Super Sex: Body Objectification and Superhero Narratives

I want a perfect body

“Creep,” Radiohead

She’s suddenly beautiful
And we all want something beautiful
Man, I wish I was beautiful

“Mr. Jones,” Counting Crows

Superhero comic books have a long and troubling history of xenophobia, racism, cultural appropriation, sexism, and nearly any negative -ism you can imagine.

The comic book industry is obsessed as well with rebooting as an industry mechanism and rebirth as a recurring plot element. Whether reboot, resurrection, or adaptation, however, superhero narratives seem unable to shake the very worst aspects of cliche and reductive storytelling.

The adaptation of The Punisher (Netflix) and yet another rebooting of Daredevil, volume 6 (2019), share even more examples of failing to take advantage of starting over.

Season 2 Episode 1 of The Punisher puts Frank Castle, masquerading as Pete, in a dive-bar in Michigan.

Ever stoic, Frank cannot avoid trouble, interjecting himself between a crude bar patron and the bartender, Beth, who has remained nearly equally as distant as Frank. When the bar bouncer moves to expel both the creep and Frank, Beth intervenes, and despite her protestation that she doesn’t need any help, she ultimately makes the move on her knight in shining armor, offering a nightcap at her place.

As Beth and Frank (Pete) walk to her car, Beth asks Frank to assure her he isn’t an “asshole”; Frank replies, “Isn’t that the kind of thing an asshole would do?”

Soon, Beth and Frank are entwined in Hollywood montage sex, interspersed with some dialogue where Frank confesses his name is Frank, and not Pete as he has told her.

Once again, Beth struggles with a reasonable concern about whether or not Frank is an asshole, just another creep, one whose body is riddled with scars.

And for the second time, Beth just goes with a feeling and accepts Frank is essentially a good guy.

Not blessed/cursed with superhero powers, Frank is one of the mostly human superheroes although gifted with skills and the prerequisite rage-motivation: a well-trained killing machine spawned by the military and then driven to incessant vigilanteism by the slaughter of his entire family.

Castle and Mad Max were cast from the same mold.

The Hollywood montage sex of E1 is much less about the sort of sex people have on one-night stands and more about the objectification of bodies in superhero narratives. And these narratives never stray too far from the unexplainable magnetism of the white male saviors that nearly always sit in the center.

Superhero sex is a compelling topic when those superheroes have exceptional powers like Superman needing to be human to be with Lois (see the Christopher Reeves films) or the violent and destructive coupling of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage in the Netflix adaptation of Jessica Jones.

But Castle, The Punisher, is all rage and training so the super sex is titillating but mostly secondary to the standard messages being sent about Frank as white male savior and sexually irresistible.

In both the Marvel comic book universe and the Netflix universe, Castle/The Punisher and Daredevil/ Matt Murdock are paired as different sides of the same vigilante coin—Frank the-ends-justify-the-means Castle juxtaposed with Matt Batman-lite Murdock.

With Daredevil being resurrected once again in the comic book with 2019’s volume 6, on the heels of the Death of Daredevil and three seasons of Daredevil on Netflix, we are immediately confronted with super sex and body objectification.

While superheroes such as The Punisher and Batman are essentially humans with super abilities gained through training and trauma, Murdock is a step above since he does possess super powers, although his physical strengths are mostly acquired. In other words, Murdock/Daredevil does not pose the same sexual threats as Superman or, say, the Hulk.

Fresh from the edge of death and the hospital, like Frank in S2 E1, Matt in issue 1 (2019) moves from the bar to the bedroom:

The panels preceding these are the comic book version of Hollywood montage sex, but this dialogue is significant for the ways this reboot approaches well and then fails the super sex motif.

In the early episodes of Netflix’s Daredevil, Foggy chuckles about Matt’s being blind but always attracting beautiful women. This adaptation remains uncritical in its use of the blind motif in Daredevil, which the comic book has tended to do since the early 1960s.

The scene above does complicate the blind motif when Matt implores: “Please don’t make my disability your fetish.”

However by the final panels of that page, the dialogue and artwork paint a disturbing, and far too predictable picture.

