I was reading the account of Professor Christine Blasey Ford today, and it brought back a memory for me, from about the same time. A memory of boys being boys.
It was about 1985 or so. I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I was with some of my friends drinking a beer at Fowl Play, a bar in Dinkytown. The bar was just up the street from the fraternity row.
About two tables over there was this guy, this boy, well dressed, loudly holding court with a bunch of other boys who looked to be his fraternity "brothers". They would be about the same age as Brett Kavanaugh.
This little man, this boy, was talking - no, bragging - about his formal date with his girlfriend. How much money he spent, taking her out, getting a limo, a tux. How he got her purposefully drunk in the back of the limo. How he pulled off her dress in the limo, tearing it. How he exulted, "Man, I just f*cked her right there!", to the acclaim of his friends. How she was drunk, humiliated, and in tears, as he forced her to give him a blow job in the back seat of the limo. And how so g*d d*mned proud of himself he was.
And all his boys were hanging on his every word.
I remember wanting to go over to that table and tell him how pathetic he was. I wanted to slap the smirk off his face. I wanted to ask him - What the hell do you think you're doing? You claim this woman is your girlfriend - doesn’t that term denotes at least some amount of concern for her as a fellow human being? And you treat her like this? And brag about it to your frat boys, laughing?
Of course I didn't go over. There were a lot of them and not many of my friends. You don't want to cause a scene.
And now, as I’ve read Dr. Ford’s account of Brett Kavanaugh’s assaulting her in the mid-80's, as I hear all the republicans and conservatives say “boys will be boys”, I'm brought right back to that same moment in the mid-80’s, listening to some privileged well dressed white boy in a bar bragging about raping his girlfriend, while all the other boys laugh and whoop about it.
Boys will be boys.