In this op-ed, author Jill Filipovic explains the gendered double standards at play as people try to defend Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in the wake of sexual-misconduct allegations against him.

Personal responsibility sure is a funny thing. Women are supposed to take it when we get pregnant by carrying the pregnancy to term no matter what our circumstances — after all, as some conservatives routinely argue, having sex is apparently an act of profound female irresponsibility, and so the only responsible thing to do is to have a child we didn’t plan for and perhaps can’t afford. Relying on public benefits to support children is also personally irresponsible, those same people may say. And girls, of course, are supposed to be responsible in what we wear and how we act so that we don’t give boys the wrong impression.

For the opposite sex, it’s a different story. “Boys will be boys,” after all. A great number of people seem to think sex, consensual or not, is little more than a conquest for men; they certainly aren’t expected to be the primary preventers of pregnancy in their relationships. Men enjoy sex as a pleasure and a conquest. Women shoulder the responsibilities.

This dynamic is currently playing out in sharp relief with the allegations of attempted sexual assault recently made against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford. According to Ford, Kavanaugh and another student pushed her into a room during a party while they were in high school, sexually assaulted her, and attempted to rape her. She alleged Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth and groped her as he tried to remove her clothing. Both Ford and Kavanaugh may deliver testimony before the Senate on September 24, but in the meantime, some of Kavanaugh’s defenders offer a clever explanation. They say he didn’t try to rape anyone, and even if he did, he was only 17 and therefore it was youthful hijinks and he’s not responsible. “The thing happened — if it happened — an awfully long time ago, back in Ronald Reagan’s time, when the actors in the drama were minors and (the boys, anyway) under the blurring influence of alcohol and adolescent hormones,” wrote Lance Morrow in the Wall Street Journal. The attempted rape “is ugly, and stupid more than evil,” Morrow wrote, continuing, “The sin, if there was one, was not one of those that Catholic theology calls peccata clamantia — sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.”

After all, who among us should face serious consequences for a mistake we made as a hormone-fueled teenager?

Vulnerable teenage girls should, at least according to Kavanaugh. When he was a circuit court judge, Kavanaugh heard the case of Jane Doe, a girl who had come to the United States without her parents and was taken into the U.S. custody. She was pregnant and wanted to exercise her constitutional right to abortion — a right that applies to citizens as well as foreigners in the United States. She was, as another circuit court judge put it, “a child who is alone in a foreign land,” who was clear that she wanted to end her pregnancy. Kavanaugh wanted to delay her ability to do so, arguing that the government should not facilitate her abortion. She was already 15 weeks pregnant, and the clock was ticking.

Under the guise of protecting her, Kavanaugh argued that her minor status meant it was all the more reasonable to make it harder for her to have an abortion. It’s a strange view, this contention that “she is pregnant and has to make a major life decision,” as Kavanaugh put it — as though having an abortion is more major and life-altering than having a child. In any case, he believed the responsible thing for her to do was to consult an adult and really think about it, as if having an abortion and keeping her life on its existing path was the bad decision and having a child she did not want to carry, birth, or raise would be better.