There’s another aspect of the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh that the Senate Judiciary Committee isn’t even considering, and that’s the “prep school” culture that produced Kavanaugh, a culture that included in Kavanaugh’s time, and certainly in earlier years, overconsumption of alcohol and an concerted effort on the part of the preppies to get young women drunk in order to take advantage of them. The “antics” portrayed in the movie Animal House weren’t unknown on all too many Ivy League campuses [except for turning Cadillacs into monster cars, which didn’t happen, at least so far as I know].
Young women were regarded largely as prey by a good many preppies, no matter what Kavanaugh and other preppy-produced, but now “upstanding citizens”, may claim, and far too many fruit “punches” were heavily spiked in hopes of taking advantage of unwary young women. And many did end up highly intoxicated and at the mercy of unscrupulous young men, who were disproportionately products of prep schools.
Part of that prep school behavior may well have been also influenced by the belief on the part of graduates of exclusive prep schools that they were “superior” in education and background and that young women were supposed to defer to them.
That sort of behavior was one of the reasons why my alma matter actually abolished fraternities while I was an undergraduate, although that was only one of several rationales cited by the committee that made the recommendation to the College.
But for the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Republican Senate leadership to pretend that Kavanaugh’s behavior either didn’t exist or that it was an isolated instance is a denial of wide-spread male misbehavior at that time, behavior that still persists too widely on the undergraduate and even graduate student level. The Republican denials and avoidance of the issues that the accusations against Kavanaugh have again raised just illustrate how sexist the Republican Party leadership continues to be.
And, of course, it’s now been revealed that Kavanaugh, as a judge, admonished a pregnant teenager that she could not have an abortion and that she had to live with the consequences of her actions. So…why doesn’t Kavanaugh have to live with the consequences of his unwise actions as a teenager?
Or does his superior education and background mean that there are different rules for him and the rest of the male prep school products?