Eternal Standards. Changing Times.

High school couple, 1940s.

First, let me note that I don't know who is telling the truth in the whole Kavanaugh matter (and I didn't watch the testimony that was given the other day), but as I"m going to state later, I think that I've formulated an opinion on how such things should be handled in the public sphere.

You don't know who is telling the truth either.  How the heck would we?*

And I'm not commenting on that.  What I'm commenting on are two comments that I've heard from women who; 1) don't believe Kavanaugh's accusers, and 2) made statements that are pretty similar, I'm pretty sure, to what a lot of high school graduates who went to high school in the 1970s, 80s, and very early 90s, are thinking.

And that leads me to the Atlantic magazine.

The Atlantic is running an article under this headline:

My Rapist Apologized

The Kavanaugh allegations led me to reach out to the man who had assaulted me decades before.

Included in that article is this paragraph:

Let me tell you what life was like as a girl in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the early 1980s. I am a year older than Christine Blasey Ford and a year younger than Brett Kavanaugh. I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, a few miles from both Holton Arms, Ford’s school, and Georgetown Prep, which Kavanaugh attended, but I went to my local public high school, Churchill. Never mind that any girl who was in high school in Potomac during that era knew, through the whisper network, not to go to a Georgetown Prep party alone. That was a given. What was also a given is that “date rape,” as a term, was in its infancy. Most of us thought getting our bodies groped at a high-school party—or anywhere—was the unfortunate price we paid for having them, not something we would ever go to the police to report.

Not just Montgomery County, Maryland.  I think that applied to every high school and every high school party in that era.

I'm not saying that's a good thing.  Indeed, I'm saying the opposite.  And I'm not commenting about anything at all past the very early 1990s, as I think things changed at the high school level.**  I am saying a lot, however, about the 1940s through the 1960s, and that era's impact on the 70s and 80s.

And let's go just a bit further from that article:

Even in junior high school, this was true. I have a vivid memory of my friend Marcia having her skirt ripped off her body in the middle of a bar mitzvah dance floor. It had snaps down the middle. I actually heard one boy say, as she was weeping in a corner, trying to refasten her skirt, “I mean, duh. If you’re going to wear snaps on your skirt, what do you think will happen?” I made a mental note: Never wear snaps to a dance party.

Horrible?  Yes.  Beyond the pale then?  Yes.  But hugely uncommon in that era.  Not so much.

Thank you Hugh Hefner.

This is an aspect of this entire conversation that is very interesting.

For most of us, the Maryland prep school atmosphere and the Yale atmosphere of the time cited is a vague cultural reference. We didn't go to prep schools and we didn't go to Yale.  Indeed, I've argued here more than once that the time for the Ivy League grasp on the Supreme Court, and frankly the Presidency, should go.  Deep down, frankly, most Americans are a lot more pedestrian, small town, rural, or blue collar than that, and frankly that's a really good thing.

The reason I mention that is that I’m continually amazed by how the fallout of the Sexual Revolution is really coming down on our society now.  The whole Me Too movement is really a highly confused cry for the return of the standard that we started abandoning in the early 1950s.  In 1953 Playboy came out and urged men to believe something different about women that what had been the standard for the prior millennia. By the early 60s pharmaceutical advances had come in which meant that the new standard urged by Hefner and his followers, that women were dumb, eager to please any man in bed, and completely sterile, made the sterile part of that potentially true and increased pressure on women to accommodate the eager to please part.***  Standards fell and illicit male expectations rose.  Now we have the natural fallout and the strong argument is to return to the prior standard which was natural and which worked, but the cry is divorced from the philosophical underpinning for that standard, Christianity, which those making the cry otherwise reject.  A cry with no solid underpinning is never effective or even fully understood.

Anyhow, while I’m rambling, I’ll note that I know nothing about these accusers at all, but I will note that the standards towards decent conduct had fallen so far that during the time I was in high school all of this would have seemed perfectly credible as a local story and people would have talked, but not that much.  At the time, to be a male with standards marked you in an odd way in that in certain situations you’d attract female company that you normally wouldn’t, simply because you were “safe”.  Having been a “safe” male in that earlier era, I can attest to it being a status that at least had some sort of honor, if only that.  It did mean that the pretty girls would hang out with you at parties and dances, however.

