It’s been a long time since I last thought about the Technical Virgins Association.

The T.V.A. — which is not to be confused with the people who generate electricity in the Tennessee Valley — was a joke my friends and I made up early in our college careers. It referred to the then-popular idea that girls could go as far as they wanted with a boy as long as everything stayed, um, intact.

All of this brings us to Brett Kavanaugh, who appears to have been a T.V.A. member.

“Never had sexual intercourse with anyone in high school?” asked a Fox interviewer. “Correct,” said a somber Supreme Court nominee, who added that he had maintained that record for “many years after.”

Except maybe not.

“Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh was a virgin for many years after high school. But he claimed otherwise in a conversation with me during our freshman year in Lawrance Hall at Yale, in the living room of my suite,” tweeted a history professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The professor, Stephen Kantrowitz, said he remembered Kavanaugh’s account of losing his virginity distinctly “because it was the first time I had had such a conversation with an acquaintance who was not a friend.”