Can Democrats actually stop the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh?

[Starving_Artist]

@you_with_the_face

Shame. The vast majority of sexual assault victims feel ashamed because they “let” themselves be violated. They feel responsible even if intellectually they know they weren’t. Also, it’s common to feel like being raped turns you into damaged goods.

The author’s point has nothing to do with virginity. The point is that Ford was determined to act normal, not like the victim of something dirty and shameful.

If this needs to be explained to you after all the discussions you’ve had on this board about rape, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. It’s not that difficult to understand.

Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that I don’t think what she alleges to have happened to her is all that serious. During the days of my own youth such occurrences during drunken parties was fairly commonplace, and the reaction of the girls involved was usually that the guy was just a drunken asshole and then they forgot about it.

You do raise an interesting point though, which is that Ford may have felt shame for having put herself in the position where such an attack could occur. She was underage, in a swim suit, at a party where alcohol was flowing, there was no adult supervision, and with boys who were known to become sexually aggressive when drinking. I can certainly see how she would feel a certain sense of responsibility for what happened to her (though I doubt anyone here will profess the same), and that she was probably also fear of her parents finding out.

So to that degree, I will accept that your point is well taken.

@you_with_the_face

I don’t know why this merits an eye roll. Can you expound?

First, she did not ‘flee’ to California to escape the memories of what happened that night. I know this because she remained in the town and at the school she was attending when the attack occurred for two to three years afterward. She then moved to North Carolina to obtain her bachelor’s degree. So now we’re up to six or seven years after the fact before she is alleged to have found it necessary to flee 3,000 miles to California to escape the memory of that night.

The nonsense about her wearing blue jeans and surfing is obviously intended to show that she was finally able to relax, throw off the binds (and apparently the clothing preferences) of her former prep school environment in Maryland, and at long last wrest some enjoyment from life.

In other words, it was a ridiculously clumsy and tortured attempt at creating a deliberately false impression, which was that she was so uptight and haunted that she fled to the West Coast immediately after high school to seek refuge from her memories of that night, when the reality is that she still lived at or near home for some six or seven years afterward and then merely moved to California to continue her education, as countless people have done before and since.