Yesterday’s senate hearings were like September 11. I was talking to people I hadn’t heard from in decades just to make sure we were all okay. A lot of us weren’t. I tried to focus on sending love and light to everyone as traumatized as I was.
To everyone who been hindered professionally by sexist men and preyed upon by male sexual predators. To everyone who had been manterrupted or mansplained. Who had been sexually assaulted or harassed. To everyone on whom the burden of proof had landed on us when they were already experiencing PTSD.
We were watching all this happen to a woman in real time and we wanted her to be ok–to achieve her goals not only because of what’s at stake in the Supreme Court, the body of law that dictates what happens to female bodies, but because our related wounds remain so profoundly unhealed.
How systemic is male privilege? How deeply is sexual assault built into our dating culture? How much denial are men in when they are perpetrators? Enough so that my most serious abuser was posting pious, good-liberal pablum about believing CBF as if he himself did not exhibit this sort of violence. And, of course, getting lots of atta-boys for his efforts.
I am enraged by so many aspects of the hearings. I am enraged that the brave, highly accomplished Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was grilled by Rachel Mitchell as if she were a common criminal. There’s a special corner of hell reserved for women who perpetuate female oppression, and it is so telling that the Republican senators couldn’t refrain from manterrupting this female stool pigeon even as doing so undermined their cause and she’d been hired to boost their optics.
I am enraged that CBF felt compelled to smile compulsively, speak in a little girl voice, and apologize profusely even as she was carrying out her civic duty at great personal cost and with enormous diligence. (I loved how she balanced scientific knowledge with vulnerability.)
I am enraged that commentators positively compared Dr CBF’s testimony to Anita Hill’s because the former woman seemed “more vulnerable”; as a woman of color, Hill likely felt even more pressure to keep it together no matter what.
I am enraged that SCOTUS nominee Kavanaugh himself did not insist Mark Judge testify, that he blocked a FBI investigation, that he did not bother to cover his lies. His whole “defense”–mostly crying and screaming and foot-stamping in a manner that would have invalidated any woman as a hysteric –was riddled with holes because white male entitlement was blinding him from taking even normal precautionary steps.
I am enraged by the “boys will be boys” bullshit running rampant in Hollywood, politics, Wall Street. That the GOP clearly believes Ford and simply gives no fucks. I am enraged that it doesn’t matter how many women come forward because this governing body will write them all off as hysterics, jane-come-latelys, fundamentally irrelevant. This is not just Trump but a militia of white, hateful men deadset on preserving their evil empire and the rites of white, young, rich men.
I cannot wait for the next Nuremburg Trials.
The word I keep flashing on is “graceless.” In stark relation to Ford, this weak-chinned, weak-willed Willy demonstrated no self-possession nor empathy. Only motivated by self-interest, he is a true Trump delegate and thus uniquely ill-suited to the Supreme Court. He lacks grace in every sense of that precious word.
I feel pretty strongly Kavanaugh will be 
appointed this weekend, but I’m grateful to the brave women who spoke out regardless of the outcome. It is imperative we call out offenders all the time, not only for our individual well-being but because we must never let another misogynist, ill-qualified f*ckwit like Kavanaugh rise through the ranks. To do that, we must rise instead like phoenixes. We must make our own movies, myths, money, monuments, movements. We must bypass entitled trash entirely and dismember entitlement, all entendre applicable. It is time for sweet, sweet change for us all. To turn shit into gold, and night into light. It is time for us to be born in flames.