Women Let Out A Primal Scream Over Brett Kavanaugh. It Didn't Matter.
Something did change since Anita Hill--yet, at the moment, it does not matter, as the GOP Senators are not listening.
0/05/2018 03:52 pm ET
Women Let Out A Primal Scream Over Brett Kavanaugh. It Didn’t Matter.
Somehow, Republican men assumed the mantle of victimhood.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/women-brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court_us_5bb7a3f1e4b01470d0514eef
“My body is on fire.”
The message blinked onto my phone in the middle of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. It came from a rape survivor I interviewed during the 2016 election season, when women were literally becoming ill from watching a man who had bragged on tape about grabbing women “by the pussy” ascend relatively unscathed to the presidency.
Twenty percent U.S. households tuned in to watch Ford describe what was probably the worst moment of her life, when, she said, two boys laughed uproariously and turned up the music to drown out her screams while one tried to force himself on her. Women openly cried on the subway as they listened to the testimony on their headphones. I realized halfway through the hearing that my teeth were sore from clenching.
As a sexual assault survivor, I pictured myself sitting in front of a callous Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and being grilled on live television by a female prosecutor he had hired because he didn’t know how to talk to me.................................
Ford did the best she could under those circumstances and was, by nearly all accounts, extremely credible. The most cynical Republicans had to admit that they at least believed she had been assaulted, and even Donald Trump called her a “very credible witness.” ........................................
And so women let out a collective primal scream. Women in their 50s, 60s, 70s began calling into C-SPAN — dry, sober C-SPAN — to announce to the world that they, too, had been sexually assaulted decades earlier. Rape survivors angrily confronted politicians in elevators and hallways demanding to be heard, driving one Republican senator to hide in a bathroom. The sharing of stories became so compulsive, so casual, that a cab driver of mine, a woman from Trinidad, volunteered two minutes into a ride that she had been raped twice by a diplomat.
I asked if she tried to report the assaults, and she laughed. “Please, they don’t even believe white women,” she said. “Why would they believe me?”
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It seemed as if something had changed since the 2016 election. Women got angry, and they poured out their stories, and they mined their pain on social media, and they got up in politicians’ faces and begged to be heard. Nationwide polls after Ford’s testimony showed that more than half of U.S. women surveyed said they opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination and fewer than a third said they supported it.
Republicans pretended to listen to them......................
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Demonstrators protest Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in front of Trump Tower in New York City, Oct. 4. The Senate is set to vote on his confirmation on Oct. 6.
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