Stephanie Gutmann

Opinion contributor

There are so many of us. Women watched the hearings with Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford last week and were furious. Furious — but not for the reason you might think.

We are furious at the people purporting to speak for women, furious that what should have been an ordinary parsing of evidence (what little there is after 36 years) was turned into a Kabuki theater campaign ad for the Democratic Party, stressing their trope that the GOP is conducting a so-called war on women.

Sixty-nine percent of Republican women, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll released Monday, said they favor confirming Kavanaugh. As for anecdotal evidence, I know what my friends and relatives are saying and what the several women who called into Hugh Hewitt’s radio show said this week.

Many conservative women detest the McCarthyite tone of the proceedings; we feel sickened by the sight of crowds of college girls ripping up pro-Kavanaugh posters; we are worried as mobs chant, “We believe survivors!” (What if Ford is not truly a “survivor”? Don’t we have to establish whether she’s a survivor first?)

The theater turned us off, but it was a kind of a last straw — after years of pussy hats and #MeToo and college kangaroo courts. We don’t buy the larger message about a GOP “war on women.” We know these are crude scare tactics designed to get our votes. But Democrats are making a huge miscalculation. We don’t vote on reproductive policy alone, and many of us voted for President Donald Trump because at least he talked about taxes and regulations and eliminating government agencies — things we knew would affect the American economy, not just our own jobs but those of our husbands, sons and brothers.

The Democratic Party's war on men

In fact, the past decades have been much harder on men than women. We know that the recession of 2008 was rightly called a “man-cession” because it hit mostly men, particularly those in manufacturing jobs or who were home builders and construction workers.

We know that college campuses have been a nightmare for young men for years as unfair panels established to judge alleged sex abuse have proliferated — aided and abetted by President Barack Obama’s threat to withdraw federal funds for universities that weren’t swift enough in establishing these faux courts.

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We know that popular culture created in the salons of the East Coast relentlessly portray men as bumbling idiots, as children. And we bleed for our sons and husbands and brothers who have been scarred by these relentless attacks.

Perhaps one reason we haven’t been heard up to this point is that many women who aren’t particularly electrified by the pussy hats of this wave of feminism also eschew identify politics. We don’t see everything through a lens of sex and race, so we don’t make a big noise about our desires as women.

I know I loathe identity politics. Maybe that's because of the way I was raised, by a scientist father who took the family along while he did field work for months at a time on the Navajo reservation and in a Mayan village on the Yucatan Peninsula. I moved light years beyond the politics of sex and race years ago, if I ever thought in terms of such crude categories.

Women must push back on #MeToo

I’ve hesitated to start an op-ed with the “as a woman” trope. Unfortunately, it might be time to give a little on this principle.

Late last month, one of the bravest male writers I know (he's a friend and former colleague) came out with a piece about the #MeToo movement. He wanted to write about its “eagerness to denounce” and its “censorious tone.” All important things to note, but he started the piece with the now-standard genuflections to feminist conventions. “#MeToo has done a lot of work exposing uncomfortable truths,” he wrote. “Recall that the movement got going when women who had long remained silent felt emboldened to speak up after many years.”

Uh, no. That’s a huge revision of history. The original sickness of the #MeToo movement was that its definition of sexual abuse was so blurry and undefined. I wonder whether its real goal was to shame and criminalize all men and all heterosexual sex. Everything was thrown into the #MeToo pot, from bad dates to the alleged actions of the notorious Harvey Weinstein.

I recently saw further evidence that men are afraid to speak up when a male writer friend actually asked me to go on his Facebook page and rebut the charge that Kavanaugh must be opposed because Trump would not nominate anyone who was in favor of women's rights.



I realized that because of what I call “the decent man syndrome” (obviously a very good thing in many ways) it is becoming impossible for men to speak up effectively in their own defense.



It’s now down to — What to call us? — how about "the women who won’t put on the pink hat"?

How about a movement called “Not In Our Name”? It’s time everybody — from lawmakers tempted to make policy that they think will placate women to our male brothers who increasingly are saying they’re afraid to hire and even date women — to know that "the women who won’t put on the pink hat" are out there in big numbers.

Stephanie Gutmann is a writer and manager of a phototographic studio living in upstate New York.