indelible in the hippocampus
I wrote this on the evening of the senate judiciary hearing:
I'm listening to the boys downstairs, watching a movie with Kim and Zoe, relaxing after a day of first grade. Which you know was arduous in its own way, despite our tendency to think of our children's lives as simpler, or easier than the lives we live.
Asher and a neighbor girl, who is also a gorgeous, healthy six year old, are in the same classroom. Asher brought home a book on dogs from the library today--he told me the neighbor girl showed him where the pets section was in the stacks. Just that--that sweet interaction, layered with no extra meaning--she knew more about the layout of the library than him and she showed him.
Today, with the radio and the television tuned to the Supreme Court hearings, the relative innocence of six year olds could break your heart. For me, the testimony about the laughter resonated deepest, deeper even than the testimony about the second door. "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter," Christine Blasey Ford testified, "the uproarious laughter between the two and their having fun at my expense."
Of course I've been there, with my own stories, and so has almost every woman I know, my daughters, my dear friends (with some key exceptions) and I'm not going to tell you my stories because you know them, maybe not the details, but you know them. Someone noted today the peculiar way we talk about violence against women--there, just like that--in a way that elides the men. As if the violence was just something in the air that landed, like a body blow, on women.
I went to a college where the very geography of the campus was a set-up. Kenyon allowed women to attend in the early 1970s--why? Because the college was near bankruptcy. So right there, we know the women weren't really invited, not at the time.
The college had a long history of fraternities, which were housed on the beautiful, historical end of campus, and the women never voted to bring sororities to campus, so there was a peculiar extra edge of power to the greek system at Kenyon. The women were brought in, paying full freight, and housed on the other end of campus in the new dorm buildings. By the time I got there, in the mid-80s, the rituals were solidified. The parties that went on down at the fraternity end of campus--the grain alcohol, the red solo cups, the Talking Heads in the background, the hazing of the pledges, the naivete of the first year students, clutching their invitations to the parties, the walk of shame home that evening, the next morning, the blurred mascara, the tears, the gaze of the fraternity boys as the women walked into Peirce Hall to eat dinner--the Hall looked like Hogwarts, except the tables in the front of the hall were where the fraternities sat; the back room was for the women, the gays, the newspaper students, the orchestra players, the poets. Indelible in the hippocampus.
And that was the 80s, where the women's center I helped run sponsored take back the night marches--the idea of date rape, as Caitlyn Flanagan wrote in the Atlantic, was unknown or brand spanking new. As a senior on campus, I watched the younger women stumble down to the fraternities in the dark cooling autumn air, in between their writing the three to five page papers on Odysseus, on Dickinson, on medical care in the civil war, on government policy in the Vietnam War era, in Spanish, in Latin, in between the calls home on the public dorm phones--there was no texting, there was no privacy to tell anyone at home of the shame that seemed braided into that first and second year of college.
Elite prep schools, Ivy League colleges and universities, fraternities and eating clubs--part of what was on display during the Kavanaugh hearings was the well-trodden path for the one percent to take to stay the one percent. I didn't understand what it meant to be from east coast money until I got to Kenyon. I instinctively knew and was instantly recognized as being a girl from public school and from Ohio (never mind we were in Ohio, because we weren't: Kenyon was its own universe, hundreds of miles away from the depressed Mt. Vernon, Ohio, on the map only five miles away). I was learning class, or perhaps I was learning elitism.
When I got to Princeton, I used to call the undergrads the "beautiful people." Of course they all weren't beautiful, and yet they were. And of course there were many people there--the nerds, the geeks, the brainy scholarship kids, kids from other countries--but there was a certain kind of undergrad there who was so beautiful in their astonishing health, their glowing entitlement, their careless laughing ways. They were going places, they were brilliant, they were protected. Sigh. I guess it was a combination of awe, jealousy, anxiety and judgment that shaped my view of these kids. They knew the code, they recognized one another and I wasn't one of them there, and I wasn't one of them when I got to the firm, and it took me some time to untangle my emotions about what? Look, let's put it this way. Part of Kavanaugh's story on display was a story about varsity sports, prep schools, ivy league colleges and money; within those channels the man certainly has worked hard and been brilliant, but that man wasn't on display. I would have loved to see a man understandably angry at what was happening to him, but someone with humility, dignity, and grace. Instead I saw someone sputteringly furious that what was due to him was being threatened. When he got angry, I got triggered.
