If you’ve ever wanted to commit sexual assault, now is your chance. I mean, has there ever been a better time, especially for men assaulting women? We are in the midst of the Kavanaugh Window, where no accusation of sexual assault, no matter how credible, will be believed.
After all, any woman accusing any man, especially any powerful man, will just be accused of jumping on the #MeToo bandwagon.
Sexual assault is shame-inducing and demoralizing all on its own, but if you can make the experience extra embarrassing, then that makes it even less likely to be reported at all! Not that you have to worry, because people won’t believe her, even if she does report. You could do something really crazy like ask her, “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke [can]?” Or tell her that you want to rub her [expletive] with a falafel. Shout out to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and celebrity “news” host Bill O’Reilly, who were accused of those very things, respectively. And terrible things happened to them like (checks list): getting confirmed to the Supreme Court and continuing to be paid outlandish sums for pretending to be a journalist. Harsh!
Or maybe you committed a smidge or two of sexual assault in your past, say, as a young child of 17 who couldn’t possibly have known that trying to make sex with a girl who didn’t want to make sex with you was in any way wrong. Well, you’re in luck, too, because attempted rape doesn’t count if you were in high school. (It’s also super helpful to be white and rich.)
Now, if you’re a man and you want to sexually assault other males, well, that is not recommended, but who knows? Maybe the sexual-assault tide raises all sexual-assault boats. Then again, some men tend to take that sort of thing marginally more seriously, or at least are a lot less concerned about punishing a homo than, you know, a “normal” guy who rapes.
If I seem angry, then sorry but not sorry BECAUSE I AM ANGRY AND YES I AM YELLING.
With Brett Kavanaugh confirmed to the Supreme Court, where he and Clarence Thomas can drink all the Cokes they want as they vote to take away a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, we are saying to women and men who have been sexually assaulted, “You do not matter. We do not see you, we do not hear you, we do not care.”
#HimToo is trending on Twitter. The idea is that men are the real victims here. Men have to live in constant fear that they will be falsely accused. In reality, men are much more likely to be sexually assaulted themselves than falsely accused. The idea that women make this stuff up for attention is insane. But it’s a lot easier to believe that than to actually address America’s systemic rape-culture problem.
Thankfully, if you search for #HimToo on Twitter, you find mostly tweets that begin, “This is my son” with pictures of people who are, in fact, not the users’ sons, in order to mock a post purportedly by a mother who tweeted a picture of her son in a sailor suit and claimed that “he won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind. I VOTE.” The responses are truly hilarious.
And, man, I need to laugh, because I feel like breaking something. But I can’t come up with anything worth breaking compared to democracy. America is broken. And as far as I can tell, this break isn’t going to ever fully heal. I’m not saying America will never walk again. But if we ever get back on our feet, we will always have a noticeable limp.
We will always have a reminder of what happened when we were careless. When we were cruel. When we didn’t #BelieveWomen. When we didn’t #BelieveSurvivors. When we went home with the drunkest guy at the party — the guy who’d spent the night boasting about sexual assault, making fun of disabled people, praising Nazis and gambling with other people’s money — then handed him the keys and said, “I’ll sleep while you drive.”
Wake. Up. And. Vote. Everything and everyone depends on it.
D’Anne Witkowski is a poet, writer and comedian living in Michigan with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBT politics for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.