pervocracy:

I don’t really think of myself as a sexual assault survivor, not on a daily basis.  It’s true, but most of the time it’s true in the same sense that I’m a car crash survivor–it happened, it hurt, I got away, I healed, I don’t think about it every day.

But it’s something that never completely goes away.  And man can it blindside you how hard and sudden it can come back.  I hate to use the word “triggered” because it’s become a battleground for gatekeeping and mockery, but having a rapist president appoint a rapist Supreme Court justice and get away with it is getting me… emotionally activated in an unwanted and unpleasant manner.

All the talk swarming around about “she has no evidence”–of course she has no fucking evidence!  The vast majority of sexual assaults don’t leave evidence that can ever meet the standards set by people who want to believe the best of a nice rich boy.

But for those same people, a woman reporting a sexual assault is perfect proof of her guilt.  Dr. Blasey Ford has gotten death threats.  She’s had to move out of her house.  She’s been made to relive the details of her trauma on national TV with pundits providing live and after-action commentary. She testified that one of the worst parts of her assault was the assailants laughing at her, and the president of the United States goaded an arena full of his fans to laugh at her.  She has received excruciating punishment for her crime of speaking up against the man who assaulted her.

And in the end it was all for nothing, because “Brett Kavanaugh will help me get away with crimes” is the only thing that matters to Trump, and “we do whatever Trump wants” is the only thing that matters to Republican senators.

Plus the whole thing’s been twisted around into some kind of completely fucked up reverse victimization where Brett Kavanaugh is not only innocent, not only qualified for the Supreme Court, but he is the victim and Dr. Blasey Ford is the aggressor.  It’s not enough for him to merely be innocent; now he’s a cause célèbre, a totem of the poor downtrodden rich white boys who had their lives ruined (i.e., almost didn’t get everything they wanted) over a little thing like sexual assault.

It’s a political frame-up, it really happened but it wasn’t him, he did it but it wasn’t so bad and he was just a kid–all three of these ideas coexist quite comfortably within the Republican party, because they don’t really care what the truth is.  The truth is that he assaulted multiple women and everyone knows it but that is simply not as important as installing a Supreme Court justice who will help achieve Republican goals.  The same way that Trump is a blithering incompetent who also assaulted multiple women, and everyone also knows that, but what are you going to do?  Pay a slightly higher tax rate on your multi-million-dollar estate? 

I would like to not take this personally.  I would like to shrug and say “yeah, everything sucks, what did you expect, there’s nothing to do but vote for our lives in November.”  But it’s getting to me, as a survivor and a human being.  I’m furious and I’m terrified and I really don’t know whether to expect the country to recover from this.