And remember, during that first ten years, and then later, in what turned out to be the last five years of my career, I made four men. Four men who are now between the ages of six and twenty-seven. I think they are wonderful, and they are in relationships (all of them except Eli, if you count Asher's year long relationship with his kindergarten girlfriend), and they are gentle, caring men who I believe have landed on the right side of consent, of nights where there was too much alcohol, on the right side of the women they love and have loved and on the right side of women they don't know as well. I think there may be something that happens to men in groups, and so far, the men I have made have been loners more than joiners. I remember a painful conversation about oral sex with my older boys, a specific, in-the-weeds talk about blowjobs and consent which was spurred on by an incident at a nearby prep school with a girl and the ice hockey team. I know that the boys just wanted me to shush and leave the room--you know, it wasn't a conversation. It was a soliloquy.
Here's the thing--all these men, the men with whom I worked, the men I made, the men I know--they are all against rape, against date rape and gang rape--they have wives and daughters and sisters and mothers. But that doesn't change the fact that Kavanaugh, if guilty, is not unusual. The men who are responsible for some of the violence against my women are your neighbor, your accountant, your golf buddy, the guy at church, the town selectman. There are bad eggs. There are good eggs and bad nights. There are good eggs.
Because that's the thing about violence against women. There are a bunch of men at the other end of most of the stories I know, the stories of my women--my daughters, my friends--and they aren't men in jail, they aren't men who have been called to account for their actions, they aren't "rapists." They are just men.
So yeah, it's been triggering.
The thing I will admit is I don't have any energy left to care about Kavanaugh's reputation. I only care about Ford. That's what happens after fifty-two years of watching, hearing, experiencing, absorbing sexual assault, sexual discrimination, rape, date rape, title nine bullshit, nothing to do because he said, she said--this shit will grind you down. I'm an exhausted woman who can only care about making sure the women and men I have responsibility for, the actual children I made, know who they are, what they deserve in bed, what the boundaries are, and when they have been crossed. I can only do my damndest to make sure that my innocent first grader, so grateful to know where the dog books are in the library, stays that way--grateful to the women who help him, courteous, loving, gentle--not just to the right women he dates and marries, but to the wrong women, by which I mean the women he can choose to help in a bar, at a party, women he must learn to respect just as he must learn to respect the men in his life. The school the boys go to has an anti-bullying program for kindergartners through eighth graders and it is giving the children the vocabulary to stand up for themselves and for others, and, please God, the knowledge to never, ever cross the line. And it has to be meaningful that the school is giving children the words, right from the get-go.
But for me? When I see Kavanaugh tear up because of the harm that has been done to the women he loves--his wife, his daughter--because his name has been besmirched, I can't find an ounce of sympathy in me for him. I admit that, and that is clearly a failing on my part, because I should care most about the truth, the most about justice.
I wrote all that a few days ago. I've been hesitant to go live with this one. I lurk sometimes on a listserve on Facebook that is specifically for Kenyon students from the 80s. Of course the conversation has been lit up with rage and fury, and with frustration on the part of some of the listeners. The blowback is quick. Oh, the affronted Dekes, who are astonished and offended to be accused of contributing to the rape culture of Kenyon in the 80s. They love women, to hear them tell, they love the women they married, they respect the women with whom they work, they love their daughters. And I know they do. Who are the rapists, then? Who are they? If they are not the Dekes, and they are not Kavanaugh, who the hell is responsible for all of the unwanted, unconsented to sex which haunts the women I love? Is it possible to even have this conversation?
I don't hate men--I really love many specific men. And I believe Christine Blasey Ford. I am scared and triggered watching the angry, sputtering, sarcastic, furious Kavanaugh and he reminds me of some specific men in my life and the lives of women I love, and those men feel entitled to their version of Supreme Court jobs, and here's the thing, where does the entitlement end? I don't know. I do know that violence was done to Ford and someone is on the other end of that violence. When I hear Senator Graham freak out in anger at the idea that anyone would accuse a good man of wrong, I feel like weeping. I can hardly bear to listen. What does that say about me?
