The Off Seasoner:

 

“Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.”

-William S Burroughs, great American writer who used his status to have sex with much younger men but that’s not what we’re here to talk about right now, ok?

One of the many good things about living outside of the United States is that I don’t hear the circus of a news cycle if I don’t want to. One of the surprising things about leaving the US was realizing how nationalistic we really are, and much like how I constantly wonder what other people think of me, (do they hate me, are they laughing at me, are they making secret trade policies without me?) the reality is that the rest of the world really doesn’t think about the United States as much as we think they do.

So if I’m not looking for it, the subject of my country very rarely comes up. Another thing is that if I’m going to be informed, I have to choose where I get my information. I’m outside of the environment where this is happening, so I generally have no idea what is really going on and am often surprised by the conversations I have with my family and friends in the US when I ask them for their take on current events.

When I heard the news of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, I was really, really upset. Maybe it’s because, unlike Trump, I truly thought he wasn’t going to be confirmed. Maybe it’s because, unlike Trump, he is going to be in public office for the rest of his life. Unless of course Trump’s dreams do come true and he becomes the dictator he’s been angling to be this entire time, which I think could only be derailed by Kayne West’s successful 2024 presidential bid, you heard it here first, wake up sheeple!

But I digress, I’ll save the rest of my wild speculations for my fear mongering leftist political conspiracy theory spin-off blog, coming soon.  Maybe it’s because it got me thinking about the #metoo movement, the #shoutyourabortion movement, and how the social media’s response to Ford’s testimony is that women need to be more explicate in their life histories, that they need to exploit their pain so that men will finally really get it and change their behavior, and ultimately fewer women will be assaulted. And I hate that the burden is placed on women to do the emotional labor for men and that we are being told to use our extremely personal history for the benefit of a widely anonymous audience that may or may not care, and doesn’t really need to care. Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation just further proves that coming forward after a sexual assault doesn’t really matter. How the punishment for assault is a joke in America.

And how victim blaming is a great American past time. Exploiting free to cheap labor and then using that labor as a scapegoat for society’s problems is the United States at its most predictable. How hating women is so, so deeply intertwined with the American experience. And how internalized misogyny is a powerful force. I remember talking with a fellow ex-pat who said that when Kavanaugh was chosen, she believed that the fall out of woman leaving the Republican party would be detrimental, and an overall win for liberals. She was wrong. The response from the right seems to be that #metoo is a “victimization” movement, instead of seeing it as a validation of survivors.

The idea from women on the right seems to be that other women have experienced much worse than Ford, why is she still so traumatized by being threatened with rape when she was 15? The takeaway message isn’t men that assault women should be accountable for their actions (and not members of the supreme court), it’s that women need to get over and stop “playing the victim.”

The fever pitch of rape culture and victim blaming that we are seeing now is that 100% of the responsibility of assault falls on women, and 0% falls on men. The classic questions. What were you wearing? How much did you have to drink? Why did you put yourself in a vulnerable situation, going to a party, being in a room alone with a man? Which all leads to the conclusion that we all already know, men’s egos, reputations and feelings are more important that women’s safety.