Matt’s partner in a one-night stand is aggressively establishing her seeking out his body. But she is drawn pencil-thin, and both she and Matt concur—despite her being attracted to Matt’s blindness (“I picked you up with my charm“): “I don’t have to worry if I am pretty enough,” she explains. “And yet,” Matt parries, “you’re beautiful.”

“And yet,” she echoes, “I’m beautiful.”

Superhero narratives remain compelling because they have potential, often underachieved potential, but potential none the less.

The Punisher and Daredevil are characters with moral and ethical imperatives about justice, but also embodiments of vigilante themes that are pursued uncritically.

They share as well the lazy super sex plot elements and body objectification that is reductive for women characters who are equally diminished by their capitulation to the irresistible white savior appeal of Castle and Murdock—stoic, scarred, and chiseled.

Real-life sex is almost nothing like Hollywood montage sex, and superhero narratives could benefit from realizing that as well as exploring the full physical and emotional complexity of humans, even when they have superpowers or especially when they are merely human in the presence of the superhuman.

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Domestic Tuesday

My life as a voracious reader began in childhood, but matured at some point in early adolescence as obsessive. That early obsession was grounded in collecting and reading Marvel comic books as well as science fiction novels—early Michael Crichton, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Arthur C. Clarke.

I have steadily plowed through my reading life discovering and then devouring new writers. In my last couple years as an undergraduate English education major, I was in my John Irving phase, spurred by falling madly in love with his The World According to Garp.

Naive and often clueless, I was a twenty-something who hoped to be a writer, and desired more than anything a deep and unique love. My idealizing falling in love and marrying was compounded with idealizing Garp’s life as a stay-home husband/father.

While I have read most of Irving’s novels, and loved quite a few, it has been years since I read Garp and realize I may now find much of the novel, and Garp’s domestic self, far more problematic. However, while I have never become the novelist and fiction writer I had planned, my life as an academic and writer has included domestic elements that I genuinely enjoy.

Since I teach most often on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, I have for many years remained home to write and work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Also starting more than four years ago, I have been a caregiver for, first, my granddaughter, and now my grandson on Tuesdays.

Whether I have been home to write and work or to watch my grandchildren, I spend part of my time washing dishes and washing, drying, and folding laundry. Some days I also make a trip to the grocery store.

Laundry, while being a chore, also provides a bit of zen for me. I find a certain peace in folding and hanging up clothing the way I prefer.

As a man, I recognize the absurdity of finding peace in the sort of domestic chores society has imposed onto women, that many marginalize as “women’s work.” It is a sort of absurdity that could easily ignore that women historically and currently often must navigate a professional life as well as their domestic obligations in a way that men can drift into and out of—or even avoid—without much consequence.

One of my favorite, although heavy, units I taught while a high school English teacher included using the film Pleasantville as an entry point (focusing on the TV mother character) into exploring women poets—Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton—in terms of how their status as women impeded on their work as poets.

As I have shuffled back and forth between writing and doing the laundry, I have more than once paused against the awareness that Plath’s life overwhelmed her as wife, mother, poet. An awareness of the millions of women who have suffered and now suffer the same fate without the spotlight we shine on the celebrity-tragedy of Plath.

There is a convergence here since my mother was the most important influence on the reader I became, the writer I would become because of that reader life steeped in science fiction and comic books, and since my mother imprinted on me an indelible image of the domestic life of women.

I will always associate my mother with clothes pins, the bucketful in the laundry room where she hid hundreds of dollars at the bottom. (Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash)

My mother, Rose, was a child of the 1950s, and she spent much of her life caring for her siblings, and then her own children before later running a daycare. Even when she worked outside the home, my mother did the laundry, cooked, and provided the bulk of the childcare; she also handled the bills—and quite frankly it seems did everything.

And as Caralena Peterson explores about women academics, my mother appeared to do everything extremely well and nearly effortlessly.

Today, as my iPhone reminds me, is my father’s birthday and my parents’ anniversary. They died about six months apart less than two years ago.

My parents were very 1950s, very Southern and white. They were also uncritical embodiments of gender stereotypes and obligations.

Hard work matters, I believe because of them, for the sake of making the effort, and I do find some tranquility and sense of accomplishment in doing things the right way, or at least a purposeful way.

