The Senate judiciary committee hearing on Thursday was a bizarre set of contradictions. On the one hand, the Republican senators were superficially respectful to Christine Blasey Ford: they repeatedly asked her what she needed, hired a female prosecutor to question her, and largely refrained from the kind of denigrating slurs that allowed the media to label Anita Hill “a little nutty and a little slutty” 27 years ago.

On the other hand, the whole thing also felt strikingly retrograde, with a woman’s emotional testimony all but ignored as Republican senators deferred to the righteous indignation of a white man. It illuminated what a strange moment we’re now in, demonstrating how much has changed for American women, and simultaneously how little has.

It was apparently the power of these contradictions that shook Republican senator Jeff Flake, who – having announced he would vote yes on advancing Kavanaugh’s nomination – pivoted dramatically at the last minute, declaring that his vote was contingent on a further FBI investigation into the allegations against Kavanaugh.

The day was a study in contrasts

The day was a study in contrasts. Ford came across as deferential, nervous and deeply concerned with accuracy. Her opening statement was powerfully specific; at one point, she talked about having put a second front door on her house, because the aftereffects of the attack had made her so nervous about being able to escape her own house. She smiled, spoke quietly, and repeatedly used humor to lighten the weight of what she was saying. “I’m used to being collegial,” she even said at one point after the senators asked if she wanted a break and she asked them if it was a “good time”. She never tried to score political points.

Judge Kavanaugh came across as an angry bully bent on intimidation, and entirely willing to exploit political anger. He alternated between yelling and weeping (and, oddly, sniffing), at times conveying a real sense of the toll these allegations took on his family, at other times merely screaming his CV in all caps. He took a Trumpian approach, claiming the day’s hearing was a “national disgrace” caused by a “frenzy on the left” who “were lying in wait and had it ready”. He portrayed the allegations against him as politically motivated “last-minute smears”. His was a performance of indignant – some might say petulant – rage, shot through with the self-pity of a man who felt it was outrageous for him to be questioned in this manner.

The deferential good girl, the brazen, powerful man – the showdown was almost cinematic, but this wasn’t even the most striking thing about the day. Equally striking was the odd, folded tension in the Republican senators’ self-presentation. The Republicans on the committee (all 11 are men) were careful to avoid the appearance of grilling Ford as they had grilled Anita Hill in 1991, the optics of which now look terrible. (Instead Rachel Mitchell, a prosecutor from Arizona, asked many of their questions.) They performed a kind of stilted politeness and freely called Ford “credible”. Orrin Hatch went so far as to say she was an “attractive” and “pleasing” witness. (His choice of words in itself spoke volumes about where the Republican party still is when it comes to women.)

The hearing was truly a courtesy, as Chuck Grassley put it, and nothing more.

And yet they showed little interest in actually listening to Ford’s grave testimony. The hearing was truly a courtesy, as Chuck Grassley put it, and nothing more. By the day’s end, the senators were portraying the hearing’s findings as a simple he-said/she-said standoff, in which a lack of corroborating evidence to support Ford’s testimony all but forced them to vote for Kavanaugh. In doing so, they were misrepresenting the facts – and shirking their institutional duty, as the Democrats kept pointing out: they had the option of asking the FBI to extend its background check into Kavanaugh. Yet none of the Republican senators paused to examine the cognitive dissonance of how they could both find Ford credible and decide to “plow” right ahead with the nomination. None acknowledged how blatantly they were dismissing the real point of the #MeToo movement: that institutions must seriously investigate allegations of sexual misconduct.

The hollowness of the proceedings put a fine point on our new political reality. On the one hand, norms have changed, and even the Republican party has realized it can’t score points by personally attacking those who say they are victims of sexual assault. On the other hand, the Republican party is still able to indulge in an old kind of hypocrisy: while pantomiming respect, the men on the committee pretended that Ford’s words hadn’t actually landed a lasting blow on the man they’d chosen to elevate to the highest judicial office. They professed to believe Ford, at least in some fashion, and yet they let Kavanaugh get the last word. Which is worse: a world in which some of those in office attack women outright, or a world in which they pay lip service to the demands of women, but do as they will anyway, giving short shrift to due process?

The Republican party is still able to indulge in an old kind of hypocrisy.

The cracks in the right’s approach are showing, though. If the Kavanaugh hearings are a kind of referendum on the power of the #MeToo movement, the most telling moment actually came a day later, on Friday, when two sexual assault survivors emotionally confronted Jeff Flake in an elevator shortly after he’d announced he was voting to advance Kavanaugh. “Look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me. That you will let people like that go into the highest court of the land,” one said tearfully. Flake, looking at the floor instead of her, was visibly uncomfortable, initially unable to answer. Another woman in the elevator moved to the back and began looking at her phone. The confrontation was raw and painful, and it revealed the real power of women’s voices: if you can’t look a constituent in the eye, you know you have a problem. Shortly after, Flake called for the FBI investigation that’s now taking place.

The Kavanaugh affair is, as we all know, about much more than a US supreme court seat; it is a referendum on the political power of women. And as dark as the hearing was, Friday’s turn of events offered a bracing a reminder: The right knows it has a woman problem. It may not want to listen to the voices on its threshold, but they are only getting louder.