Just as Brett Kavanaugh looked poised to handily secure confirmation of his Supreme Court nomination, the news broke: Sen Dianne Feinstein was in possession of a letter alleging some kind of sexual misconduct when Kavanaugh was in high school.
With nothing more to go on than that, I wasn't inclined to say much about the case. After all, whatever this was, it was something that happened decades ago while Kavanaugh was still a minor. I was imagining some kind of sexual harassment allegation. Sexual harassment of young women by young men in high school is a serious issue, but for reasons I'll discuss in a moment, I was hesitant to make too much of such charges when, it seemed, they were being dredged up decades later in an attempt to derail a political appointment.
But then the substance of the accusations came out. The accuser went public, taking ownership of the allegation and the risks that go with that. This wasn't a charge of sexual harassment but of attempted rape. And the way it came to public light didn't suggest a political motivation but a deeply personal one: a victim trying to find the voice to speak in a culture that too often shames and silences the victims of sexual assault.
Why We Shouldn't Support a Sweeping Policy of Smearing People for their Past Mistakes
Before turning to why we should take the Kavanaugh accusations seriously, I want to be clear about what I'm not arguing. I don't think it's useful for us to start digging through the pasts of every public figure, smearing them with the stains of long-ago wrongs--especially if our collective understanding of those wrongs has evolved dramatically over the time since they were done. When I say I think we should take these charges seriously, I don't want to be misunderstood as endorsing some sweeping principle of this sort.
To see why, consider an example from my own life. When I was in the seventh grade, I was standing behind a girl in the orchestra room before rehearsal started (I think we were standing in line to sign some kind of form), and one of the older boys swept past us both, slithered his arm past me, and "goosed" the girl. That's what we called it then: goosing. It was an innocent-sounding name for the act of pinching someone's buttocks.
The girl let out a gasp, turned around, and saw me. Her expression changed as soon as she met my eyes. Shock at having been pinched in the butt changed to a different kind of surprise. She said something like, "Wow, Eric, I never imagined you were the type to do that!" And she gave me a smile of a kind that I, being the smallest kid in my grade who still looked like a fourth grader, was used to. It's the kind of smile that the babysitter gives to the round-cheeked little boy who professes his love. She's letting him down, of course, but she finds it harmless and kind of cute and she doesn't want to hurt his feelings.
I blushed, but I didn't deny having groped her ass--because, although I'd never have done something so brazen myself, that had more to do with fear than a sense of its moral wrongness. I didn't see what had been done to her as a violation. I don't know how she experienced it--at least not before she decided that it came from a boy she classified more among those she'd babysit than among those she'd date. But I do know that years later, during my senior year in high school, my girlfriend arrived at school in tears, feeling violated and humiliated and furious. She told me that some guy had grabbed her butt on the bus.
It was the first time that I thought of that act as a violation. A part of me wanted to minimize it, to tell my girlfriend that she was overreacting, to say that the guy was just "being playful" or something like that. But instead I listened to her and thought, "Maybe I'm under-reacting." Others, predictably, called her hysterical.
I'm pretty certain that I never "goosed" anyone in the years between those events--but it was a common enough occurrence in the halls of my junior high and high school. It was usually the more confident guys who did it, the ones that looked older than their years, played sports, actually dated girls instead of pining for them while standing against a wall. The guys we were all supposed to admire and wish we were more like. And the girls would jump and then--in my memory of the events--would give the boys a "naughty-you" flirtatious look. And the boys would shrug and smile.
If I never goosed anyone myself, what held me back was not a sense that such an act was a form of uninvited sexual touching, and hence a violation of someone's bodily autonomy. What held me back was, in part, the near certainty that the look I'd get would not be a naughty-you-flirtatious smile but a look of contempt. Or, worse, the look the babysitter gives to the little boy when he professes his love.
When I think of it more deeply, there's another reason I didn't do it: I didn't feel entitled to. But this was a judgment about my own status: I wasn't an alpha male. I wasn't one of those guys we all admired, the guys who had tacit permission to goose anyone they wanted. In other words, I subconsciously internalized a worldview in which entitlement to touch women's bodies didn't come from women but from one's status in the male hierarchy.