Like carefully folding each piece of clothing because each piece of clothing—whether yours or someone else’s—deserves that moment of purpose.

Part of the celebration around Irving’s Garp, which eventually led to a film starring Robin Williams, revolved around his provocative topics, but the novel also spurred a conversation about Garp as domestic husband.

In no small part, the public discussion equated “domesticated” with “emasculated.” A man without a job was no man.

This was a long time ago when I was far less aware, but I don’t really think that conversation interrogated that Garp as a man still had a decision. A decision that women are often not easily allowed.

I often find the sink filled with dirty dishes, and the dishwasher storing clean dishes—from when I started the cycle. Whether late at night before bed or first thing in the morning, I often make that right.

Putting away clean dishes. Filling the dishwasher and starting another cycle.

This seems simple; some would be compelled to compliment my helping out.

But this is not some other person’s chore. This is something I choose to do, in part because it brings me a calm to set things right.

It is, however, a decision I can make. It is my remaining privilege as a man.

Today as my grandson plays, and as I write, do some work, I cycle through washing and drying all the dirty clothes, folding them warm and clean smelling on the day my father was born, the day my parents were married 59 years ago.

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Pledge, Anton DiSclafani

Halloween Reader: Everything You Know Is Wrong

Scientific Racism And Black Sexual Pathology

Ending the practice of pathologizing Black sexuality will not be easy because the assumptions that enable it to flourish are part of the fabric of American culture. As noted, some researchers have recognized the problems associated with pathologizing Black sexuality and are advocating different approaches, perhaps illustrating that tenaciously adhering to the old tradition can prevent true resolution.

Johnson: Women’s voices are judged more harshly than men’s

There is no escaping the fact that some voices sound more pleasing than others. And there is no quick way around society’s belief that deep voices convey authority; men have been more powerful than women for all of known history. It may be good practical advice to tell women who want to get into the voice-over industry—or indeed others that have been historically dominated by men—to use firm and deep voices if they want to impress. They might also take care to avoid the distraction of vocal fry, while simultaneously ensuring that they don’t sound too mannish. Women, in other words, are required to walk a thin line when they speak in public, a no-room-for-error performance never expected of men.

The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

Inspired by the meritocratic ideal, many people these days are committed to a view of how the hierarchies of money and status in our world should be organised. We think that jobs should go not to people who have connections or pedigree, but to those best qualified for them, regardless of their background. Occasionally, we will allow for exceptions – for positive discrimination, say, to help undo the effects of previous discrimination. But such exceptions are provisional: when the bigotries of sex, race, class and caste are gone, the exceptions will cease to be warranted. We have rejected the old class society. In moving toward the meritocratic ideal, we have imagined that we have retired the old encrustations of inherited hierarchies. As Young knew, that is not the real story.

The Meek

When I read this thread on Twitter, I cried:

My niece turns 6 today. A year or so ago we were out somewhere and when she got tired I picked her up and carried her even though she’s plenty old enough to walk. I told her, “even when you’re a big girl, as long as you need carrying, I’ll always carry you.”

— wikipedia brown 🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂 (@eveewing) October 2, 2018

I read this the day after I walked across campus from my parking lot to my office. Two students approached, holding hands while laughing and smiling as they talked.

They both made eye contact with me, smiling, and spoke.

I thought about my granddaughter, who snuggles still against me. She is four now, and the first thing she does when she walks into our house is take off her shoes and socks.

When we sit together, I hold her bare feet. It is our holding hands.

How any of us treat our own children, and other children, how a people view and treat all children—this reveals a great deal about character that we tend to ignore in the U.S.

In short, we are an awful people, a disturbing antithesis of the so-called Christian values many want to wave like a tattered American flag in the face of the world.

When Barbara Kingsolver wrote about being in Spain with her daughter, she concluded: “This is not the United States.”

Kingsolver explains:

With a mother’s keen myopia, I would tell you, absolutely, my daughter is beautiful enough to stop traffic. But in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, I have to confess, so is every other person under the height of one meter. Not just those who agree to be seen and not heard. When my daughter gets cranky in a restaurant (and really, what do you expect at midnight?), the waiters flirt and bring her little presents and nearby diners look on with that sweet, wistful gleam of eye that before now I have only seen aimed at the dessert tray. Children are the meringues and eclairs of this culture. Americans, it seems to me now, sometimes regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil, maybe, but if it’s not their own they don’t want to see it or hear it or, God help us, smell it.

