Background
First, in case you don't know exactly what is going on, here is background info.
4 Key Takeaways From the Blasey and Kavanaugh Hearing
Some statistics from the leading anti-sexual violence organization, RAINN
One in 9 girls and 1 in 53 boys under the age of 18 experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult.
82% of all victims under 18 are female.
Females ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.
The effects of child sexual abuse can be long-lasting and affect the victim's mental health. Victims are more likely than non-victims to experience the following mental health challenges:
About 4 times more likely to develop symptoms of drug abuse
About 4 times more likely to experience PTSD as adults
About 3 times more likely to experience a major depressive episode as adults
Some statistics from Five-Thirty-Eight,
Seventy-seven percent of incidents of rape and sexual assault were not reported to the police in 2017, according to the survey. You can read more about what it found here.
A culture that promotes sexual assault
See Kavanaugh’s ‘Good Guy’ Defense Reveals A Dangerous Rape Myth from Sarah Diefendorf who is a Scholars Strategy Network Postdoctoral Fellow. She studies conservative religious groups and their beliefs about gender and sexuality. Sarah has a PhD in Sociology from The University of Washington. Dr. Diefendorf cites research from CJ Pascoe and Jocelyn Hollander called Good Guys Don't Rape.
See Kavanaugh’s ‘Good Guy’ Defense Reveals A Dangerous Rape Myth from Sarah Diefendorf who is a Scholars Strategy Network Postdoctoral Fellow. She studies conservative religious groups and their beliefs about gender and sexuality. Sarah has a PhD in Sociology from The University of Washington. Dr. Diefendorf cites research from CJ Pascoe and Jocelyn Hollander called Good Guys Don't Rape.
Men learn from a young age that being manly means you need to be dominant. High school boys try to exert dominance over other men, often by calling each other “fags,” and dominance over women, by talking about them sexually and boasting of sexual conquests....This joking between men is a form of what sociologists CJ Pascoe and Jocelyn Hollander call “symbolic” sexual violence. Jokes, lewd discussions and laughter about rape and assault, as well as dismissal and blame of survivors of sexual violence, are hallmarks of rape culture. Increasingly, Pascoe and Hollander argue, rape culture is one in which rape is understood as both abhorrent and frequent. We stigmatize rape, but we also accept how common it is....Because we live in a world now in which most people, at least on some level, understand rape to be bad, men also work to distance themselves from what Pascoe and Hollander call “bad guys” who rape (#notallmen, remember?)....But my research suggests that masculine bonding at the expense of women might be even stronger among men who are virgins....When Kavanaugh or other men respond to allegations of sexual assault by making themselves look like good guys, they’re trying to pin the blame on other “bad” men as failures of masculinity. This good guy defense is brilliant. It allows men to make the problem of sexual assault and rape about being an individual ― the work of bad men, not a bad culture ― when we know that it is actually a widespread cultural problem. When men point to others as the problem, we are left with individual accounts, denials, and explanations that hide the overarching theme in all of them: masculinity and dominance.
And this from Nicole Bedera guest posting on Dan Hirschman's blog, Scatterplot. Hirschman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brown University. Bedera is a sociologist who studies gender and sexuality with an emphasis on college sexual violence and masculinity. Her graduate work has focused on how undergraduate men interpret sexual consent.
According to one of the most recent and rigorous studies, as many as 10.8% of college-attending young men commit an act of rape before graduating (Swartout et al. 2015). The rate might be alarming, but the reasons are different than we traditionally think. Acts of sexual misconduct usually are not reflective of a man’s hatred toward women (although sexism, especially when mixed with power, certainly does play a role; Diel, Rees and Bohner 2016). Instead, many men use sexual maltreatment of women as a way to bond with other men and assert their masculinity (Quinn 2002)....Because sexual violence is so common among adolescents, many girls and young women normalize the sexual abuse they endure, even when it rises to the legal level of sexual assault (Hlvaka 2014). However, minimizing an act of violence does not necessarily mean it wasn’t harmful. Researchers have found that the impact of sexual victimization can be long-lasting, especially if survivors don’t receive effective support and resources (Ahrens, Cabral and Abeling 2009)....Still, when survivors do come forward—regardless of the circumstances—it makes sense to start by believing their testimonies and treating their narratives as credible evidence because false allegations are rare (Lisak et al. 2010).
Why would Kavanaugh lie and why would so many people be willing to ignore obvious lies?
The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy is research by Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim, Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan first published January 10, 2018 in the American Journal of Sociology. It explains why some people are so willing to support people who are obviously lying. One of the authors of this research, Ezra Zuckerman Sivan (@ewzucker) tweeted about this research here. Here is his thread:
Obvious (“common knowledge”) lies can be effective tools for proclaiming deeper truths to those who are primed to hear them. As with Trump, the deeper truth is that a particular group is treated unfairly by the establishment (recall Kavanaugh’s opening). Then, so long as the obvious lies can be framed as serving that larger truth, the liar can present himself as the group’s “authentic champion.”
It just so happens that our study tested this theory in the context of a simulated college election where the main issue was the imposition of a campus alcohol ban so as to limit sexual assault. Such a ban would threaten campus drinking traditions.And when people were experimentally manipulated to see themselves in the traditionalist group and were led to believe the establishment was treating them unfairly, they regarded clearly false, misogynistic statements as “authentic” & were more likely to support the candidate. it’s not that these aggrieved traditionalists ignore the lies. They recognize lies as such in our experiments. & in a post-election survey, Trump supporters largely acknowledge that one of his most notorious lies (about the Chinese inventing climate change) was false. It’s just that they see these lies as a tool for expressing a larger truth.
