Yesterday was awful. Painful. Today I am furious.
Yesterday I spent the entire day in my office, door closed with a sign that said do not disturb. I watched, with headphones on, the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States. I watched and wept. For hours.
This historic moment was/is one of shared collective (largely gendered) pain. The astronomical amount of women I know who are similarly situated is too numerous to imagine. The great number of friends and family members who have their own stories of sexual assault and rape, very few ever reported, are unfathomable. And the many many women I know who were also quietly glued to the testimony, also privately grieving, is so huge and multi-generational this feels like a horrific defining moment. In our country and culture.
And while I sat there - listening to so many familiar facts about an early-teenage girl drinking (late afternoon) in a house with some boys that resulted in a sexual assault that she didn't tell anyone about for years to come - i not only thought about myself, my female family members and friends but also my son. Yes, my son.
For as I watched this nightmare unfold and revisited my own youth, my son was at school busy being a second grader. My happy, loving, kind-hearted, sweet son, who is also a very privileged (currently seven year-old) white boy at a private school. When I dropped him of yesterday morning I watched him on the schoolyard playing with his friends before going inside. The group of boys were all together, several of them engaging in some physical wrestling competition while the others looked on. The girls were talking in groups of twos and threes, not so interested in these faux-fighting schoolyard antics. I thought of who he is now, who he could become, and what he could do. And what I hope to hell he does not become, or do - as he walks through his life with the comfort and accommodations that his skin and sex and class automatically grant him. The automatic entry passes that come with patriarchy and white privilege.
This historic moment was/is one of shared collective (largely gendered) pain. The astronomical amount of women I know who are similarly situated is too numerous to imagine. The great number of friends and family members who have their own stories of sexual assault and rape, very few ever reported, are unfathomable. And the many many women I know who were also quietly glued to the testimony, also privately grieving, is so huge and multi-generational this feels like a horrific defining moment. In our country and culture.
And while I sat there - listening to so many familiar facts about an early-teenage girl drinking (late afternoon) in a house with some boys that resulted in a sexual assault that she didn't tell anyone about for years to come - i not only thought about myself, my female family members and friends but also my son. Yes, my son.
For as I watched this nightmare unfold and revisited my own youth, my son was at school busy being a second grader. My happy, loving, kind-hearted, sweet son, who is also a very privileged (currently seven year-old) white boy at a private school. When I dropped him of yesterday morning I watched him on the schoolyard playing with his friends before going inside. The group of boys were all together, several of them engaging in some physical wrestling competition while the others looked on. The girls were talking in groups of twos and threes, not so interested in these faux-fighting schoolyard antics. I thought of who he is now, who he could become, and what he could do. And what I hope to hell he does not become, or do - as he walks through his life with the comfort and accommodations that his skin and sex and class automatically grant him. The automatic entry passes that come with patriarchy and white privilege.
As I sit here today, containing so much anger and rage (along with millions of other women across this country) about what this process has shown us about the U.S. and the status of women and sexual assault survivors and male privilege. Misogyny. Entitlement. And the dismissability and disposability of women. The only thing I can think of, the one thing I am trying to focus on - meditate on - strategize around - is how I will raise my son. How I will raise him to be better.
I will now focus even more determinedly on how I can raise a privileged white male human who will work hard to resist the systems, structures, traditions and messaging that culture and society shove at him at every turn. A culture that benefits from instilling in him the dangerous idea that the world is made for him, that women and girls are objects, reduced and less than, that their bodies exist for his pleasure. For his amusement. For his laughter. (If you watched the courageous and selfless testimony of Dr. Ford, you heard her say that her strongest memory of the assault was something she could not forget - "the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two [boys], and their having fun at my expense.")
I have been on the receiving end of exactly such laughter.
I refuse to quietly allow my son to be indoctrinated into a toxic culture of masculinity. One that feeds him a sense of entitlement and impunity for how he treats others (particularly, but not only, women).
I refuse to let him blindly subscribe to false ideas of masculinity and dominance, because it is easy, convenient, spoon fed, and makes his life easier.
I refuse to let him believe that it is acceptable for women to pay the price of his male bonding and acceptance as "one of the guys."
There will be no “boys will be boys” in my house. Not in this mother's house.
I will now focus even more determinedly on how I can raise a privileged white male human who will work hard to resist the systems, structures, traditions and messaging that culture and society shove at him at every turn. A culture that benefits from instilling in him the dangerous idea that the world is made for him, that women and girls are objects, reduced and less than, that their bodies exist for his pleasure. For his amusement. For his laughter. (If you watched the courageous and selfless testimony of Dr. Ford, you heard her say that her strongest memory of the assault was something she could not forget - "the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two [boys], and their having fun at my expense.")
I have been on the receiving end of exactly such laughter.
I refuse to quietly allow my son to be indoctrinated into a toxic culture of masculinity. One that feeds him a sense of entitlement and impunity for how he treats others (particularly, but not only, women).
I refuse to let him blindly subscribe to false ideas of masculinity and dominance, because it is easy, convenient, spoon fed, and makes his life easier.
I refuse to let him believe that it is acceptable for women to pay the price of his male bonding and acceptance as "one of the guys."
There will be no “boys will be boys” in my house. Not in this mother's house.