The U.S. is a culture of rugged individualism, no sense of community, as Kingsolver adds:

In the United States, where people like to think that anyone can grow up to be President, we parents are left very much on our own when it comes to the little Presidents-in-training. Our social programs for children are the hands-down worst in the industrialized world, but apparently that is just what we want. In an Arizona newspaper, I remember seeing a letter from a reader incensed by the possibility of a school budget override. “I don’t have kids,” he declared, “so why should I have to pay to educate other people’s offspring?” The budget increase was voted down, the school district progressed from deficient to dismal and one is inclined to ask that smug nonfather just whose offspring he expects to doctor the maladies of his old age.

Our nation has a proud history of lone heroes and solo flights, so perhaps it’s no surprise that we think of child-rearing as an individual job, not a collective responsibility.

And our calloused disregard for children is not our only sin against the meek in the U.S. We are a violent and abusive people for girls and women as well.

Responding to conservative and evangelical support for Brett Kavanaugh (and Trump), Carly Gelsinger offers a disturbing analysis based on her own experiences growing up in “purity culture” driven by the evangelical church:

There exists a generation of women who were never taught consent ― and I’m not talking about Boomers. I’m talking about the hundreds of thousands of us who were raised in church and came of age at the turn of the millennium.

In our world, we were taught that our bodies didn’t belong to ourselves. God owned them, they said, but really, that meant that men owned them. Our fathers. Our pastors. Our husbands. Our politicians. Never ourselves.

Gelsinger recognizes that “[p]urity culture taught young girls to bear responsibility for men’s lust.” And then she catalogues her own experiences as a victim of men because of that culture.

Through her story we must recognize that the U.S. is a large and perverse frat culture in which the meek are initiated through the gauntlet of toxic masculinity and toxic privilege.

If the meek will inherit the earth, the cost of that initiation is far too high and a scar on a people who want to pretend, like Kavanaugh, that we are good and decent folk.

Sacrificing Women: “I came to see the damage that was done”

I came to see the damage that was done…

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage

“Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich

Some of the most offensive elements of the Brett Kavanaugh dissembling are that his lived experiences beneath his lies are about a much wider and more insidious reality. The partisan sideshow must not be allowed to distract us from that reality—that we are a country still complicit in sacrificing women.

Toxic masculinity and rape culture are inexcusable subsets of a larger toxic privilege that spawned Kavanaugh and legions just like him. And, yes, frat culture in his past and today are microcosms of the misogynistic worlds in which mostly white men circulate while clutching the vast majority of wealth and power in the US.

But the Kavanaugh debacle is a story about toxic privilege and our willingness to sacrifice girls and women at the alter of any one powerful white man.

Toxic masculinity, rape culture, and toxic privilege depend as well on complicit women who have been drawn into a dark fantasy of being embraced and rewarded by these men—as reflected in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:

Toxic privilege has also driven a pop culture designed to idealize and sanitize rape culture:

Sixteen Candles isn’t a college sex romp like Revenge of the Nerds or Animal House. It’s a high school love story. It’s been celebrated for 34 years for its sweet, romantic heart. Yet it is entirely willing to feature a lengthy, supposedly hilarious subplot in which a drunk and unconscious girl is passed from one boy to another and then raped.

So Caroline gets drunk at a party and passes out in her boyfriend’s room, where presumably she believes she will be safe….

The next time we see Caroline, she’s unconscious again, and the Geek is having his friends photograph him next to her unresponsive body. “Ted, you’re a legend,” they gush.

The next morning, a newly sober Caroline and Geek conclude that they had sex the night before. The Geek asks Caroline if she enjoyed herself. “You know, I have this weird feeling I did,” Caroline says.

As this analysis unpacks, Kavanaugh lived through the same era as this film, and many popular films much worse. Alcohol and toxic masculinity in high school and especially college continue to function the same ways, ways that sacrifice women.

