Kavanaugh case the ultimate weaponisation of MeToo
THE smearing of Brett Kavanaugh is the logical result of the unhinged MeToo movement, writes Miranda Devine. And it will take the mothers of boys to stop it.
Rendezview
Don't miss out on the headlines from Rendezview. Followed categories will be added to My News.
THE baby voice was startling when Christine Blasey Ford began testifying in Washington last week about her alleged sexual assault, 36 years ago, at the hands of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Here was the Boadicea of the MeToo movement, a Hillary supporter who wore pussy hats, a psychology professor with three degrees whose credentials were lauded at length beforehand by Diane Feinstein, the Democrat Senator who is using her as a pro-abortion political weapon.
Here was Blasey Ford, preparing to slay one of the most powerful men in the land, a 51-year old grown woman.
And she was speaking like a 13-year-old Kardashian, all uptalk and vocal fry, with coquettish mannerisms that belied her mission.
“Thank you, Senator?” she simpered. “I think after I read my opening statement I anticipate needing some caffeine, if that’s available?” and then she grinned inanely while rocking side to side in a way that would be cute if she were seven years old and looking for a pat on the head.
The vulnerable little girl demeanour continued through her statement, undercutting its authority but rendering the male Republican senators across the chamber powerless to challenge her.
Her face was largely hidden behind thick glasses and hanging hanks of professionally blow dried blonde hair.
Only the people who know her well could gauge her sincerity but, to an outsider half a world away watching on TV, she was a woman self-consciously playing a role on a stage that is shaking the foundations of our civilisation in way we don’t yet fully understand.
The Kavanaugh lynching is the ultimate weaponisation of the MeToo movement. This is a powerful mutant offshoot of identity politics, a revolutionary moment aimed at overturning thepatriarchy. It threatens not just to split societies but the most intimate relationships between men and women laid down over tens of thousands of years.
It defies reason and history by holding that a woman is always the innocent victim and a man always the perpetrator.
Men lie. Women never lie. But we know this is not true.
“Believe women” read the placards outside.
“Believe Survivors”.
“Believe Blasey Ford”
“Men Are Trash.”
Who do you believe, Blasey Ford or Kavanaugh? Should we judge her on her girly voice? Should we judge him on his petulance and self-pitying tears? It’s all emotion, impression, intuition, prejudice.
That’s not how civilised societies judge guilt or innocence. We believe you are innocent before proven guilty, that it is better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted.
But all that has been turned on its head in a millisecond.
“If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay,” opined Teen Vogue.
The story Blasey Ford told is that, when she was 15, she attended a gathering with friends from Washington’s private school elite. She claims Kavanaugh, then 17, was drunk, pushed her on to a bed and jumped on top of her, tried to grope her and remove her clothes, and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. He only stopped when Kavanaugh’s friend jumped on top and they all rolled to the floor, the boys laughing while she escaped.
She is “100 per cent” certain it was Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh is “100 per cent” certain it wasn’t.
There is no proof. None of the four people she said were present can remember any gathering. She told no one at the time.
And yet she says it ruined her life.
Even if what she says happened did happen, and even if she hasn’t mistaken Kavanaugh for some other boy, so what?
In the scheme of sexual violence, it barely rates. She was not raped, her body was not violated, she remained fully clothed, she was not stopped from leaving the room.
It’s neurotic to inflate a minor assault into a life-altering trauma that makes you insist on building two front doors in your home and leaves you with a supposed inability to fly in planes. It trivialises the trauma of actual rape.
Surely, as a psychologist, Blasey Ford knows that resilience does not come from dwelling on long-ago incidents over which you have no control.
Teenage years are best left in the past. It’s a time of hormonal mood swings, clumsy experimentation and boundary-testing. The first cigarette, first drink, first kiss, first fumbled practice sex. For some it’s a smooth transition to adulthood. Others lose their way. But it’s rarely easy.
Are we really going to reach back across four decades and try to mediate how teenagers behaved in the 1980s, the “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” decade between the taboo smashing Baby Boomers and the helicopter parenting of the next generation?
It’s all a sham, staged by the Democrats and feminist left of America who are desperate to stop Donald Trump appointing another conservative to the Supreme Court because they fear abortion laws will be wound back. This is a cause so sacred that any means justifies the end, even the destruction of an innocent man.
But now it has been unleashed, no man is safe from this Jacobin revolution against the patriarchy. All men have been disarmed.
In the end, it will be the mothers of sons who resist, and you would not want to underestimate their fury.