What’s the larger truth in Kavanaugh’s case? I’m speculating now but I’d say there are three levels to it.
At the most basic level, it’s simply that it’s unacceptable to hold someone accountable for high school hijinks 35 years later, esp without evidence. And so when he claims there were no hijinks when everyone knows there were, he’s inviting his fellow partisans to help protect him from being held to an unfair standard. They know he’s lying but they collude in the lie for a higher purpose.
Second, the larger truth may be the partisan battle, as evoked by his opening statement. Under this logic, the GOP are invited to collude in his lies bc he will be a reliable champion of the cause. The lies are in service of the larger truth that Democratic power is illegitimate.Finally, and as suggested by our experiments, he may also be appealing to his fellow traditionalists’ anxiety about threats to their culture. What kind of real American doesn’t like beer, amirite? And what kind of loser doesn’t have too many beers once in awhile? The larger.truth then is that those high school hijinks were *good* and it’s wrong for these jerks to now cast aspersions on them. Of course these three logics are complementary. One, two, or three of them could be working for any one person. Exposing lies is insufficient to reach across this kind of partisan divide. We have to look harder for the deeper implicit claims being made & why they resonate with those who seem unable to see the lies. They *can* see the lies but their *focus* is elsewhere. A few people have asked what the action implications of our (@minjaekim22 @ohahl) research are. Excellent question and our guess is as good as anyone's.
I would offer four observations though, fwiw:
First, *everyone* is prone to this behavior, as our experiments attest (even women excuse a misogynist!). And in real life, you can choose various examples on the left. I mention a recent one here: https://twitter.com/ewzucker/status/1040630071239868416 ….
Second, mere partisanship is *insufficient* for a lying demagogue to seem authentically appealing. If there's no "legitimacy crisis" (bc the establishment appears corrupt or to favor an upstart group), partisans don't cotton to the lying demagogue (see https://twitter.com/ewzucker/status/1036666246232768513 …)
This makes sense bc US political history isn't dominated by lying demagogues (thank goodness). So the real Q is why so many Americans felt so aggrieved going into the 2016 election, & continue to feel that way (on the right, even tho they control executive & legislative!) today.Third, while the previous two points identify mechanisms that turn this on & off, it's important to recognize that the problem may actually be worse than what we document in our research. Why? Because it's one thing to excuse deviant behavior one time, in private but it's quite another to do it repeatedly (think of how many norms Trump has broken since coming on the political scene) in public. This "escalates commitment" like no one's business. Very very hard to reverse. (yes, this is key to cults; see Kanter's classic study)
Finally, a personal takeaway is that I don't take seriously anyone who can't find serious faults w their own "side." All human beings are flawed and any leader commits major errors, in part bc they always have to balance competing values & in part bc they're fallible. If you can't recognize this then you are a partisan hack, not a committed citizen of a republic. An example: I was extremely disappointed in 2012 when Romney was vilified on the left for his "binders full of women" line. The implication was that Obama was great for women. But was he? Definitely not, if you read Ron Suskind's Confidence Men, an excellent treatment of the first two years of the Obama Administration. Ask Christy Romer. Or ask Anne-Marie Slaughter: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/ ….The point wasn't that Romney was a better candidate than Obama. I personally thought that Obama was the better candidate. The point is that we must recognize *and work hard to overcome* our tendency to excuse faults on our side & howl at faults on the other side.
A microsociological analysis of the hearings; men and women in conversation
In this post from the Society Pages' Sociological Images, Evan Stewart, a sociologist shows that gender can have indirect influences on who carries social status into a conversation, and we can balance that influence by paying attention to who has the authority to speak and when.
Sociologists use conversation analysis to study how social forces shape our small, everyday interactions....Are men more likely to change the subject or ignore the topic of conversation? Two experimental conversation studies from American Sociological Review shed light on what could be happening here and show a way forward.
The importance of talking to teens
This NY Times article talks about how teens are viewing this hearing and why it is so important to them.
A 17-year-old in Rapid City, S.D., said it felt odd as a student to hear grown-ups dismissing the significance of Mr. Kavanaugh’s character in high school.
“For me and my friends his past is our now,” she said.
And she worried that if the Senate does not take Dr. Blasey’s allegations seriously, it will reaffirm the idea that “boys will be boys,” and teach a dangerous lesson to teenagers today.
“Boys will learn that what you do in high school won’t affect your future at all, so go do the damage you need to do now,” she said.
The difficulty of dismantling this culture
From NY Times,
This strain of masculinity is an entrenched part of American life, prized by employers from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, romanticized by Hollywood, handed down from fathers to sons, and shared by many who become respected leaders in society. It persists in part because some of its traits — a sense of brotherhood that comes from withstanding a trial by fire — are seen as positive
A sociological imagination helps to explain how this could have happened
Think with a sociological imagination about 1982. This was a different time in America when even the most popular movies that teens watched condoned date rape. This article from Vox explains.
If there’s one thing we can take away from the popular culture of the 1980s, when the alleged events took place, it’s that a sexual assault at that time might not have been immediately clear as what it was, for participants and observers alike. Some of the most popular comedies of the ’80s are filled with supposedly hilarious sequences that portray what in 2018 would be unambiguously considered date rape.
As long as everybody involved is acquainted with each other, these movies tend to treat those rapes as harmless hijinks. They don’t really count. They’re funny — even in movies as sweet and romantic as Sixteen Candles.
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