THE STONE Trump’s New Taunt, Kavanaugh’s Defense and How Misogyny Rules

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/opinion/kavanaugh-misogyny-epistemic-worlds.html? The battle over the Supreme Court nomination is not about truth. It is about who controls meaning. By Bonnie Mann Ms. Mann is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. Oct. 3, 2018 Image A majority of the senators were male at the executive session last week on moving Brett Kavanaugh's nomination out of the Judiciary Committee.CreditCreditErin Schaff for The New York Times The Supreme Court nomination hearings of Brett Kavanaugh and the ensuing storm over the sexual assault allegations made against him have exposed many things, but perhaps most of all, they have exposed the depth, belligerence and intransigence of misogyny in our time. What we have been witnessing is the form misogyny takes when the most powerful, wealthy and entitled of white men find themselves confronted by women unwilling or unable to keep silent any longer. Donald Trump provided a typical example on Tuesday when he used his platform as president to openly mock Christine Blasey Ford and her testimony during a rally in Mississippi. The uproar over the Kavanaugh hearings — even more powerful than the one that followed the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape during the presidential campaign, on which Donald Trump boasted about committing sexual assault — has plunged the nation into a sort of civil war. As a philosopher, I am inclined to see this as a war between two epistemic worlds. By “epistemic world” I mean a broadly shared framework for knowing in which emotions, moral sensibilities and reason are all informed by certain values, either consciously or unconsciously held. These values are at stake in moments like this one, and so are the material power arrangements that support and give rise to them. When our epistemic world is threatened, we feel ourselves being undone. In the first world, privileged white men get to do with impunity what other men at least have to think twice about, and for women who dare to speak of them, the punishment is swift and devastating. Aggressive sexual behavior toward women, far from disqualifying a candidate for the highest offices in the land, demonstrates the kind of manhood that is felt to be a qualification for such positions (though no one with public power can say this out loud anymore — only “the base” can speak clearly). In the second epistemic world, the default position is to believe women who make sexual assault allegations, the good ol’ boys’ network seems ugly and out of date (#timesup), and too often moral outrage substitutes for real thinking, and more important, for real power. That photograph of the panel of 11 white men who represent the Republicans on the judiciary committee for Kavanaugh’s nomination provokes such unease in the second epistemic world, because it is the visual representation of the kind of institutionalized white male power that is supposed to be receding into the past. But make no mistake — the “old” world represented by that photograph is right here, right now, and despite the remarkable gains of the #MeToo movement, it controls every branch of our government. Much of the media spectacle around the Kavanaugh nomination has made it seem as if the epistemic battle is about the truth. She says he did this to her. He says he didn’t. The very notion of a “he said, she said” situation reduces the conflict to a battle of credibility — but we are mistaken if we think the clash of belief is over the facts of the matter. The women who’ve brought the allegations forward and the Democrats who demanded an investigation from the beginning hoped that getting to the truth would break the epistemic impasse. The investigation is going ahead, but the Republicans still hope to win a battle of belief, sealed off from the truth. This suggests that both sides believe the alleged facts are likely to be true. Speakers on Kavanaugh’s behalf have repeatedly betrayed this belief by saying things that imply that even if he did do these things, they are typical rambunctious male behavior and not worth ruining his career over. Kavanaugh’s supporters want to be sure that what is at stake is not truth but meaning. It isn’t really about who you believe so much as which epistemic world you believe in. Will the first epistemic world retain its power to determine the status of such happenings, to determine what they mean, how they matter? Retaining the power of meaning is tightly connected to retaining the power to continue reproducing a world that looks like that disturbing photograph. In identifying the response to the women who have gone public with accusations against Kavanaugh as misogynist rather than sexist, I refer to a helpful distinction made by the philosopher Kate Manne in her book “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.” Whereas sexism justifies patriarchal social arrangements by differentiating between women and men, she points out, misogyny works by differentiating between “good women” and “bad women,” by rewarding the good ones and punishing the bad. It “should be understood,” Manne writes, “primarily as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing norms and expectations.” A central mechanism for enforcing these determinations is the deployment of misogynist attacks against women who have stepped out of line by stepping forward to intervene in national politics. These attacks take the form of an attempt to annihilate the women as epistemic