BY MADELINE FITZGERALD ’21
I didn’t feel much when the news notifications rolled in, one after the other. My phone lit up continuously for five minutes, with the same message: “Brett Kavanaugh confirmed 50-48 to the Supreme Court.”
I didn’t feel much because I wasn’t shocked. Because this is what makes sense to me. I don’t remember the first time I understood that being a woman would make my life harder — I’ve just always known that it would. In less than two decades on this Earth, I’ve become resigned to the fact that men don’t care about us. There’s a reason that we tell men not to degrade women by saying, “She’s someone’s daughter/sister/mother/wife.” It’s because they don’t care about us as a class of people. Men do not value women on premise — they merely value the women that are connected to them. A woman’s value is determined by her relationship to men, and even that isn’t guaranteed. Who among us can say she doesn’t have a horrific experience at the hands of a man who was supposed to care about her?
I’ve become accustomed to women like Susan Collins, the Republican senator who voted to confirm Kavanaugh, who will make themselves inferior and agree with what men say. For a long time I pitied them. I tried to find explanations that made sense — there has to be a good reason so many of these women exist. But now I loathe them. They are traitors and cowards who are complicit to the evils of men simply because it’s easier. They do it because they are the women who hold that precarious position in society — still inferior to the white men but superior to the rest of us. They are the women who can close their eyes and pretend that the world is good and that men will keep them safe and they almost believe it. They are women who think they are insulated from the effects of the patriarchy due to their race, their class or their sexuality.
But even they aren’t safe. Christine Blasey Ford represented the most powerful class of women in American society. She’s straight and white and blonde and pretty. She has a Ph.D. and has lived in insulated pockets of American wealth all her life. When Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her, Ford was a prep school girl who spent every day of her summer at the country club. But flash forward to today: the Republicans heard Ford recount the trauma which shaped her life and they didn’t care because she had the audacity to get in the way of a white man on his quest for power. When push comes to shove, men will always protect each other. Women like Susan Collins will always dutifully follow along, until one day they’re the ones under attack and they have to face the reality that men don’t care about them either.
I could go through Republican policy line by line and show you all the ways in which the GOP is a monstrous institution lacking any kind of empathy or decency. But at this point, it’s unnecessary. Christine Blasey Ford epitomized society’s elite in all elements but one: her gender. And that one factor was enough for them to throw her by the wayside. If they care so little about Ford, of course they don’t care about African-American women whose communities are torn apart by well-oiled systematic racism. Of course they don’t care about Hispanic and Arab women fleeing to the U.S. for peace and safety. Of course they don’t care about women who live on the wrong end of town with overgrown yards and broken-down cars and thermostats kept too low in the winter. Of course they don’t care about lesbians and transgender women whose civil rights exist in a precarious limbo and a patchwork of court cases. And of course they don’t care about any woman of any class of society who needs a handful of pills or a minor surgical procedure to protect her life from ruins. Because they are devoid of any empathy towards women, they don’t see women as having any inherent value. Because powerful men don’t care about us.