One of the most notable qualities of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, leaked to the Washington Post a month before the 2016 Presidential election, was the bizarre, awkward, three-toddlers-in-a-trenchcoat artificiality of Donald Trump’s attempt to impress the TV host Billy Bush with an account of his sexual prowess. “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her,” Trump said. “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss . . . grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” This conversation, quickly shoved by Trump and his campaign under the heading of “locker-room talk,” resembled other such man-to-man interactions that seem, on the surface, to be about sex with women, but are not really about sex, or women, at all.

I thought about the tape this week, when the Times published a story about the embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook. The phrase “Renate Alumnius” appears on Kavanaugh’s senior page, and there are, all told, at least fourteen “Renate” references in the yearbook, the Times reported. A photo of Kavanaugh and eight other football players is captioned “Renate Alumni.” These phrases all refer, the Times explained, to Renate Schroeder Dolphin, a woman who attended a nearby Catholic girls’ school. Two of Kavanaugh’s former classmates told the Times that it was common for this group of guys to boast about their “conquests.” One said, “They were very disrespectful, at least verbally, with Renate.” Kavanaugh, meanwhile, offered the denial of a squirming ninth-grader in the principal’s office: the reference on his senior page merely alludes to a wholesome kiss, he told the paper. Dolphin called her appearances in the yearbook “horrible, hurtful and simply untrue,” and added that she and Kavanaugh never kissed.

In some ways, of course, it is ridiculous that we are talking about the 1983 Georgetown Prep yearbook at all. (“Barrel: Scraped,” the editor of NationalReview.com wrote on Twitter.) I was the editor of my high-school yearbook, and my friends and I stacked it with dozens of bad inside jokes, many of which surely highlighted various forms of adolescent cruelty. But, then again, the contrast between the yearbook and the way that Kavanaugh speaks about his high-school experience has accentuated the judge’s reflexive inability to be candid about his own life. Although his senior page is littered with extremely recognizable teen-dirtbag allusions, including “100 Kegs or Bust” and “Beach Week Ralph Club,” Kavanaugh, on Monday night, appeared on Fox News and described a high-school experience that “focussed on academics and athletics, going to church every Sunday at Little Flower, working on my service projects, and friendship.”

The yearbook also helped to highlight a pattern in the two sexual-misconduct allegations that have been lodged against him. As with Trump’s spasmodic talk about Tic Tacs and magnets, the stories about Kavanaugh seem to show sex—and sexual assault—as something that men do for other men. Christine Blasey Ford, who attended the all-girls Holton-Arms School while Kavanaugh attended the all-boys Georgetown Prep, has accused Kavanaugh of drunkenly corralling her into a bedroom at a high-school party, and, while a friend egged him on and both boys laughed, pushing her down onto the bed, trying to pull off her clothes, and covering her mouth to stop her from screaming. Deborah Ramirez, who attended Yale with Kavanaugh, has said that, during a freshman-year drinking game, after one male student pointed a plastic penis at her, Kavanaugh dropped his pants and, laughing, put his penis in her face. (Kavanaugh has said he “never sexually assaulted anyone” and called Ramirez’s accusation “a smear, plain and simple.”) “In each case the other men—not the woman—seem to be Kavanaugh’s true intended audience,” Lili Loofbourow wrote at Slate, noting the jarring presence of laughter in both stories. “If these allegations are true,” Loofbourow went on, “one of the more shocking things about them is the extent to which the woman being mistreated exists in a room where the men are performing for each other—using the woman to firm up their own bond.”

This is a common dynamic in fraternities, and it has been a persistent one in the Yale chapter of Kavanaugh’s fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, or DKE (pronounced “deek”). When Kavanaugh was a sophomore, the Yale Daily News ran a photograph of DKE pledges carrying a flag woven out of women’s underwear across campus (Kavanaugh did not appear in the picture); in 2011, DKE received a five-year suspension after its pledges yelled “No means yes! Yes means anal!” in front of the Yale Women’s Center. The fraternity’s 2016–17 president was suspended after the school found that he had engaged in “penetration without consent.” (In a statement to the Yale Daily News, he denied “many of the claims made” in the complaint filed against him.) “Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women,” Nicholas Syrett writes in his history of white fraternities, “The Company He Keeps,” published in 2009. “The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.”

I belonged to a sorority at the University of Virginia; my partner of nine years was in a U.V.A. frat. I spent a not insignificant amount of my freshman year going to DKE parties. (On a recent revisiting of my old journals, I came across an entry in which I happily recount blacking out after consuming a large bottle of strawberry-daiquiri-flavored Boone’s Farm at the “Dekes of Hazzard” country-themed soirée.) The dynamic in which men denigrate others to gain male approval can be relatively harmless if the person being clowned is a man who is framed as a rival and equal: frat boys set off fire extinguishers in one another’s rooms and dump spaghetti in one another’s shower drains, and this, in the grand scheme of things, is funny and good and fine.

But women are not equals in the eyes of the Greek system—among other things, the system generally prohibits sororities from throwing their own parties with alcohol, and so sororities rely on fraternities to provide booze—and they frequently become a casualty of this dynamic. In college, fraternity costume parties, engineered to encourage women to dress as sluttily as possible, felt to me as distant from actual sex as Trump’s remark about Tic Tacs: men seemed to be getting women to doll themselves up as “tennis hoes” to their “golf pros” just to prove that they could. It was common, in some frat houses, to deliver a collective slow clap to the girls who sneaked out the morning after a party. As Syrett writes, fraternities implicitly frame sex with women as something engaged in “for one’s brothers, for communal consumption with them.” Women’s bodies become the tools with which men perform intimacy and solidarity with one another; at least at first glance, women are not potential partners so much as potential means for upholding male self-interest. Under these conditions, the lines between boorishness and sexual assault are quickly blurred and easily crossed.