Besides, if we’re expected to heed all the character witnesses who’ve called Kavanaugh a great guy, we might also listen to those who knew him as a member of this piggish milieu. Speaking of Ramirez’s claim, a former roommate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale told The New Yorker, “Is it believable that she was alone with a wolfy group of guys who thought it was funny to sexually torment a girl like Debbie? Yeah, definitely. Is it believable that Kavanaugh was one of them? Yes.”

There’s no equivalent culture in which girls reap social capital for misbehaving. You rarely see women in politics or law who flaunt college reputations as party girls; the women who make it are expected to show steely self-control. In the rarefied social world that produces so many of our putative leaders, a young man who frequently gets blackout drunk, as Kavanaugh reportedly did, is a fun guy. A young woman who does so is a mess.

Kavanaugh went on to become a protégé of appeals court judge Alex Kozinski, for whom he clerked in the early 1990s. Last year, Kozinski resigned after multiple accusations of sexual harassment by former female clerks and junior staffers; two said he showed them porn in his office. The judge’s lewd behavior was, by many accounts, an open secret. “All the clerks and former clerks in Kozinski’s ambit knew and understood that you assumed the risk and accepted the responsibilities of secrecy,” wrote Slate legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick, who had clerked for another judge on the same court. Kavanaugh has said he knew nothing. Whether you believe this or not, he had an obvious advantage over his female peers.

There is currently an uproar at Yale Law School involving professor Amy Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, both of whom had a reputation as gatekeepers for students who hoped to land coveted clerkships with Kavanaugh. Sources told The Guardian that Chua instructed female applicants to exude a “model-like” femininity, a claim Chua denies. One prospective clerk said Rubenfeld advised her, “You should know that Judge Kavanaugh hires women with a certain look.” Rubenfeld, The Guardian reports, is currently the subject of an internal investigation regarding his conduct with female law students.

Watching all this unfold is radicalizing for reasons far beyond Republican mistreatment of Kavanaugh’s accusers. His story shows, in lurid microcosm, how a certain class of men guard and perpetuate their privileges. Women who struggle ceaselessly to be smart enough, attractive enough, ambitious enough and likable enough have been playing a rigged game. As they realize that, their incandescent fury is remaking our politics. We’ll know things have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma than being abused does.