If I had goosed someone in those years, it would've been because I'd finally decided to push myself off the wall, shake off my timidity, and "make a move." And I wouldn't have perceived that move as assault. It would have been a move up the ladder of male hierarchy, a move designed to show my confidence in myself and my worth. And if asked, I would've described it as a playful, flirtatious overture.
I don't see it that way anymore. In the years since then I've thought about the culture of patriarchy, a culture which socializes both boys and girls in ways that promote and facilitate the sexual exploitation of women. Seen through that lens, the practice of "goosing" is hardly innocuous. That girls are socialized to treat it as no big deal, to laugh off an uninvited touching of their buttocks, is not a harmless feature of their socialization. That young women like my high school girlfriend are characterized as "hysterical" when they respond as she did to being goosed--that plays a role in the creation of the culture of silence and shame that has enabled predators like Harvey Weinstein to get away with sexual assault for decades.
I don't remember ever goosing anyone. I'm sure that in many other ways I was enacting little rituals and ways of talking whose cumulative effect was to provide cover for the Harvey Weinsteins of the world. But suppose I did goose someone and I don't remember doing it. Should that be held against me today?
I don't think so, but this isn't really about me. There are men and women who are far more effective agents of social change than I am who, years ago, were part of the problem they are now working to change, who routinely and without much thought acted out the oppressive and exploitative scripts they'd inherited. Back before they woke up.
If we hold everyone individually accountable for such things, we are in danger of dealing with our collective guilt by scapegoating individuals who may not only have been less responsible for our culture's wrongs but who may now be part of the effort to change it for the better. And it's fine to say that those people should come clean about their pasts and the things they used to do which now they stand against. But the deeper we are socialized into a pattern of behavior, the more invisible it is to us. I don't remember everything I did in high school, especially not those actions and events where everything conformed to the established social scripts. What I'm likely to remember the most are the moments that forced me to confront my socialization--the challenges to them, or those moments when the darkest aspects of my socialization became apparent. What I will remember are those events that called me to decide whether this was who I wanted to be.
The more routine expressions of our social scripts are likely to fall into the fog of our personal histories. If the things lost in that fog are held against us today, now that the wrongness of those things has become clear, it's more likely an effort to scapegoat individuals than an effort to take collective accountability for making things better. And beneficiaries of the status quo are more than happy to protect the exploitative regime by encouraging such scapegoating sacrifice of those who are fighting for reform.
This is why a sweeping policy of holding individuals accountable for mistakes made long ago, mistakes that express collective sins for which we should take collective responsibility, is troubling to me. Our decision to hold someone accountable for the wrongs of their youth cannot be based on such a sweeping principle. But it cannot be selective based on party affiliation or group membership, because then it's just partisan hypocrisy. It must be more nuanced than that.
Which brings us back to Kavanaugh.
It's Sexual Assault, Not Sexual Harassment
The accusation leveled against Kavanaugh is not that in his youth he recited routine scripts of sexualized talk that we now recognize to be verbal harassment. It isn't that he participated in common rituals--such as goosing--that we now see as part of a deeply troubling pattern aimed at training women to quietly accept uninvited sexual touching (or to minimizing it on pain of being dubbed "hysterical").
The accusation is one of attempted rape.
Goosing, and the accompanying social pressure to treat it as harmless or playful, is part of what has come to be called "rape culture." As I understand it, that term refers to all of these smaller things that cumulatively both encourage patterns of sexual exploitation and make it easier for sexually exploitative men to get away with rape (and other crimes of sexual objectification and humiliation). It is one thing to be unconsciously complicit in such a culture, to blindly perpetuate patterns of thought and action that provide cover for sexual predators. In cases like that, what we need to do is cry out, "Wake up!" And if they've already woken up, then we must urge them to be part of the effort to change things for the better.
