By: Michele Woodward – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
This one is a little tough to write.
I don’t know Judge Kavanaugh, but I have plenty of mutual friends with him who swear to his intelligence, his kindness, his compassion.
When I heard the news that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford named Kavanaugh as her sexual abuser in high school, know what my first thought was? “Probably happened.”
And my second thought turned to all the boys-now-men I know who are giving some thought to their adolescent antics and, maybe, wondering about the things they did.
That is, if they can remember them.
Because what Dr. Ford reports was so rampant at that time – I was there (not in Bethesda, but right across the Potomac river in Virginia) and boys pressuring girls, seeing how far they could go, taking what they wanted – this was so *normal*, that I can completely imagine a guy not remembering that one time with that one girl in that one house that one night. Because there were so many girls, so many nights, so many suburban houses.
This is what boys of my generation were taught to do and allowed to do.
That Dr. Ford carried this trauma with her – carries it today – does not surprise me. It would surprise me if I had a female friend who didn’t carry similar trauma, really.
What deeply saddens me is that the trauma which has outlined her life for over 30 years is completely unmemorable to Judge Kavanaugh. And if he wasn’t the perpetrator, then it’s unmemorable to whoever that man was.
Because it was meaningless to him. And it was everything to her.
We must stop the mindset which holds that women exist solely to gratify men. That women are almost but not quite as valuable as men. That women are no more than, as one man memorably said to me, “my jizz bucket.”
Young men, old men, boys – please. Turn on your emotional intelligence. See women and girls as your peers. As your friends. Not as an inhuman object to be used.
Seek out mutually satisfying sex. Give wholeheartedly. Be a good friend. Love unabashedly.
And always remember that what you choose to do today might become another person’s life long trauma. Don’t be that kind of catalyst. Don’t be that guy.
Because karma is real, and the harm or the good you do always comes back to you.
Always. Like, at Congressional hearings.
Michele Woodward is an executive coach and writer who lives and works in Washington, DC. A self-described “recovering political junkie”, she worked in Presidential politics for a large chunk of her career before regaining her sanity and becoming a coach and consultant. She urges every American to vote in the upcoming elections.
Confluence Daily is the one place where everything comes together. The one-stop for daily news for women.
