On Thursday morning, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford inspired and gutted millions of women with her profoundly affecting testimony, with her composure, with her utterly familiar impulse to be "collegial," to make what happened to her palatable to a panel of stone-faced male senators, with her bravery in the face of several unthinkable circumstances.

We heard what remained the strongest memory for Ford of the incident: the laughter.

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two, and they’re having fun at my expense,” she testified.



Sen. Patrick Leahy responded, “You’ve never forgotten that laughter, you’ve never forgotten them laughing at you?”

“They were laughing with each other… I was underneath one of them, while the two laughed. Two friends having a really good time with one another.”



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Over the next several hours, Ford had her decades-old, traumatic memories picked apart by Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell on behalf of Republican senators, along with several Democratic senators. She’s been asked if she has a predisposition to anxiety, why she flew to Washington, D.C., and various islands when she had a fear of flying (she also says she is “terrified” of testifying, and I’d imagine she’s also afraid of the “constant harassment and death threats” she and her family have received since she came forward), if she received tips on how to perform well on a polygraph test.

Later, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will testify. He will likely deny, as he has already, that he even attended the gathering in question, or that he misbehaved in any way as a teenager. He’ll be bolstered by the encouraging faces of Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, the knowledge that the President has mobilized his base in support of him, and national history of working tirelessly to protect and promote men like him.

Following Dr. Ford’s testimony, Ed Krassenstein, a Twitter personality and author of something called, How the People Trumped Ronald Plump, tweeted, “If you have a daughter or niece and want to show her what real courage looks like, turn on your TV right now and point to Dr. Ford. Tell this little girl never to be afraid to speak up no matter how many people don’t believe them!”

In his tweet, and in others like it, Krassenstein so significantly misses the mark it’s as if he was piloting an airplane to New York and landed on the moon. Women and girls who watch her testimony on Thursday will undoubtedly see it as a unique, historic act of immense bravery. It would be more useful, rather, to show it to your sons. Show it to your sons who might still fail to grasp how people like them have any involvement in what happens to women like Ford. Or the sons who see themselves in the descriptions of Kavanaugh spread by certain corners of the media—of a fun, normal, smart, high-achieving guy who liked to get drunk with his buddies, or in the faces of one of the male, Republican senators who undoubtedly view this hearing as an impediment to Kavanaugh's inevitable confirmation.



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jfc this rhetoric. show your goddamn sons https://t.co/1tMPWtoIwF — aoife (@aoiph) September 27, 2018

Since women have begun publicly telling their stories of harassment and assault, and since these stories have begun receiving national attention, men—especially men used to being vocal on social and other kinds of media—have worked to find where they fit in. In the process to be both included and timely, they often revert to either publicly good-manning (ie. expressing overly-earnest or saccharine messages of support, of umbrella belief in survivors), or to messages of manly wisdom. Often, these messages, typed in the intoxicating haze of allyship, betray a rudimentary misunderstanding of what’s going on. These men are commenting, from the outside, on a women’s issue; they feel their contributions lie in the area of being a good father to daughters who, some apparently dream, one day will also be able to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee when their abuser is also nominated to the Supreme Court.



Sexual violence has long been understood as exclusively a women's issue, and written about in publications that cover those. That's because the vast majority of victims are women, and a huge portion of women—one in six in America—is a victim of attempted or completed rape. And men don't often get involved in the conversation at all, or at least until they have a daughter (In the past two years, "As a father of daughters," has become a boring, meaningless cliché). It's actually, of course, just the opposite. Until we start making its prevention the purview of men and boys, women will keep having to be just as courageous as Dr. Ford.



Joanna Rothkopf Deputy Editor Joanna Rothkopf is the former deputy editor at Esquire.com and a writer for Last Week Tonight.

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