Kavanaugh Too
There’s a scene in the 1984 John Hughes film Sixteen Candles that was meant to be played for laughs but seems like a horror in retrospect. The Geek character and the hunky all-American Jake are having a heart-to-heart over drinks at the end of a sloppy teen party. Of his passed-out girlfriend, Jake says, “I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to.” The Geek responds, “What are you waiting for?” In any screenplay today, the two lines would have indicated the depthless malice of the two characters speaking them. But here, it’s just filler chit-chat between two of the male leads.
As stupid as the film is, it’s been on my mind ever since the Me Too moment in our culture started. It seemed like a perfect time capsule of evidence from not so long ago, about how men who were regarded by all as decent and well-meaning could act like sociopaths when it came to women. And in a small way (admittedly, a trivial way), it puts into context the many statements of women who have found some measure of satisfaction and even exaltation in the Me Too movement. The details of harassments often being so similar, women felt like other women were in some sense speaking for them.
And yet, now I see that this same spirit is being brought to the accusations made by Palo Alto University professor Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. To take one representative example:
The Huffington Post wrote an article on a group of alumnae of Ford’s high school — Holton-Arms, a private girls’ school in Bethesda — who are circulating a letter in support of Ford. They do not corroborate Ford’s story about Kavanaugh, but they say they believe her, writing that her story was “all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/kavanaugh-too/ar-BBNtuz4?li=BBnb7Kz