In the very real and ugly world, women are victims of crass political and ideological commitments to guns and lies about who exactly women should fear; it isn’t foreigners or strangers, but guns and men they know:

While this study does not focus solely on domestic violence homicide or guns, it provides a stark reminder that domestic violence and guns make a deadly combination. According to reports submitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), firearms are rarely used to kill criminals or stop crimes. Instead, they are all too often used to inflict harm on the very people they were intended to protect.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, in 2016 there were only 327 justifiable homicides committed by private citizens. Of these, only 45 involved women killing men. Of those, only 29 involved firearms, with 22 of the 29 involving handguns. While firearms are at times used by private citizens to kill criminals, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the most common scenarios of lethal gun use in America in 2016, the most recent final data available, are suicide (22,938), homicide (14,415), or fatal unintentional injury (495). (When Men Murder Women)

And the very worst of these realities are prominent across the Bible Belt:

Emily Peck has reported a telling moment in the Kavanaugh saga: “‘Sen. McConnell, do you always turn your back on women like this?’ Khanna asked as the senator faced other questions from activists while he rode the escalator.”

Yes, the answer is yes, but also, McConnell is but one example of a much larger reality, an entire country turning its back, allowing women to be sacrificed.

Consent, Entitlement, and a History of Sexual Violence

Few things are more dangerous than a man

who is capable of dividing himself into several men,
each of them with a unique river of desire

on their tongues.

It’s Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die, Hanif Abdurraqib

In the adaptation of John Wagner and Vince Locke’s graphic novel, A History of Violence, David Cronenberg’s film vividly confronts viewers with at least a couple powerful and related questions: Is human violence necessarily sexual (natural), and is human sexuality necessarily violent?

This dilemma, I think, is also facing us during the Brett Kavanaugh controversy as that narrative expands and unfolds with more and more details about his privileged past in elite prep school and college.

Let me begin with confession.

From about my junior year in public high school in rural upstate South Carolina and through my first two years in junior college, I drank quite a lot—some times legally (beer) and often illegally (liquor).

Bearded in college, in fact, I looked much older than my age so I would stroll arrogantly into liquor stores and buy bottle after bottle without a single occasion of being carded.

This adolescent and young adult stupidity and carelessness, this culture of drinking, was compounded by our drinking and driving. Often.

Much of my self-worth was built on being seen as someone who could drink to excess and not appear drunk. I was the responsible drinker among my friends, the one charged with driving.

None of this is about a life I am proud of living. But I would also suggest that my experiences and behaviors are shared by many young people—approaching what we can fairly call “normal” behavior.

However, here is where I start having some issues with the “boys will be boys” excuses offered for Kavanaugh.

Even after excessive drinking, I have never sexually assaulted or harassed women. And throughout my life, I have never been violent, mostly embracing passivism (including rejecting corporal punishment of children as a parent and grandparent).

In short, I have held the beliefs and behaviors that honor the sanctity of those weaker or more marginalized than I am.

Even while drunk. Even as I have not by any stretch been a perfect human. Even as I will never try to create a narrative of me as a choirboy just trying to live the righteous life.

Because I have sins I am ashamed to admit.

Although I do believe consent is sacred and have never breeched that line through coercive sex, I have been guilty for much of my life of the intrusion of the male gaze and my own direct and indirect participation in the wider culture of objectifying women through so-called “locker room” behavior all too common among most men.

Viewed by those men as harmless and “just joking,” this language and behavior are hard to avoid and socially awkward to confront. I have in later adulthood come to realize this normal behavior is neither harmless nor funny since it all contributes to sexism, misogyny, and even rape culture.

It is at the intersection of rape culture that my life experiences greatly diverge from the world being described surrounding Kavanaugh and his high school and college friends.

That divergence, I think, can be traced to entitlement. I grew up working class and fully aware I was not entitled to anything, even my parents’ love.

The wealth and privilege of Kavanaugh’s world, however, are paths to entitlement—men who believe they are entitled to everything, including women’s bodies and sex.

One of the grossest manifestation of that can be seen in the slut-shaming among Kavanaugh’s football teammates and printed in the yearbook (“Renate Alumnius”). But the grossest example is the frat-party culture that began for Kavanaugh in high school and continued through college.

As Jessica Valenti wrote in 2014: “numerous studies have found that men who join fraternities are three times more likely to rape, that women in sororities are 74% more likely to experience rape than other college women, and that one in five women will be sexually assaulted in four years away at school.”

