her to touch it non-consensually when she tried to push him off her. Kavanaugh defended himself against this accusation by saying that, if such a thing had happened, it would have been the talk of the campus. But apparently it was. An investigation by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer for The New Yorker in September 2018 revealed numerous witnesses who, while they had not witnessed this incident directly, had heard about it afterward. They believed Ramirez, many of them added.
But in my (progressive, feminist) circles at least, further evidence of Kavanaugh’s misdeeds a year later barely made a ripple.
And now, this. As Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan wrote in their dissent for the Dobbs decision:
After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had. The majority accomplishes that result without so much as considering how women have relied on the right to choose or what it means to take that right away. The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.
The blistering dissent continues by taking specific aim at Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion. He opined that Dobbs offers a “scrupulously neutral” way forward by leaving abortion rights in the hands of individual states. On the contrary, they point out:
When the Court decimates a right women have held for 50 years, the Court is not being “scrupulously neutral.” It is instead taking sides: against women who wish to exercise the right, and for states (like Mississippi) that want to bar them from doing so. Justice Kavanaugh cannot obscure that point by appropriate the rhetoric of even-handedness. His position just is what it is: A brook-no-compromise refusal to recognize a woman’s right to choose, from the first day of pregnancy. And that position… cannot be squared with this Court’s longstanding view that women indeed have rights (whatever the state of the world in 1868) to make the most personal and consequential decisions about their bodies and their lives.
This includes the right to have an abortion. And it includes the right not to be pinned down, groped, and sexually assaulted. How could a Kavanugh be expected to understand, much less care about, these fundamentally entwined matters of female bodily autonomy? As Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan put it, abortion rights are not only vital but have a vital social meaning for women.
[They] reflect that she is an autonomous person, and that society and the law recognize her as such. Like many constitutional rights, the right to choose situates a woman in relationship to others and to the government. It helps define a sphere of freedom, in which a person has the capacity to make choices free of government control. As Casey recognized, the right “order[s]” her “thinking” as well as her “living.” Beyond any individual choice about residence, or education, or career, her whole life reflects the control and authority that the right grants… To allow a State to exert control over one of “the most intimate and personal choices” a woman may make is not only to affect the course of her life, monumental as those effects might be. It is to alter her “views of [herself]” and her understanding of her “place in society” as someone with the recognized dignity and authority to make these choices. Women have relied on Roe and Casey in this way for 50 years. Many have never known anything else. When Roe and Casey disappear, the loss of power, control, and dignity will be immense.
This immense loss is not a bug, it is a feature, for those who view women’s bodies and their lives as ultimately subject to male control, scrutiny, and exploitation for others’ benefit.
It matters who we give power to. Yes, power resides in a complex cluster of social structures and institutions. But the powerful individuals within it can, at times, wield enormous influence. The groundbreaking feminist legal theorist Catharine A. MacKinnon wrote over fifteen years ago about the way, in this country, women’s lives are ruled by men’s laws. Now we are witnessing something even starker and more painful: the lives of girls and women are being ruled—and overruled—by rapists (alleged and proven, attempted and actual). In some states, horrific bounty laws enable anyone—including, potentially, a rapist—to sue those who help a pregnant person obtain an abortion. In others, we have already seen accused rapists suing their victims for parental rights over the children they have fathered. And many states implementing abortion bans will not make an exception for cases of rape or incest. This is not just about going back; it is about the deliberate engineering of a new, worse, and even more draconian future for girls, women, and others who can get pregnant in this country.
Meanwhile, ruling over all of this is, among others, an alleged attempted rapist in the form of Brett Kavanaugh. It is dystopian. It is horrifying. It is reality in America.
Today’s America is regressive and dystopian indeed. But context and history matters. Thank you for reminding us about Joe Biden’s complicity in installing a sexual predator on SCOTUS way back in the Thomas hearings. That was before the Fed Society and Leonard Leo really became the dark power they have become today which enabled the other 5 radical misogynists to gain access to the highest court and catapult us to what is certain to be a dangerously oppressive future.
Brilliant. Devastating.