But it is one thing to be a banal and mostly oblivious participant in a cultural evil. It is something else to take advantage of that culture, to be among those who use it as cover to victimize and abuse. Even if it's a one-time offense. Here, it's important to distinguish between two kinds of one-time offenders: those who realize their error, repent, do penance, and forge a new path; and those who duck their heads and enjoy the advantages of a social system that hides their crime. Those who pursue the latter course have not merely violated another human being and gotten away with it. They are by their actions endorsing the social forces that enabled them to get away with it.
Even if they never again practice overt sexual assault, their relationship to the system that enables perpetrators has changed. As beneficiaries of that system, especially if they use those benefits to rise to success, they become its cheerleaders, however silently.
If you attempted to rape someone and then rose to power and prominence because the culture of shame and silence kept your crime a secret, you are wearing that culture of shame and silence like your own private invisibility cloak, valuing it the way the Harry Potter valued his. If you act as if it's just fine to enjoy your privileges, then you're acting as if the things that made those privileges possible are just fine, too. And if what made those privileges possible is a culture of shame and silence, then you're its secret fan.
This is why what Kavanaugh did or did not do so many years ago matters so much. Because it's about who he is today. If he is guilty of the charges leveled against him, then he has been benefiting all these years from that culture of shame and silence that kept his crime hidden from the high school teachers who wrote his letters of recommendation, from the colleges that gave him his degrees, from those sitting on his confirmation hearings, from everyone who ever had a say in his rise to prominence and power.
You cannot benefit so much for so long from rape culture without a part of you being its silent cheerleader. And if Kavanaugh really did commit this crime so many years ago, then his current behavior--his unwavering denials--means that even now he is hoping that rape culture will come to his rescue, that it will help him rise even higher, to one of the most powerful positions in the world.
If Kavanaugh really did do this thing so many years ago, it is not an isolated aberration from his youth but something that he has continued to underwrite and support every day of every year since he committed that terrible crime. The choice to enjoy the protection of his invisibility cloak is an ongoing choice that he makes anew every day. If he did it and came clean all those years ago, repented and sought to do penance for it, then we could call it a thing of the past. But he's done none of those things. So either he is not guilty, or he has been benefiting year in and year out from social forces that have enabled him to get away with attempted rape. And he seeks to benefit from them now.
This is why we need to take Christine Blasey Ford's allegations seriously today. It would be different if the nature of the allegations had all the marks of a smear-campaign. But there is a clear history of Ford talking about this trauma from her youth in contexts that had to do with personal and relational healing, not political opportunism. And events unfolded in a way that indicates that Ford herself, after considerable struggle, had decided against going public for reasons of personal welfare. This narrative fits the profile, not of political opportunists, but of those who are struggling to stand up to a culture of shame and silence, one that has kept them from speaking publicly for a long time and that threatens to beat them down if they speak today.
It is a different matter whether political opportunism on the part of others played a role in these allegations becoming public when they did. I'm sure there is plenty of political opportunism to go around. But these allegations have their origins in something very different. They are serious. They speak to who Kavanaugh is today, not just to what he did so many years ago.
And so the allegations must be treated with gravity and attention, considered on their merits, before Kavanaugh is elevated to the highest honor attainable to any person in his profession.
Hi Dr. Reitan,
ReplyDeleteFirst-time poster. I've been reading your books for a while now. I want to issue heartfelt thanks for writing from a Christian perspective that is refreshing, edifying, and rigorous. Being raised in an Evangelical and Catholic milieu, I’ve found your work to be an invaluable aid in my intellectual and spiritual journey.
With regards to this post, in full agreement. (Although on a tangential note I do question the practicality of using the phrase "rape culture" in dialogue, particularly when interacting with people unaware of the many good fruits of feminist philosophy. For whatever reason, the phrase reflexively brings to their minds something like "Rape is occurring in the US with the same frequency and intensity as in, say, the war-torn Congo, where it occurs on levels so pandemic that it's actually viewed as biologically natural during conflict.”)
