I read about the Cory Booker incident yesterday in a suggested headline from the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... 100244f074He wrote about the incident while in college for the college paper. He chose to write about it because of ongoing issues with men viewing sex as a game to be secured through luck, guile, strategy or coercion that left the women as victims. He comments he initially balked at writing about his own experience where he didn't immediately take the physical cue and "stole second", and that resistance to talk about his own experience convinced him he needed to expose it himself. You can read the column for yourselves here:
https://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-bi ... 19-01.2.16The incident he described occurred when he was 15 on New Years Eve. He describes leaning in for a hug at midnight and instead she goes for the kiss, apparently a passionate one. They make out, he makes his way toward her breast, she swats his hand, he works his way back again and she doesn't stop him that time. He describes their "fumbling" as continuing for a little longer and that was a far as they went. He then says they didn't develop a relationship but did become friends. Later when discussing that night she said she had liked him a lot but just wanted to be friends, but had been really drunk so she didn't really know what she was doing.
If you read the column, you see he chose to expose his story because, after two years as a peer councilor hearing real world accounts and the consequences from the victims of sexual assaults on campus, he felt obligated to talk about it. And he didn't want to be a hypocrit when saying the way men talk and think about sex as sport is a very serious part of the problem. He acknowledges that it isn't simple, there wasn't a magic bullet that could make everything right, and he didn't have any solutions to offer.
That's what self-knowledge and maturity looks like, in my opinion. I want people who can do that in leadership positions,
who take ownership of their wrongs, make corrections, and lead with this knowledge.
Now, in Kavanaugh's case we have accusations that he is denying but deserve to be heard out before the man takes an office held for life with as much or more power shared between nine people as is held by the President or shared by the members of Congress. It's an accussation he denies. In it, he is described as acting in a way that made the young woman involved fear for her life, that he might suffocate her to keep her quiet while he attempted to take her clothes off. She claims to have escaped by luck as his friend jumping in, knocking them off of the bed which allowed her to get away and lock herself in the bathroom.
If the allegations prove to have a reasonable grounding in probability, it means Kavanaugh has never taken ownership, and will be a sitting Supreme Court justice who views that kind of behavior as apparently excusable. Negligently endangering a person to take something from them by force that you want...that's a serious accusation. Lying about it would be even more morally bankrupt.
These aren't comparable in any way, Cam. And I suspect you know that.
