@livinglava,
livinglava wrote:I used to deny that pro-life people are victims of having their democratic right obstructed to fight for the rights of the unborn. Many people approached me about why they were against abortion, most if not all women. Why were these women upset regarding abortion? Maybe because they feel powerless to do anything about it. Does that address what you're talking about with victimization, or do you consider that a different kind of victimization?
Brett Kavanaugh and the Sexist Double Standard of Being Held Accountable for Your Actions
"Boys will be boys," but girls bear the weight of responsibility.
JILL FILIPOVIC
SEP 18, 2018 9:00PM EDT
In this op-ed, author Jill Filipovic explains the gendered double standards at play as people try to defend Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in the wake of sexual-misconduct allegations against him.
Personal responsibility sure is a funny thing. Women are supposed to take it when we get pregnant by carrying the pregnancy to term no matter what our circumstances — after all, as some conservatives routinely argue, having sex is apparently an act of profound female irresponsibility, and so the only responsible thing to do is to have a child we didn’t plan for and perhaps can’t afford. Relying on public benefits to support children is also personally irresponsible, those same people may say. And girls, of course, are supposed to be responsible in what we wear and how we act so that we don’t give boys the wrong impression.
For the opposite sex, it’s a different story. “Boys will be boys,” after all. A great number of people seem to think sex, consensual or not, is little more than a conquest for men; they certainly aren’t expected to be the primary preventers of pregnancy in their relationships. Men enjoy sex as a pleasure and a conquest. Women shoulder the responsibilities.
This dynamic is currently playing out in sharp relief with the allegations of attempted sexual assault recently made against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford. According to Ford, Kavanaugh and another student pushed her into a room during a party while they were in high school, sexually assaulted her, and attempted to rape her. She alleged Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth and groped her as he tried to remove her clothing. Both Ford and Kavanaugh may deliver testimony before the Senate on September 24, but in the meantime, some of Kavanaugh’s defenders offer a clever explanation. They say he didn’t try to rape anyone, and even if he did, he was only 17 and therefore it was youthful hijinks and he’s not responsible. “The thing happened — if it happened — an awfully long time ago, back in Ronald Reagan’s time, when the actors in the drama were minors and (the boys, anyway) under the blurring influence of alcohol and adolescent hormones,” wrote Lance Morrow in the Wall Street Journal. The attempted rape “is ugly, and stupid more than evil,” Morrow wrote, continuing, “The sin, if there was one, was not one of those that Catholic theology calls peccata clamantia — sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.”
After all, who among us should face serious consequences for a mistake we made as a hormone-fueled teenager?
Vulnerable teenage girls should, at least according to Kavanaugh. When he was a circuit court judge, Kavanaugh heard the case of Jane Doe, a girl who had come to the United States without her parents and was taken into the U.S. custody. She was pregnant and wanted to exercise her constitutional right to abortion — a right that applies to citizens as well as foreigners in the United States. She was, as another circuit court judge put it, “a child who is alone in a foreign land,” who was clear that she wanted to end her pregnancy. Kavanaugh wanted to delay her ability to do so, arguing that the government should not facilitate her abortion. She was already 15 weeks pregnant, and the clock was ticking.
Under the guise of protecting her, Kavanaugh argued that her minor status meant it was all the more reasonable to make it harder for her to have an abortion. It’s a strange view, this contention that “she is pregnant and has to make a major life decision,” as Kavanaugh put it — as though having an abortion is more major and life-altering than having a child. In any case, he believed the responsible thing for her to do was to consult an adult and really think about it, as if having an abortion and keeping her life on its existing path was the bad decision and having a child she did not want to carry, birth, or raise would be better.
“It seems to me that when Brett Kavanaugh attempted to deny a 17-year-old immigrant an abortion, he believed that the decisions you make as a minor ought to have lifelong consequences,” tweeted Lauren Duca, who writes a column for Teen Vogue. “Let's treat him the same way.”
There is a theme here, and it’s not just that girls are held to different and wildly inconsistent standards of responsibility compared to boys (although they are). After all, Kavanaugh’s abortion ruling also suggested he believes that a teenage girl was possibly too immature to be treated the same as an adult, the same way his defenders believe whatever he did at 17 is now irrelevant to his fitness for a lifetime judicial appointment.
The overarching theme, though, is that it’s girls in particular who are vehicles for someone else’s needs or desires, and that “responsibility,” for girls and women, hinges on that service. That’s why having a baby before you’re ready is cast as “taking responsibility,” but choosing to safely end a pregnancy is characterized by some as selfish and irresponsible. It’s why adult men are often not expected to take responsibility for mistreating women in their youth — women’s and girls’ bodies are objects of want, mere things onto which men and boys might act out their desires. This is how attempted rape gets cast as teenage hijinks, akin to drinking too much or stealing a car. If a woman says those men or boys crossed a line, well, how were they even to know where the line was? It’s not as though women and girls are autonomous beings, and the lines within which we get to call the shots are drawn by the contours of our skin over our bones.
You can’t separate the view of abortion as both irresponsible and the purview of the government from this equally ugly view of women as tangential accessories to men’s lives — either sex objects or caretakers, and on bad days witchy creatures who become inconvenient when they insist that they get to chart their own course, or that their experience of events describes an attack and not boyish fun that happened years ago anyway and should be forgotten.
If a 17-year-old can be forced by the government to be responsible for carrying a pregnancy to term, surely an adult man can be expected to answer for the choices he is alleged to have made at 17. Kavanaugh says he never assaulted anyone. Some of his defenders say it doesn’t matter if he did, because teenage boys shouldn't necessarily be responsible for bad choices they made when they were younger, and must not have their careers or lives at all impacted by their youthful mistakes. That is, of course, only if they’re white — Donald Trump still insists that the teenagers who made up the exonerated Central Park Five are guilty of rape.
Kavanaugh and men like him have never been held to the same standard of responsibility as Jane Doe, Christine Blasey Ford, and all the women like them. But at the very least, as a potential Supreme Court justice and a grown adult man, Kavanaugh should be responsible to tell the truth — under oath, and after the woman who says he attacked her gets her chance to testify.
Essential Consultants LLC, which was allegedly created by Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen for the purpose of hiding "the true source of funds to be used to pay" Daniels, filed a removal to federal court on Friday. 