But an uncomfortable question for us Christians: To what extent has Christian theology contributed to the general patriarchal oppression in modern society?
Naturally, passages like Ephesians 5:22-30 come to mind, which you touch on in your latest book, and which for many are clear advocations of patriarchy within marriage and in the world as a whole.
[Also, here’s a side note, but I hope you’ll address it nonetheless:
ReplyDeleteIn the book, you attack fundamentalist readings of the husband-wife --> Christ-church analogy by noting the absolute difference in kind between Christ and the church, whereas a man and woman, whatever differences they have, still belonging to the same species and moreover tend to seek out mates with essential similarities to them.
Philosophy of language isn’t my forte, but I wonder if there might be a better way to criticize the fundamentalist reading of the Ephesians analogy that, instead of focusing on the objects of the analogy, focuses on the structure of analogy itself.
A casual reader and defender of the patriarchal view might react to object comparisons by making up an analogy (“A gambler relates to a casino like a small insect relates to a flytrap”), noting that, although sure, there are massive dissimilarities between the former pair and the latter pair, the analogy makes perfect sense, and concluding that the Ephesians model is perfectly sensible and good.
Of course, I think there are a bunch of logical steps skipped in that hypothetical. For one, saying “X—> Y is like A—> B” is a much different thing from saying “X—> Y should be like A —> B” (an “injunctive simile,” for lack of a better description). However, I’m not completely sure how to analyze the latter type of sentence. Though there doesn’t seem to be any philosophy of language literature on the topic, my intuition wants to reduce such sentences to “it should be the case that ‘X—>Y is like A—>B.’” Doing so forces analyses of the former type to naturally carry over to the latter type, which primes the more structurally-driven criticism:
Regarding the former type, they seem to require that we bring definitions/preconceptions to the table before the analogy can do any conceptual work of extracting similarities. For example, there is an increase in the degree of correspondence from “a gambler is to a casino like a small insect is to a flytrap” to “a hungry dog is to a chocolate bar on the floor like a small insect is to a fly trap” precisely because we fully understand the relationship going on in each pair. We have detailed, well fleshed-out conceptions of the gambler-casino dynamic and the dog-bar dynamic. We then adjust the content of the insect-flytrap dynamic based on our conception of the dynamic that’s being compared. So, a conception of the thing that’s undergoing comparison needs to be in our possession before the analogical process can get off the ground.
To my mind, this creates a glaring problem for the fundamentalist position, seen in each of the two possible statements of the analogy:
“husband—> wife (a marriage) is like Christ—> church” (We are to adjust the well-known characteristics of the Christ-church dynamic in light of…what, exactly?)
“Christ —> church is like a marriage” (We are to adjust…what, exactly, in light of the Christ-church dynamic?)
In short, whatever work the Ephesians analogy ends up doing hinges entirely on the conception/definition of marriage we bring to the table. We are therefore allowed to inject a very subjective element into the analogy, which naturally overthrows the conclusion that the fundamentalist wants to obtain to begin with [e.g. a patriarchal hierarchy is dictated by the analogy]. Even if marriage is defined in Biblical terms (viz. “one flesh union” — a union exemplifying oneness), that still leaves a wide open space for subjectivity. (How are we understanding oneness? In egalitarian terms or in patriarchal terms?)
A fundamentalist could then counter with, “Well, the marriage dynamic should be maximally like the Christ-church dynamic,” but that would seem to be going well beyond what Ephesians 5 actually says, in addition to potentially generating a host of other conceptual difficulties.]
Ian: Thanks for these helpful comments.
ReplyDeleteFirst,a word of clarification on my main aims in the section of the book you're commenting on. My main target is the view Stanton Jones articulates about the Christian purpose of marriage. The conservative Evangelical goes beyond treating this passage as a normative analogy for what marriage should look like to a deeper account of God's cosmic purpose for marriage. According to Jones and others like him, not only is Paul using this analogy, but God has cosmically ordained marriage to serve as a loving analogy for teaching humans about the proper relationship between the Church and Christ. In other words, from a passage in which Paul uses C as an analogy for M, we are supposed to infer that God ordained M for the purpose of being an ongoing analogy for C though human history. My comments about the deep difference between the relata in M and in C was intended to highlight how poorly M would serve this cosmic purpose and hence how deeply implausible this interpretation is, even though many evangelicals take it for granted.
