Christine Blasey Ford
October 2, 2018
Christine Blasey Ford
STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:
Is Dr. Christine Blasey Ford just sui generis or is she perhaps representative of a whole class of female academics and professional women in the U.S. today who, while intellectually bright and professionally accomplished, have become infantilised and fragile? That would be inevitable when one is raised to believe that to be a Western woman is to be everywhere and all the time a victim.
I don’t want to sound unkind, but I surely can’t be the only one to have seen Christine Blasey Ford give her statement to the Senate select committee and come away baffled by just how very immature she seemed – especially, but not limited to, her pattern of speech and intonation.
I’m no expert on American regional accents but I do recall that in the ’80s and ’90s a lot of U.S. movies featured teenage female characters called “Valley Girls,” who spoke with a weird vocal intonation where they would vary their pitch during a sentence to produce what has been called “up-speak.” This affectation has the effect of making even the most declaratory statement sound like a question. It’s associated forever in my mind with pampered teenagers, particularly girls.
Dr Ford seems, at 51, and of professorial rank, to have managed either to retain a Valley Girl accent from her youth or, worse, acquired one during her maturity. It’s a very girlish and unimposing manner of speaking, no?
What about her other acutely and unseemly personal girlish affectations: the straggly hair falling down her face, the fidgeting in her seat, the asking for a coffee as though the Senate hearing room were a cafe where she’s met with her besties to emote about their feelings?
And what of her boosters/lawyers next to her? Do you not think, like me, that they exacerbated this impression of immaturity and weakness? In the opening moments they are shown pawing her and touching her tenderly as though she were a child. Yes, I know that sexual assault is a serious matter and must carry pain. Men, too, get this. One doesn’t have to be a woman to understand this. Sane men have empathy too and can feel for a woman who has been attacked.
But the woman here is no teenage girl without deep personal resources. She is a mature professional woman, a wife and mother who has travelled the world.
The only time in my legal career I ever saw parties treated with such kid gloves was in the cases of children of very tender years who had been scarred permanently in accidents. The presiding judge or magistrate at the hearing would usually wish to examine the scarring with his own eye and even speak with the child with a view to properly assessing the impact on the child’s body and personality so as to better assess damages. In such cases they were rightly coddled even to the extent of the judge leaving the bench to sit in the body of the court with the child so as not to frighten them. Their mothers of course were always close at hand to reassure and comfort their young ones who often mistook the judge in his bright robes for Santa.
That is all as it should be because children are rightly seen as vulnerable by reason of their age and lack of experience of the world. But to extend such cloying accommodations to a mature, accomplished and resourced adult is wrong.
Laura writes:
Thank you for your interesting review of the show.
I found this whole episode of mass hysteria unbearable. I did not watch any of her testimony. But you’re correct: feminist victimhood creates immaturity.
The Ford testimony has helped to unleash more hysteria at college campuses, where sexual liberation has caused confusion and feminist rage. A professor at the University of Southern California made the mistake of saying in an e-mail that accusers sometimes lie. Yesterday students demanded his firing.
These students have been wronged. They’ve been wronged by the Revolution. But all the adults are gone. So they won’t get that message.
— Comments —
Kyle writes:
This whole episode is the older, uglier and more pathetic real-life sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Kavanaugh’s calendar could’ve been the itinerary for Tom Cruise’s character from Risky Business–numerous references to “brew skis”, “ralph club” (vomiting), going to see Rocky III, partying on the beach, being grounded, etc.
I had to laugh when Kavanaugh name-dropped Fast Times, Caddyshack and Animal House as influences on the lives of he and his friends at the time. Ford fulfilled her “Molly Ringwald” role as the aging, average, bookworm that pined for the attention of the football jock in the summer of ’84, with the tresses of golden hair, wide glasses and valley girl up talk that Stephen mentions. The media even got the idea. Someone called him “Biff” Kavanaugh–a reference to Biff Tannon, the McFly family bully from the Back to the Future movies. Trump, an obvious holdover from the ’80s, has received the same label. His friend, Mark Judge, wrote a book titled Wasted: Tales of Gen X Drunk in 1995.
Generation X is really shaping up to be a melodramatic bunch of middle-aged alcoholics, still grinding axes from the days of MTV.
Guilain writes from France:
I think your indifference regarding whether Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed or not is partly based on the assumption that Mr. Kavanaugh won’t be changed by what he is currently going through. On the contrary, I think that it’s likely that he will be a different man. Maybe not instantly, maybe not to the extent we wish he would. But I cannot imagine him continuing his career unaffected, without a different perception of U.S. politics and a different worldview.