Which is not to suggest in any fashion that the lurid bizarre oddities stated by Swetnick were ever tolerated anywhere, in any society.  I'm not suggesting that.  Indeed, her claims sound, both descriptively and even linguistically, like something out of the period piece The Warriors more than anything in reality.****I'm not suggesting, therefore, that rape was sanctioned ever.  But to suggest that a girl going to a high school party, wearing a swimsuit even with clothes over it, was not risking getting groped?  Not so much.  That doesn't make it right, but frankly that wouldn't have surprised anyone and it likely would not have lead the victim of it to lasting trauma nor would anyone have expected it to follow a perpetrator into his adult years.

Indeed, I know a real gentleman who truly goes out of his way to help people who perfected, in his high school years, the ability to unhook a bra of a female student in the highway before she could catch which of course, in the case of chesty girls, has an impact.  He and his fellows didn't get into trouble for that, and had the girls complained to school authorities, which they uniformly did not (which doesn't mean that they cared for that), it really wouldn't have lead to much discipline of any kind.

Things have improved hugely here since that time, and stuff people tolerated when we were that age at that time now would not be at all locally, for which I’m hugely grateful.  Be that as it may, for those of us with no familiarity with how things worked elsewhere, it’s interesting to know how things worked.  My friends, and I now have some, who attended prep schools in the 1960s claim that nothing of the sort would ever have happened in them at the time, and that they were characterized by rigorous academics and proper behavior.  Perhaps so, but standards in everything fell since the 1960s and perhaps the service academies, which have had some really bad behavior exposed in this area, shows how that is the case.  In the 60s they didn't admit women, of course, but it's well known that rape has been a problem at the Air Force Academy and sexual misconduct a problem at West Point.  If it happens there, believing that standards amongst the prep school crowed in the late 70s and early 80s were as poor as they were in Western high schools isn't too hard to imagine. 

But assuming they are, what are we to make of the cry now?

Well, again, its an interesting cry to return to that earlier era. But when you do that, you have to return to the overall standard as well.  You can't have a standard that's purely built on human wishes, as the wishes tend to run toward the base.  Indeed, the dismantling of a standard that was underpinned by a deep philosophical understanding of the world and human nature is what lead us to the point where things like that being discussed could have occurred, and beyond that to confusion to what the standard is today.

But when you do that, you have to accept everything that philosophy brings to you, at least as being true or the underpinning of the standard. And that's what those most vigorously arguing for the return to the standard, in the guise of it being a "new" standard, are arguing for.

And perhaps most interesting of it all, the old standard had its peaks and valleys in the degree to which certain conduct was expected.  There was always a common set of standards that applied to it, but the vigor and ancillary rules that applied did vary.  And they varied the most in terms of being extremely strict, interestingly, in the Georgian through the Victorian Era.  At that time, among the educated, the standard was so strict that women were basically regarded as being highly vulnerable to any advance and to be protected from anything, even if they were receptive to it, at all costs.  Folks familiar with literature of the period may recall the side drama in Pride And Prejudice of the young maiden who runs off with the despicable Mr. Wickham, and the terrible scandal that ensues.  That she would be vulnerable to his improper advances is not questioned, and society's duty to address it clear.

It's interesting that this is essentially the standard now urged again.  Not at first.  At first the Me Too movement simply called out hte really reprehensible.  But it evolved pretty quickly to calling out those who had advanced and whose advances had been well received, but shouldn't have been offered in the first place. That's very Victorian.  And its now sort of been kicked around that the decayed standard of the 1970s was not only decayed, but that women, or rather girls, who strayed into situations that they would have best avoided should have been treated much more chivalrously.

And indeed, they should have.

And they should now.

But that means the restoration of a societal conduct that would protect them in other ways, and whose values run not only deep, but deeply counter to what many would wish for.

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*Having said all of that, I frankly find the claims by the third accuser, Julie Swetnick to be completely fantastical.  And I have questions at this point about Ramierez's (the second accuser's) statement as well.

**Indeed, since I first wrote those words, I've read an article, written by a woman who is the same collective 50s demographic I am and all of these people are, noting the exact same things I've noted in this one, so its not just me. I.e, there was a vast amount of misbehavior going on at that time amongst this generation to the point it was pretty common, unfortunately, and standards have since much improved.

***You'll note that none of Hefner's chesty dimbulbs appeared nine months later with a baby sucking on one of those big breasts, looking tired, worn out, and being presented in the centerfolds meeting with a lawyer for a paternity case. Weird.

****While I'm an attorney in my day job, I've done other things including working on drilling rigs, working in ranch work, and serving in the armed forces.  I have, therefore, a pretty broad exposure to interesting vocabulary.  The only place I've ever heard the phrase "train" used to describe gang rape is in the film The Warriors. Train?  Did people really use that term ever?  Hmmm