The last several years have been, for those who have cared to learn, a brutal education in how pervasive rape and violence against women is. We saw how the perpetrators are so often believed, the victims blamed and discredited, and how various powers – employers and institutions, universities, media, law enforcement – have protected perpetrators, especially high-status perpetrators and allowed their abuses to continue. Bringing this system to light has changed it – but not enough.

The hearings about whether Brett Kavanaugh is fit to be a US supreme court justice feel like the finale of this education: the test. Will what we have learned matter? Or will a Republican party that has, with minor exceptions, made itself one with rape culture, prevail?

When the Anita Hill hearing happened 27 years ago, we were as a nation ignorant about the prevalence and nature of sexual harassment. Though many women had experienced it, it had not been established that sexual harassment violated our legal rights and was something that could and should be publicly and officially remedied. It was just something you dealt with yourself or accepted as part of the tax on being female.

The Hill hearings were a massive education in not only the awful reality of sexual harassment but why women might do nothing about it. You could say of Hill what someone joked about Christine Blasey Ford the other day: “Why didn’t she report it earlier so they could start attacking her earlier?” The way the all-white, all-male senators treated Hill is now widely regarded as despicable; that three of them – Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Patrick Leahy – are still on the committee is dismaying.

It’s worth remembering that, though Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the supreme court, Anita Hill did not testify in vain. The indirect consequences of her testimony included what’s called The Year of the Woman, the 1992 elections that sent more women to the House of Representatives and US Senate than ever before. That year also saw improved federal sexual harassment legislation passed, which was clearly in response to her courageous testimony. Reports of sexual harassment in the workplace soared, as women recognized themselves in her story and recognized that their rights had been trampled on. The seldom remembered Civil Rights Act of 1991 was passed in the wake of her appearance, “to provide appropriate remedies for intentional discrimination and unlawful harassment in the workplace … because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”.

Each of the three women who has emerged to accuse supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual crimes has been, as so many anticipated, blamed and attacked and, in the case of Ford, threatened so gravely that she and her family are essentially in hiding.

The people who blame the victims for not reporting are ignorant or conveniently forgetting what it was and is like

You’d think that if they had so much faith in Kavanaugh’s innocence they wouldn’t be trying to scare these women back into silence and prevent investigations. With the newest bearer of allegations – Julie Swetnick, who on Tuesday claimed she was at about 10 drinking parties with Kavanaugh at which young women were drugged and sexually assaulted – an attack framework appeared so quickly and widely it seemed planned. As one person put it on Twitter: “Julie Swetnick says girls drink spiked drinks, men gang rape, and does nothing, She should be arrested for being complicit and a co-conspirator.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. One quirk is that the same people who insist these things didn’t happen blame the women for them happening – it’s the logical incoherence of multiple contradictory defenses common in cases of sexual assault: it didn’t happen and it was her fault anyway. Or perhaps it’s that she’s guilty even if nothing happened and he’s innocent no matter what did, and we’ve certainly heard a lot of elected officials say that an attempted rape in your youth shouldn’t disqualify you.

But the people who blame the victims for not reporting are ignorant or conveniently forgetting what it was and is like: rape has been a crime in which prosecutions and conviction levels are extremely low in this country, women have been disbelieved or punished for coming forward or both, perpetrators have been furiously defended whether they’re high school athletes or famous public figures, and even what we consider rape has been radically revised in recent years.

‘Women have been disbelieved or punished for coming forward or both.’ Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Take the last part first. We have only recently arrived at the idea of “affirmative consent”, the idea that someone has only consented to sex if they affirmatively agree and are competent to do so. If they are drugged, intoxicated, or unconscious then they may not have resisted or said no, but they did not consent. Before feminists pushed for affirmative consent, you were fair game, and you’d be blamed if you had gone to a party and became inebriated or passed out. You still are, as Deborah Ramirez, who alleges that Kavanaugh put his penis in her face at a Yale drinking party, has been since she came forward.

Actress Molly Ringwald recently wrote in the New Yorker about how the movies that made her a star look to her now. The film 16 Candles, which came out in 1984, two years after the parties that Swetnick describes, around the time of the incident Ramirez describes, has a scene in which, as Ringwald put it “the dreamboat, Jake, essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter’s sexual urges, in return for Samantha’s underwear. When she wakes up in the morning with someone she doesn’t know, he asks her if she ‘enjoyed it’.” That’s rape just as much as what Brock Turner, the now-notorious Stanford rapist did to his unconscious victim, except in 1984 they thought it was funny-cute. How could you report something people chuckled over?

Blasey Ford, who was two years younger than Kavanaugh, reports the kind of incident that was almost never taken seriously then and is still being dismissed and trivialized and legitimized even now. Swetnick has been criticized for being a college-age woman attending parties with high-school boys; it’s also worth noting the Stanford victim was a college graduate who went to an undergraduate party held by the fraternity Kappa Alpha, where the victim had rebuffed Turner twice before she became too intoxicated to resist. Swetnick has been criticized for attending parties at which she claims young women were gang-raped, but if you want to criticize young women for that – rather than young men – you may be criticizing a significant percentage of past and present undergraduate women, especially sorority women.

The last time sexual assault allegations were made against Kavanaugh’s own Yale fraternity was 2018. And 41% of Tulane University undergraduate women and 18% of undergraduate men reported being sexually assaulted in a survey early this year. You can debate why young women go to drinking parties hosted by men with a propensity for sexual assault, but it’s common – and as the Washington Post reported earlier this year, “the National Panhellenic Conference, which governs the country’s 26 major sororities, maintains that sisters can’t swig booze in sorority houses — even as the fraternity down the street throws a keg party.”

This puts the fraternity brothers in charge of all alcohol-soaked parties, so that the women are not in charge of the space, the schedule, the substances or the rules. It’s a perfect set-up for victimizing women. It’s worth remembering that the tidal wave of feminist activity and ideas of the past six years was started, in no small part, by campus anti-rape activists, many of them young women who were themselves survivors.

The bad old days are today. But they were worse then. Kavanaugh is a test of whether we’re still mired in them or moving forward, whether women have gained any credibility and high-status men lost any impunity.

• Rebecca Solnit is the author of Men Explain Things to Me, and The Mother of All Questions