I'm listening to the boys downstairs, watching a movie with Kim and Zoe, relaxing after a day of first grade. Which you know was arduous in its own way, despite our tendency to think of our children's lives as simpler, or easier than the lives we live.
Asher and a neighbor girl, who is also a gorgeous, healthy six year old, are in the same classroom. Asher brought home a book on dogs from the library today--he told me the neighbor girl showed him where the pets section was in the stacks. Just that--that sweet interaction, layered with no extra meaning--she knew more about the layout of the library than him and she showed him.
Today, with the radio and the television tuned to the Supreme Court hearings, the relative innocence of six year olds could break your heart. For me, the testimony about the laughter resonated deepest, deeper even than the testimony about the second door. "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter," Christine Blasey Ford testified, "the uproarious laughter between the two and their having fun at my expense."
Of course I've been there, with my own stories, and so has almost every woman I know, my daughters, my dear friends (with some key exceptions) and I'm not going to tell you my stories because you know them, maybe not the details, but you know them. Someone noted today the peculiar way we talk about violence against women--there, just like that--in a way that elides the men. As if the violence was just something in the air that landed, like a body blow, on women.
I went to a college where the very geography of the campus was a set-up. Kenyon allowed women to attend in the early 1970s--why? Because the college was near bankruptcy. So right there, we know the women weren't really invited, not at the time.
The college had a long history of fraternities, which were housed on the beautiful, historical end of campus, and the women never voted to bring sororities to campus, so there was a peculiar extra edge of power to the greek system at Kenyon. The women were brought in, paying full freight, and housed on the other end of campus in the new dorm buildings. By the time I got there, in the mid-80s, the rituals were solidified. The parties that went on down at the fraternity end of campus--the grain alcohol, the red solo cups, the Talking Heads in the background, the hazing of the pledges, the naivete of the first year students, clutching their invitations to the parties, the walk of shame home that evening, the next morning, the blurred mascara, the tears, the gaze of the fraternity boys as the women walked into Peirce Hall to eat dinner--the Hall looked like Hogwarts, except the tables in the front of the hall were where the fraternities sat; the back room was for the women, the gays, the newspaper students, the orchestra players, the poets. Indelible in the hippocampus.
And that was the 80s, where the women's center I helped run sponsored take back the night marches--the idea of date rape, as Caitlyn Flanagan wrote in the Atlantic, was unknown or brand spanking new. As a senior on campus, I watched the younger women stumble down to the fraternities in the dark cooling autumn air, in between their writing the three to five page papers on Odysseus, on Dickinson, on medical care in the civil war, on government policy in the Vietnam War era, in Spanish, in Latin, in between the calls home on the public dorm phones--there was no texting, there was no privacy to tell anyone at home of the shame that seemed braided into that first and second year of college.
Elite prep schools, Ivy League colleges and universities, fraternities and eating clubs--part of what was on display during the Kavanaugh hearings was the well-trodden path for the one percent to take to stay the one percent. I didn't understand what it meant to be from east coast money until I got to Kenyon. I instinctively knew and was instantly recognized as being a girl from public school and from Ohio (never mind we were in Ohio, because we weren't: Kenyon was its own universe, hundreds of miles away from the depressed Mt. Vernon, Ohio, on the map only five miles away). I was learning class, or perhaps I was learning elitism.
When I got to Princeton, I used to call the undergrads the "beautiful people." Of course they all weren't beautiful, and yet they were. And of course there were many people there--the nerds, the geeks, the brainy scholarship kids, kids from other countries--but there was a certain kind of undergrad there who was so beautiful in their astonishing health, their glowing entitlement, their careless laughing ways. They were going places, they were brilliant, they were protected. Sigh. I guess it was a combination of awe, jealousy, anxiety and judgment that shaped my view of these kids. They knew the code, they recognized one another and I wasn't one of them there, and I wasn't one of them when I got to the firm, and it took me some time to untangle my emotions about what? Look, let's put it this way. Part of Kavanaugh's story on display was a story about varsity sports, prep schools, ivy league colleges and money; within those channels the man certainly has worked hard and been brilliant, but that man wasn't on display. I would have loved to see a man understandably angry at what was happening to him, but someone with humility, dignity, and grace. Instead I saw someone sputteringly furious that what was due to him was being threatened. When he got angry, I got triggered.
