I am enraged by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s approach to handling the serious allegations that have been raised about Brett Kavanaugh. It is clear that the Republican senators, all men, plan on doing the minimum possible to investigate the allegations, so they can move ahead with Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Mitch McConnell has already assured evangelical leaders that Kavanaugh will be confirmed, prior to any investigation by the committee.
I am tired of this being the world that girls and women have to live in; nothing has changed since the Clarence Thomas hearings. We will most likely have two Supreme Court justices with the history of Thomas and Kavanaugh making decisions that will affect the lives of women and girls for years to come.
I know part of my rage comes from my experiences and those of women close to me. I know many women who were raped in high school or college. None of those rapes were reported, and why should women report rapes when they continue to see how women not only aren’t believed, but in fact are degraded and threatened for daring to challenge men?
The stories about physicians who sexually assaulted athletes has had me thinking about a doctor who treated me when I was younger. I was having recurrent running injuries when I was in my early 20s and went to see him on the recommendations of other runners. At the end of the visit, he asked me to show him how I stretched my calves prior to a run. He didn’t like my form and demonstrated how I should be stretching by putting his hand and arm across my breasts. I felt violated but distrusted my judgment — he was a doctor — maybe I was overreacting.
I told some friends about what happened, and we decided to do an experiment. They would both make appointments, and we would see if he treated the man differently than the woman. The experiment confirmed our hypothesis — the doctor put his hand and arm on the woman’s breasts to adjust her stretching position and told the man how to adjust his position from across the room. But we were afraid to take the next step and report him.
Years later, I heard the doctor had retired, and I knew my experience was most likely repeated on hundreds of women. I was angry at the doctor, and angry at myself for never reporting him.
Up until recently, I’ve always assumed that the doctor would have been stopped had I reported him. Now I know that what most likely would have happened is that his actions would have been minimized, and I would have been attacked.
Given the experiences of others whose reports of sexual assaults by physicians were ignored, my fear of reporting him was most likely justified.
Just like my fear of telling anyone about the two 16-year-old neighborhood boys who tackled me in the dark one evening in my front yard and groped my crotch. Or my boss who, when I was 16, stuffed my purse down the front of his pants. Or the boss who, when I was 20, came up behind me when I was standing waiting for a light to change in downtown Minneapolis and reached up under my skirt to grope my crotch. Or the boss who, when I was 21, gave me a long talk about why it was important for a woman to never have sex with another woman, because a man would never be able to please her (he was right in my case).
Or … or … or. The story of being a girl or woman in our culture. Repeated over and over.
Don’t these men know how the culture they are continuing affects their wives, daughters, sisters, granddaughters? Or do they just not care?
Now they want to firmly embed that culture into the Supreme Court, so they can make sure they can continue to exert their power over women and girls for decades to come. The story of “The Handmaid’s Tale” is way too close to the reality we live in.
Julie Pokela, Ph.D., is the President of Market Street Research.