How About Just 'Listen to Women'?

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford/570715/

How About Just ‘Listen to Women’?
In coming forward with allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford has faced not only doxxings and death threats; she has also been, like so many others with #MeToo stories to share, willfully misheard.
Megan Garber
11:00 AM ET

#KremlinAnnex protesters place a sign referring to Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh of a 1982 sexual assault, and spell out the word "AMORAL" on the 66th consecutive day of their demonstration outside the White House in Washington, U.S., September 19, 2018.Brian Snyder / Reuters

snip//

The discussions of this week, which have found politicians and commentators finding new ways to cast the old doubts on Blasey Ford, have suggested how far the country has to go before believe women can manifest as anything more than an empty performance. And not only because the term has been, in the public discourse, breezily misrepresented. Believe women fails when Americans prove themselves—still, despite it all—reluctant to do the extremely basic work the ethic asks of them, as it asks for women’s experience to be taken seriously: to acknowledge that experience in the first place. To pay women that smallest and yet rarest of dignities: listening to them. And actually hearing them.

Here are some of the immensely predictable things that have happened to Christine Blasey Ford, according to her lawyers, since she was coerced into coming forward publicly: She was hacked. She was doxxed. She and her family, including her two teenaged sons, have had to leave their home, and are currently seeking refuge from the rage of their fellow citizens at a location that remains, for the moment, undisclosed. They have had to hire a security team. (There is currently a GoFundMe campaign, started by a law professor at Georgetown, to help the family defray the costs of coming forward; it currently has more than $209,000 in donations.) The hiring of the security detail was necessary, of course, because—the world whirls in predictable patterns—Blasey Ford, those close to her say, as part of the campaign of “vicious harassment” that has been waged against her, has been receiving death threats.

She knew this would happen. Her lawyers, both women, knew this would happen. Anyone who has been paying attention—including the ACLU, which provides a detailed list of the protective measures one should take before going public with a story of assault—knew this would happen. After sending the letter detailing her allegations about Kavanaugh to her representatives, Blasey Ford had initially decided not to come forward, The Washington Post reported, precisely on the grounds that Kavanaugh would be confirmed despite her claims, she assumed, and also on the grounds that she would be collateral along the way to another American inevitability. “Why suffer through the annihilation,” she figured, “if it’s not going to matter?”

The annihilation has come. And it has, over the past day, taken on a new form. The story of Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh has come to involve another strain of coercion, one that is doing its insisting not in a bedroom, or in a home with eager journalists camped out on its front yard, but rather as a matter of public record: in the demands that Blasey Ford appear, on Monday, before the Senate Judiciary Committee—to testify, potentially, in the same room, and at the same table, as her alleged attacker, as the nation watches and judges. Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has given her a strict deadline (Friday, 10 a.m. Eastern time) for deciding whether she will appear. And so much will rest on that decision. “Everybody should be clear about what the stakes are,” the legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin put it on CNN on Wednesday evening: “If she does not testify, he is getting confirmed.”

The binary nature of such an appearance—“Will she or won’t she?” the San Jose Mercury News, Blasey Ford’s hometown paper, asked on Wednesday—suggests in its own way a failure of listening. Blasey Ford has asked for an FBI investigation, so that her testimony might have the opportunity to be more than an empty, angry performance of a he said/she said show; thus far, that request has been denied. And so, with the “choice” being presented to her—by politicians, with their vested interests; by journalists; by a public that is not accustomed to listening to the words of women—Blasey Ford is being asked to do the thing so few people, in her position, would want to do: to make herself vulnerable in a new kind of way. To know a new kind of trauma. To risk going forward, in the most public of settings, to be heard but not listened to. To be that most telling, and most inevitable, of things: simultaneously famous and ignored.

[bigtree]

1. like this

"Blasey Ford has asked for an FBI investigation, so that her testimony might have the opportunity to be more than an empty, angry performance of a he said/she said show; thus far, that request has been denied."

[live2011]

2. DENY, DENY, DENY

Who benefits from denial?
Rapists, polluters, sexual assaulters, con-men, liars, scoundrels of all kinds, politicians, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Who loses from denial?
Mostly the victims, but also everybody else because NOTHING CHANGES.
Problems like sexual assault, climate change, pollution, etc. go unsolved and unfixed. Problems get shoved “under the rug” and forgotten [except for the VICTIMS who wish they could forget].

[smirkymonkey]

3. K&R