That Ford, a professor and research psychologist who has a reputation for particularly careful scholarship, might in fact have multiple, complicated, and eminently logical reasons for not coming forward until she did seems not to have occurred to Carlson. (Or at least not to the character he plays on TV.) Nor does it seem to have occurred to the many others who—not wanting to cast direct doubt on a woman’s stated experience, but at the same time, perhaps, very much wanting to—have navigated this particular collision of #MeToo and partisan politics by focusing, in their public doubt-casting, on the question of timing. Why didn’t she say anything sooner? No, but really, why?

In this, the commentators betray an ignorance that, at this point, can only be assumed to be willful: ignorance about the obvious answers to the question of temporal delay. Ignorance about how often claims of sexual abuse are mishandled by law enforcement. Ignorance about all the factors a person must weigh—assured costs to their reputation, likely costs to their finances, potential costs to so much else, in the life they have built around the violence—when deciding whether to come forward. Ignorance about the manifestations of trauma. Ignorance about the weaponization of shame. Ignorance about a culture that has found so many canny ways to tell women, in particular, that their bodies are not fully theirs, and that they misunderstood what went on, and that anger is ugly, and that boys will be boys, and that men will be men, and that maybe they should have thought about that before accepting the beer.

Brett Kavanaugh and the revealing logic of “Boys will be boys”

There have been particular strains of willful ignorance in the case of Christine Blasey Ford and her allegations against Kavanaugh—allegations that he has strongly denied. Attempts to assassinate her character, even before the character in question revealed her identity. Attempts to dismiss her, misleadingly, as “a major Democratic donor with a long history of left-wing activism.” To question her motivation under the (also entirely false) premise that Kavanaugh’s mother had once ruled against Ford’s parents in a home-foreclosure case. To brush aside the specific allegations she has made about what happened to her as a 15-year-old girl—being trapped in a room; being pinned down, her mouth covered so as to muffle her screams; being groped at so violently that she thought she might die—as the delusions of an unreliable narrator. It’s not her fault, Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah, concluded this week, magnanimously: The matter is simply that Christine Blasey Ford, in her recollections, must be “mixed up.”

“Believe women,” the ethic goes, in its attempt to correct misogynies that have accumulated over centuries, and in its two efficient words is summoned a determined optimism that the world that is can be better than the world that has been. What the public treatment of Ford has revealed, however, among so many other sad revelations, is that, even in the America of #MeToo—even in the America that promises so readily that Anita Hill’s warnings will be heeded, this time around—“believe women” remains a pipe dream.