Let’s now add some context to Kavanaugh being nominated for the Supreme Court and just who controls that process:

A good day to remember that 76% of U.S. senators and congressmen and 85% of Supreme Court justices have been in fraternities, while only 2% of America’s population have been fraternity members.

— Ben Kesslen (@benkesslen) September 26, 2018

And just who has sat and now sits on the highest court:

Another way to phrase it: 40 of 47 Supreme Court Justices between 1910-2014 were in fraternities.

— Ben Kesslen (@benkesslen) September 26, 2018

And, don’t forget: Every current Supreme Court justice attended Harvard or Yale.

— Ben Kesslen (@benkesslen) September 26, 2018

All of this is to confront, then, it is normal for frat culture to include rape culture.

But it is not normal adolescent or young adult behavior [1], I must argue, because frat culture/rape culture is an extension of privilege and entitlement, not the consequence of human nature. Kavanaugh’s world and the world that young men and women like him now see being dismantled and re-interpreted:

Brock Turners grow up to be Brett Kavanaughs who make the rules for Brock Turners.

— feminist next door (@emrazz) September 27, 2018

Just as pathological liars believe everyone is lying, the entitled believe their entitlement—including the coerced and violently taken sex of those not giving consent, not able to consent—is simply the way the world works. I am reminded, for example, of Richard Dreyfuss’s retort to charges against him: “Dreyfuss told the New York magazine blog Vulture he flirted with and even kissed Los Angeles writer Jessica Teich over several years but thought it was a ‘consensual seduction ritual.’”

As a man continually forced to investigate my own humanity against #MeToo, my culpability both indirect and direct, I seek ways to honor consent and human dignity, continually unpacking my past, always reflecting on my present, and reaching for a better me in the future.

Like the dilemma exposed by Cronenberg’s film, Hanif Abdurraqib ends It’s Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die with

The only difference between sunsets and funerals

is whether or not a town mistakes the howls
of a crying woman for madness.

Sunsets harken the end to daylight that leads to night and the promise of tomorrow. Funerals rings more final, an ending.

We, the “town,” a community, must make a choice at some point; maybe this reckoning of Kavanaugh and his entitled class will be that transition.

To remain stuck in the mire of misogyny, reducing all women to the hysterical type that renders them less than human and thus the free bounty of the entitled.

Or to recognize the “howls/of a crying woman” as a plea for her dignity that has too often been sacrificed for the entitled, “a man/who is capable of dividing himself into several men”—one of them dressed in a suit and spinning tells of a choirboy past so that we are too distracted to see the monsters he has been, the monsters he will continue to be.

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[1] See this thread that explains with citations: “The best studies estimate that as many as 10.8% of young men commit an act of rape before graduating from college.”

The Slowly Approaching Rumble of the “White Noise” of Privilege

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.

Meditation XVII, John Donne

although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

“Theme for English B,” Langston Hughes

For my first-year writing students, Roxane Gay’s “Peculiar Benefits” serves as a powerful mentor text and an effective entry point into a difficult topic, privilege.

“Privilege is a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor,” Gay explains, adding:

There is racial privilege, gender (and identity) privilege, heterosexual privilege, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, educational privilege, religious privilege and the list goes on and on. At some point, you have to surrender to the kinds of privilege you hold because everyone has something someone else doesn’t.

While her essay demonstrates the effectiveness of grounding an argument in personal narrative—her own Haitian heritage and trips to Haiti that confronted her with that country in contrast to the US—Gay also acknowledges the inherent struggle to address privilege in meaningful ways:

The problem is, we talk about privilege with such alarming frequency and in such empty ways, we have diluted the word’s meaning. When people wield the word privilege it tends to fall on deaf ears because we hear that word so damn much the word it has become white noise.

From #BlackLIvesMatter to #MeToo, I have begun to wonder if a growing rumble approaches, a rising toll that will someday no longer be only “white noise.”

Many in the US strongly resist discussions of or acknowledging privilege, as Gay notes, and part of that resistance is grounded, I think, in the cultural narrative created and perpetuated by the power elites—mostly white men: Political and economic status in the US has been earned through merit, and not privilege.

