[re Kavanaugh] Pynchon's great theme of power & dominance by ruling classes and echoing scenes from real life.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Tue Sep 25 07:51:22 CDT 2018 

As she lay there, she said, Kavanaugh exposed himself and thrust his penis
in her face. She remembered the other students “laughing at her confusion
and taunting her, one encouraging her to ‘kiss it.’”

.............................

Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh, however, this scandal has given us
an X-ray view of the rotten foundations of elite male power. Despite Donald
Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy
League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that
produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be.


...........................................................................................................


There’s now a wealth of reporting
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/these-are-the-stories-of-our-lives-prep-school-alumni-hear-echoes-in-assault-claim/2018/09/19/b6343f74-bc2e-11e8-b7d2-0773aa1e33da_story.html?utm_term=.fdd5b437b573>
painting
the private school as a bastion of heedless male entitlement. .....
According to The New Yorker, Judge confided in an ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth
Rasor, about an incident where he and other boys took turns having sex with
a drunken woman. (Judge denies this.)

.......................................................................................................

>From Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh went to Yale. There he joined the
fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon, or DKE, which was, according to The Yale
Daily News
<https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2018/09/20/a-flag-of-underwear-photo-from-kavanaughs-time-shows-dke-hijinks/>,
“notorious for disrespecting women.” (Long after Kavanaugh graduated, the
fraternity, once headed by George W. Bush, was banned from campus after video
emerged of pledges chanting
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sexual-harassment-yale/yale-punishes-fraternity-for-sexist-chanting-idUSTRE74H06W20110518>,
“No Means Yes! Yes Means Anal!”) Kavanaugh was also a member of an all-male
secret society
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/the-yale-secret-society-brett-kavanaugh-joined-was-mostly>
called
Truth and Courage, which had an obscene nickname affirming its dedication
to womanizing.


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Image
Students, faculty members and staff members walked out of Yale University’s
Sterling Law Building on Monday to protest Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination.
The judge received his bachelor's and law degrees from Yale. CreditArnold
Gold/New Haven Register, via Associated Press

It may not be fair to judge Kavanaugh by the company he kept. But it’s
telling that these were the crucibles in which he and other members of our
ostensible meritocracy forged their identities and connections.

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There’s no equivalent culture in which girls reap social capital for
misbehaving. You rarely see women in politics or law who flaunt college
reputations as party girls; the women who make it are expected to show
steely self-control. In the rarefied social world that produces so many of
our putative leaders, a young man who frequently gets blackout drunk, as
Kavanaugh reportedly did, is a fun guy. A young woman who does so is a mess.

Kavanaugh went on to become a protégé of appeals court judge Alex Kozinski,
for whom he clerked in the early 1990s. Last year, Kozinski resigned after
multiple accusations of sexual harassment by former female clerks and
junior staffers; two said he showed them porn in his office. The judge’s
lewd behavior was, by many accounts, an open secret. “All the clerks and
former clerks in Kozinski’s ambit knew and understood that you assumed the
risk and accepted the responsibilities of secrecy,” wrote Slate legal
correspondent Dahlia Lithwick
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/12/judge_alex_kozinski_made_us_all_victims_and_accomplices.html>,
who had clerked for another judge on the same court. Kavanaugh has said he
knew nothing. Whether you believe this or not, he had an obvious advantage
over his female peers.

There is currently an uproar at Yale Law School involving professor Amy
Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, both of whom had a reputation as
gatekeepers for students who hoped to land coveted clerkships with
Kavanaugh. Sources told The Guardian
<https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/20/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-yale-amy-chua>
that
Chua instructed female applicants to exude a “model-like” femininity, a
claim Chua denies. One prospective clerk said Rubenfeld advised her, “You
should know that Judge Kavanaugh hires women with a certain look.”
Rubenfeld, The Guardian reports, is currently the subject of an internal
investigation regarding his conduct with female law students.

Watching all this unfold is radicalizing for reasons far beyond Republican
mistreatment of Kavanaugh’s accusers. His story shows, in lurid microcosm,
how a certain class of men guard and perpetuate their privileges. Women who
struggle ceaselessly to be smart enough, attractive enough, ambitious
enough and likable enough have been playing a rigged game. As they realize
that, their incandescent fury is remaking our politics. We’ll know things
have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma
than being abused does.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the
author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and
was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for
reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn
<https://twitter.com/michelleinbklyn>
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 25, 2018, on
Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Pigs All the Way
Down. Order
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Trending on NYTimes
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