The importance of words and stories: If we don't know how to put it into words, it doesn't exist (lessons from Kavanaugh)

Penelope Trunk, Judge Kavanaugh has taught me so much about how the world works. First four paragraphs:

I can’t stop reading about Judge Kavanaugh. I am learning so much about how the world works.

His yearbook from high school is horrifying. There were derogatory jokes about women throughout the pages. Everyone knew, but the boys were rich, and they were going to top colleges, so it was okay. I didn’t know there were yearbooks like that.

I knew that in those rich-kid private schools the teachers decide who goes to which school. I know that, for example, Yale takes a certain number of kids from Choate, and Choate tells Yale which kids will be the best fit. There is a symbiotic relationship. Choate can say they always get kids into Yale. And Yale knows they’ll get the best kids for Yale without having to do much searching.

What I didn’t know was that the most coveted clerkships work the same way. Judge Kavanaugh always takes law students from Yale. The symbiotic relationship there is that Yale can say their students always get great clerkships, and in exchange Yale law professor Amy Chua makes sure Kavanaugh always has a stream of female law school students who look like models. Really. Click that link.

This and that and then she mentions that she was once sexually assaulted, and once was forced to touch a man's penis:

And I said no, get away from me, gross. But I still touched it. I am shocked that it’s hard for Ramirez to put a coherent story together. I thought not having a coherent story meant maybe what I thought happened didn’t happen.

But now I understand that not having the words to describe it is part of the problem. We have no word in the English language for being so stressed and so full of shame that you start trying so hard to block it out the minute you get way. Of course we have no word for that. Because it’s only women feeling a loss of power who need that word.

She had no language.

We need to create that language so these indignities and this violence can have a proper place in public discourse.

Are we now beginning to create that language?

Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh – he shouldn't be confirmed, but who knows? – I'm glad to see that this widespread culture of toxic masculinity and misogyny is being brought to light.