subjects. Every stupid remark (“She admits she was drunk,” “She’s mixed up,” “Why didn’t she report at the time?”) is designed to dismantle her status as a knower. Structuring the hearing as if the accuser were on trial by hiring a sex-crimes prosecutor to question her discloses the real purpose of the process. Misogynist attacks on the one giving testimony also take on the temporal structure of a typical sexual assault, in which time is sped up and pressure to hurry up and do it right now is applied incessantly (“Drink this,” “Drink faster,” “I’ve gotta have it now,” “You’re holding out on me,” “I don’t wait, I just start kissing,” “Shove her in the room quick before she knows what’s happening,” “Get her drunk,” “O.K., get in line”). This is typical of all manner of sexual violence against women. While the Republicans made a show of giving Dr. Blasey “all the time she needs” during the hearing itself, the entire process has involved a pitched a battle over time, in which the Republicans’ determination to rush the Kavanaugh decision and their outrage over delays echoes and repeats the hurry-up temporality of sexual assault. Kavanaugh himself was enraged by having to wait. “I wanted a hearing the day after the allegation came up,” he shouted. “I wanted to be here that day!” I am a 57-year-old full professor of philosophy tenured at a well-respected research institution, who might be tempted to engage in an abstract analysis of these dynamics and leave it at that. This is what we are told “doing philosophy” entails. But in this case, I must evoke my own experience to get at the deep meaning of such events. So, #MeToo. I was gang raped by my sister’s boyfriend and his friends at what was supposed to be a party. I was 19, a sophomore in college. They were in their 30s, graduate students at another institution. My sister’s boyfriend, whom I considered a trusted friend, and his roommates had invited us to their home. They immediately started pushing shots of tequila on us (“hurry up,” “drink more”). I had so little experience with alcohol at that point, I had no idea how fast I could be incapacitated. When we were drunk enough, my sister was escorted away to sleep and I remember the image of her departure and the fear that cut like a knife through the fog. My memories are broken and choppy after that. They are mostly still photographs, even today in sharp focus. At certain points there is a short video burned into my brain; these memories are surrounded by periods of blackness. I don’t know everything that happened that night. I know enough. (This kind of assault is not shocking, to allege such an assault is not outrageous. Julie Swetnick’s claims are not from the “twilight zone,” they are from a typical American college campus.) When I pulled my sister out of her boyfriend’s bed and insisted we leave immediately, the sun was just coming up. We found a bus stop. She was my closest friend, but I didn’t breathe a word about having been raped on that bus ride, or when we got home, or for years after that, to her or anyone else. Why? Because shame was a living, aggressive, willful, enormous thing, set loose inside my body. In the next days and weeks, I waged an internal battle to contain it. This battle was so viscerally urgent, so physical in its immediacy, reporting the rape to the police didn’t even occur to me. I never forgot what those men did to me, but I forced the memories down into a tiny, locked compartment. “This will not matter,” I swore to myself over and over. My life was not derailed. Silence enabled that victory. Had I been dealing with the misogyny, with the outraged, aggressive sympathy for men that erupts when women disclose sexual assault in a hostile epistemic world — I knew this intuitively even at 19 — the shame would have been fed and grown. It would have taken me down. Over time, I worked my way into another epistemic world, one which, for all of its problems, is less cruel to women. In this world such events matter because of the harm suffered, because of the injustice they inflict and because they are recognized as one mechanism among many for the reproduction of men’s dominance over women. This world is perhaps bigger than it has ever been before in this #MeToo moment. In this world I can speak. When one makes one’s experience public, however, particularly if one names the perpetrators, particularly if they are powerful white men, the entrenched, material, institutionalized power of that other epistemic world — as Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick are experiencing now — slams like a wrecking ball into the very heart of a life. Each of these women got legal counsel before they went public with their stories, took measures to ensure their safety before or just after they did so, and Dr. Blasey took a lie-detector test. In her opening statement for the reopened Kavanaugh hearing, Dr. Blasey described herself as “terrified.” All of this reinforces what their years of silence indicate, that the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy is alive and well. Aided and abetted by misogyny, presidents are elected, Supreme Court justices are seated. If this nomination succeeds, women’s human rights will be set back for decades. Whatever happens, we owe a debt of gratitude to the women who have stepped up as a matter of civic duty to challenge the epistemic world where such men deserve power, women who are now confronting its well-oiled machinery of misogynist annihilation. Bonnie Mann is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon.