What Happens at Prep

Wait, isn't that what conservatives want? (No, they just want a room with no women.)

A really great piece at Slate by Lili Loofborouw (a name that's harder to spell than mine!) gets Kavanaugh precisely to rights:

For what it’s worth, and absent evidence or allegations to the contrary, I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that he was a virgin through his teens. I believe it in part because it squares with some of the oddities I’ve had a hard time understanding about his alleged behavior: namely, that both allegations are strikingly different from other high-profile stories the past year, most of which feature a man and a woman alone. And yet both the Kavanaugh accusations share certain features: There is no penetrative sex, there are always male onlookers, and, most importantly, there’s laughter. In each case the other men—not the woman—seem to be Kavanaugh’s true intended audience.

Abuse of this type isn't about heterosexual relations with women at all, in fact, it's about homosocial relations with men, at the expense of women. Kavanaugh assaults Blasey Ford only because Mark Judge is there to watch, and to roar with appreciative laughter. And then a male omertà protects him: "What happens at Prep stays at Prep."

This jibes with another story (from Emily Peck/HuffPost via Lemieux) about the abominable Judge Alex Kozinski, for whom Kavanaugh clerked in the early 1990s:

During [one] man’s clerkship, Kozinski showed him a video of naked women skydiving, he told HuffPost. “He thought it was hilarious to watch their breasts ‘flap’ back and forth,” he recalled.

The former clerk declined to be named in HuffPost for privacy reasons, but Catharine MacKinnon, a prominent professor at the University of Michigan Law School who first conceptualized the notion of sexual harassment in the legal system, confirmed his story.

“He spoke of hearing in the chambers things Judge Kozinski said that I vividly recall were sexually salacious,” she said, adding that the judge made this man extremely uncomfortable. The former clerk was MacKinnon’s research assistant years ago.

Men weren’t typically the butt of Kozinski’s jokes. The former clerk remembered that while Kozinski was evaluating the application of a woman who was second in her class at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, the judge had described her as the sort of woman who would only give you a handjob.

Kozinski abused his female clerks directly and horribly as well, as Dahlia Lithwick reports from personal experience, but what's relevant to Kavanaugh is his jocular relationship with the male clerks, members-for-life of the "Easy Rider Gag List" with whom he'd share nasty, woman-demeaning jokes by email. The clerks themselves weren't doing anything to women, at least in this connection, but they were participating in the culture.

I'm reminded here of Trump's "locker room talk", young Billy Bush laughing like crazy in the van as Trump boasts about how his star status allows him to abuse women at will. "They let you do it!" We don't really know whether Trump did the things he boasted about—in the case of the married woman he took furniture shopping as part of his seduction program he confesses failure, in spite of "moving on her like a bitch", which makes me think it must be true—and in a cultural sense that may not really matter, but it matters to the women who are deliberately excluded from the culture but may be pawed, knocked down, or have penises waved in their faces at any time or be ruthlessly gossiped about and slut-shamed, while the jocks share a laugh.

(Disclosure: I was a freak culturally, though drugs didn't yet exist in our small town, completely outside of jock culture, when I was in high school, except during a brief moment of popularity during my senior year, perhaps when it became known that I smoked cigarettes, and honored once in the school parking lot when a football star invited me into the car for a warm can of Bud and I listened to him and his friend complaining about his girlfriend—not, in fact, in a demeaning way, for laughs, at all, but sad and baffled, the way many of us often are. #NotAllJocks, or at least not all the time, I imagine, but none of us were Yale-bound prep school twits in any case.)

Kavanaugh claims to recall nothing about Kozinski's emails, though he was close to Kozinski (so close that after Kozinski was finally forced to resign last year Kavanaugh "reached out" to him, "concerned about his mental health"). Kavanaugh doesn't remember any of these things, or denies they happened, or says he wasn't there, as he denies seeing the emails stolen by Manuel Miranda from Democratic members of Senate Judiciary, or having a preconceived opinion about the constitutionality of abortion, but they follow a pattern. He's certainly lying about that much of it, and he shouldn't be on the Court.

Update: Also see Brian Beutler:

The most common refrain on the right is that liberals have imperiled Kavanaugh’s nomination with unprovable accusations of sexual misconduct and that this is part of a trend that will ultimately make it impossible for men to climb professional ladders in life.

Muscling Kavanaugh on to the Court, in this telling, is the central battle in a larger fight to preserve male liberty.

Where "liberty" means, as it usually does when libertarians use it, "prerogative".

Incidentally, Beutler cites the conservative complaint about Senator Mazie Hirono:

“I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases,” she said. “As I said, his credibility is already very questionable in my mind and in the minds of a lot of my fellow Judiciary Committee members, the Democrats. So he comes, and—when I say that he’s very outcome-driven, he has an ideological agenda, is very outcome-driven. And I can sit here and talk to you about some of the cases that exemplifies his, in my view, inability to be fair in the cases that come before him. This is a person that is going to be sitting on our Supreme Court, making decisions that will impact women’s reproductive choice. He has a—he very much is against women’s reproductive choice. And I can tell you two very important cases in which he applied the same standard, but came to totally different results to make it much harder for women to get this kind of coverage. So there’s—there are so many indications of his own lack of credibility. And I put that in a context.”

Nearly to a person, conservatives interpreted Hirono to be arguing that she doesn’t believe Kavanaugh, because Kavanaugh is pro-life and thus inherently less trustworthy than his accuser—if not prone to commit assault.

Beutler explains carefully that that is not what she was arguing, but he doesn't stress the part of this that I think is important, what Hirono means by "outcome-driven": she means Kavanaugh is, as a judge, willing to frame his argument to force it to the conclusion he wanted to start with (like Scalia, I'd add). It doesn't matter whether it's abortion rights or workers' rights. It's what I'd call legalism, as in Chinese antiquity, or the exploitation of the letter of the law to impose the ruler's particular will, even if it conflicts with the law's spirit. This end-justifies-the-means approach to justice is, for Hirono, a sign that Kavanaugh is basically dishonest, and it's that that makes her feel Kavanaugh is guilty.