And remember, during that first ten years, and then later, in what turned out to be the last five years of my career, I made four men. Four men who are now between the ages of six and twenty-seven. I think they are wonderful, and they are in relationships (all of them except Eli, if you count Asher's year long relationship with his kindergarten girlfriend), and they are gentle, caring men who I believe have landed on the right side of consent, of nights where there was too much alcohol, on the right side of the women they love and have loved and on the right side of women they don't know as well. I think there may be something that happens to men in groups, and so far, the men I have made have been loners more than joiners. I remember a painful conversation about oral sex with my older boys, a specific, in-the-weeds talk about blowjobs and consent which was spurred on by an incident at a nearby prep school with a girl and the ice hockey team. I know that the boys just wanted me to shush and leave the room--you know, it wasn't a conversation. It was a soliloquy.
Here's the thing--all these men, the men with whom I worked, the men I made, the men I know--they are all against rape, against date rape and gang rape--they have wives and daughters and sisters and mothers. But that doesn't change the fact that Kavanaugh, if guilty, is not unusual. The men who are responsible for some of the violence against my women are your neighbor, your accountant, your golf buddy, the guy at church, the town selectman. There are bad eggs. There are good eggs and bad nights. There are good eggs.
Because that's the thing about violence against women. There are a bunch of men at the other end of most of the stories I know, the stories of my women--my daughters, my friends--and they aren't men in jail, they aren't men who have been called to account for their actions, they aren't "rapists." They are just men.
So yeah, it's been triggering.
The thing I will admit is I don't have any energy left to care about Kavanaugh's reputation. I only care about Ford. That's what happens after fifty-two years of watching, hearing, experiencing, absorbing sexual assault, sexual discrimination, rape, date rape, title nine bullshit, nothing to do because he said, she said--this shit will grind you down. I'm an exhausted woman who can only care about making sure the women and men I have responsibility for, the actual children I made, know who they are, what they deserve in bed, what the boundaries are, and when they have been crossed. I can only do my damndest to make sure that my innocent first grader, so grateful to know where the dog books are in the library, stays that way--grateful to the women who help him, courteous, loving, gentle--not just to the right women he dates and marries, but to the wrong women, by which I mean the women he can choose to help in a bar, at a party, women he must learn to respect just as he must learn to respect the men in his life. The school the boys go to has an anti-bullying program for kindergartners through eighth graders and it is giving the children the vocabulary to stand up for themselves and for others, and, please God, the knowledge to never, ever cross the line. And it has to be meaningful that the school is giving children the words, right from the get-go.
But for me? When I see Kavanaugh tear up because of the harm that has been done to the women he loves--his wife, his daughter--because his name has been besmirched, I can't find an ounce of sympathy in me for him. I admit that, and that is clearly a failing on my part, because I should care most about the truth, the most about justice.
I wrote all that a few days ago. I've been hesitant to go live with this one. I lurk sometimes on a listserve on Facebook that is specifically for Kenyon students from the 80s. Of course the conversation has been lit up with rage and fury, and with frustration on the part of some of the listeners. The blowback is quick. Oh, the affronted Dekes, who are astonished and offended to be accused of contributing to the rape culture of Kenyon in the 80s. They love women, to hear them tell, they love the women they married, they respect the women with whom they work, they love their daughters. And I know they do. Who are the rapists, then? Who are they? If they are not the Dekes, and they are not Kavanaugh, who the hell is responsible for all of the unwanted, unconsented to sex which haunts the women I love? Is it possible to even have this conversation?
I don't hate men--I really love many specific men. And I believe Christine Blasey Ford. I am scared and triggered watching the angry, sputtering, sarcastic, furious Kavanaugh and he reminds me of some specific men in my life and the lives of women I love, and those men feel entitled to their version of Supreme Court jobs, and here's the thing, where does the entitlement end? I don't know. I do know that violence was done to Ford and someone is on the other end of that violence. When I hear Senator Graham freak out in anger at the idea that anyone would accuse a good man of wrong, I feel like weeping. I can hardly bear to listen. What does that say about me?
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