That cultural narrative is mostly a lie since the original power grabs were almost all at the expense of others (slavery and denying women equal status with men, for examples) and then those advantages—privilege—have been accumulated over many, many generations. That historical expanse has helped reduce privilege to “white noise,” it seems.

The recently stalled appointment of Brett Kavanaugh represents both the entrenched refusal of privilege and the potential eroding of the merit-cloak shrouding the truly disturbing underbelly of life-long privilege.

Kavanaugh’s interview to defend himself and proclaim both his innocence and determination to continue the appointment process has some telling features:

“I’ve always treated women with dignity and respect,” Kavanaugh insisted. “Listen to the people who’ve known me best my whole life.” Did he commit sexual assault? He “never saw any such thing.” Did he engage in lurid sexual encounters? He “never participated in any such thing.” Rather, he was focused on “trying to be No. 1 in my class” and “captain of the varsity basketball team” while working on “service projects” and “going to church.” Also, he did not have “anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter.”

The denial extends beyond claiming not to have committed sexual assault to never hearing of misconduct at his school or by classmates, punctuated with his own choir-boy self-description.

This picture is the merit-veneer narrative common among the privileged who have created and maintained a network of privilege. Kavanaugh’s appointment is a blueprint for circling the wagons among the connected to protect each other regardless of who or why.

Kavanaugh’s assertions stretch credibility, however, not just for those attending elite private school but for anyone who has ever attended any high school in the US. Teens drinking and sexual misbehavior are all too common parts of adolescence, but even more damning are artifacts from Kavanaugh’s own high school experience and published accounts by his peers and friends, notably Mark Judge:

Judge, 54, has chronicled the debauchery of his 1980s high school years as a student at Georgetown Prep, where he and Kavanaugh were self-proclaimed members of the “100 Kegs or Bust” club.

In his 1997 memoir, “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk,” he wrote of high school “masturbation class,” said he “lusted after girls” at Catholic schools and referenced a passed-out “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” who drank too much and once threw up in a car.

This Kavanaugh debacle is a slightly more polished but perfectly aligned part of the larger Trump phenomenon grounded in lies and denying evidence. While Trump plays the cartoonish buffoon, Kavanaugh is sprung from the refined elites who, as this unmasking is exposing, have very ugly lives under the cover of privilege—the ruling vampire class of the US.

As the perverse and contradictory claims reveal about the cavalry forming to defend Kavanaugh—including women—somehow Kavanaugh is both innocent of sexual assault (because he was a virgin and attended church) and the poster boy for “all boys have sexual assault in their pasts” and “we cannot allow boyhood indiscretions to ruin the promising futures of some men.”

And beyond the specific Kavanaugh controversy and the subsequent defenses, even more disturbing is the rise of concerns about all men now being afraid of #MeToo consequences joined by garbled memes about mothers fretting over their sons’ futures (see this Twitter thread dismantling that narrative).

Ultimately, the US is now poised to make an important decision about continuing to ignore the white noise of privilege or hearing the rising rumble that tolls for the abusive and corrupt privileged elites.

The Kavanaugh accusations sit against the merit-veneer narrative orchestrated by Kavanaugh (and echoed by Trump and his ilk) as well as the often-ignored weight of evidence:

“Sexual assault is likely the most under-reported crime in the United States. About two-thirds of female sexual assault victims do not report to the police, and many victims do not tell anyone. Sexual assault is a terrifying and humiliating experience. Women choose not to report for a variety of reasons — fear for their safety, being in shock, fear of not being believed, feeling embarrassed or ashamed, or expecting to be blamed.

“A lack of reporting does not mean an assault or attempted assault did not happen or is exaggerated. Research demonstrates that false claims of sexual assault are very low — between 2 and 7 percent. This tells us that far more women are assaulted and don’t report than women who make false claims.” (Statement of APA President Regarding the Science Behind Why Women May Not Report Sexual Assault)

A people disgusted by the sordid underbelly of privilege must reject the merit-veneer narrative and choose the greater path to not only truth but also equity.

#MeToo is a reckoning about sexual assault and the silencing of women.

Everything about the Kavanaugh narrative rings false, and we are far past time to silence the lies of privilege.