Of course, I'm also disinclined to treat this passage as warranting a timeless injunction to impose patriarchy on marriage, and instead see Paul as working from a patriarchal starting point given to him by his culture and challenging the common understanding of what that means in light of the Christ/Church analogy. In this regard, your thoughts may be very helpful. I'll need to mull soon them some more.
Another thought, although I'm not sure how far is take it: given that the whole passage begins with an injunction of *mutual* submission in the Christian community, followed by an account of what it looks like for the wife to submit, it would be a small interpretive stretch (far smaller than the monster interpretive leap Jones makes) to imagine Paul implicitly saying, "And likewise for husbands submitting to wives." The US Catholic Bishops seem to make that interpretive move in their Pastoral Letter on Marriage, and Kant was clearly inspired by this idea in his account of marriage.
Thanks for that clarification, Dr. Reitan. I had no idea that M was being used as an analogy to teach about C — I’d only ever heard it articulated the other way around, and must have superimposed that onto the relevant passage while reading the book.
ReplyDeleteI’m glad my thoughts may be of some use to you.
Thanks for the additional thought -- not sure why that prelude is almost never mentioned in discussions of the Ephesians analogy. Regardless, here and elsewhere, there seems to be little doubt that Paul is painting contrasting pictures, and which picture we ultimately embrace is up to us, but it's an embrace that ought to be done in an interpretative framework of love.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that, as a young guy in a deep pocket of the Bible Belt (Mississippi), this is more than just a theoretical issue to me. It’s intensely personal. I have close female friends in their very early twenties who are married, are extremely bright (pursuing grad studies in the hard sciences), but nevertheless feel that, because of their reading of verses like these, and of the understanding of Scripture entrenched in the surrounding culture, they must put up with regular sexual abuse (i.e. must mentally shut down and physically submit whenever the husband requires a release, regardless of whether or not she wants it to happen), never speaking authoritatively out of fear of appearing “disrespectful,” not actually having any authority whatsoever, and sacrificing everything for the sake of their husbands’ dreams and desires, all under the banner of “the love of Christ.” It’s quite disturbing. Even if the husbands aren't showing the love of Christ, they still feel they must "graciously submit" in the hope of their loving submission having a restorative effect via kind words and pure conduct (a la 1 Peter 3). They come to me to discuss their issues on occasion, and inevitably the conversations end with some sort of admonition on my part to consider amending their understanding of the Bible, but they can’t bring themselves to do it. They feel that anything less than inerrancy would demolish their entire spiritual edifice, and being the “spiritually serious” sort of people that they are, they’re “willing to believe in difficult things and not take the easy way out.” Also, doing so would be tantamount to going against the entire, close knit, Southern Baptist culture they’ve been raised in, a culture that believes the only two possible theories of the Bible are “inerrancy” or “garbage,” and that advocates a whole host of other related doctrines like the untrustworthiness of reason in light of the fall (so, no room for the impositions of “philosophy”), the total denigration of emotion for the same reason, maximal literalism, Sola Scriptura, the perspicuity of Scripture, predestination, and so forth. Doctrines that wind up being behaviorally and psychologically maladaptive for those who take them seriously.
This has led to a lot of pain on my end -- in that I feel impotent in being able to help those I want to help -- but your work has been instrumental in helping to more clearly see the utter vacuity of these ideas.
*I should add that I also mention that there are inerrantists who don't think Paul was making a patriarchal injunction, but given the conservative evangelical commitment to Scripture's "perspicuity," they don't buy into the idea that Paul was merely speaking tactfully and actually disliked the patriarchal hierarchy. It's all a bit too convoluted for them.
ReplyDelete