Had it been a rehearsal, not the final hearing, notes for Brett Kavanaugh would surely have featured the suggestion, for the sake of verisimilitude, that he try to act a bit more like an actual judge. Part of the job description being, you imagine, the office holder’s ability to appear emphatic without pulling angry faces; to appear honest, without a reference from a 10-year-old; to subdue, for the sake of public faith in the judiciary, any behaviour that looks cheap, overblown, uncontrolled. And that includes sniffing.

Not the least mesmerising aspect of this allegedly brilliant jurist’s performance, at the hearing of his lifetime, was Kavanaugh’s refusal, like some wailing toddler, to submit to the offer of a tissue. In an ideal world, prosecutor Rachel Mitchell would have gone over and, sparing us all, dabbed his nose for him.

As for Trump’s verdict, on a person whose nasal quirks alone would have some of us heading for a distant tube carriage: “Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him.” Start sniffing, senators.

Supposing the judge’s delivery in response to the allegations by Christine Blasey Ford can be explained, as alleged, by his desire to please a presidential sponsor so deeply invested in tantrums, a less tribal operator might nonetheless have alternated aggressive volatility with glimpses of a more conventional “judicial temperament” of which the owner has boasted.

“That’s why,” Kavanaugh protests, “I have unanimous, ‘well qualified’ rating from the American Bar Association.” But by the end of this performance the American Bar Association was asking for Kavanaugh’s appointment to be delayed, pending an FBI investigation.

The American Beer Association, if there is one, probably felt the same way. Brewers have been trying, for years, to sell beer to women. And now here is Judge Kavanaugh, the “alumnius” (sic, in an obscene yearbook entry) of implied sexual conquests, blotchily repeating: “I like beer.” Any suspicions that extreme dedication to this beverage may have led to blackouts, during which anything might have happened, were hardly dispelled when Kavanaugh, suddenly more uppity than tragic, retorted to the female senator who’d asked if he’d ever suffered: “I don’t know, have you?”

Kavanaugh’s performance could only look more unfortunate once Ford, had, in contrast, maintained her dignity throughout a Senate hearing whose resemblance to an early ecclesiastical court is probably inevitable – since both ritualise the public sex-shaming of a violated woman by disbelieving but insatiably curious patriarchs.

More specifically, Ford’s interrogation, though it inescapably recalled the prurient public questioning of Anita Hill, and subsequently, the lawyer Ken Starr’s salacious interest in the exact sexual usage of a 22-year-old intern, featured lines that could have come directly – transcripts allow for the comparision – from a rape trial in 1612.

As performed in a new, acclaimed dramatisation, It’s true, It’s true, It’s true, drawn from contemporary records of the trial, the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who was, like the young Christine Blasey Ford, aged 15 when attacked, had to testify, subject to torture, before an audience of derisive men, that she was not inventing the event in which her rapist pushed her into a bedroom, threw her on the bed and covered her mouth, while she struggled to escape.

Last week, Ford, now 51, a mother and a senior academic, had, like Hill and Lewinsky before her, to endure the further allegation, along with a television audience estimated at 20 million, that she amounted to nothing more than an accessory, a “new tactic” (in Kavanaugh’s words) who’d been effectively duped by more powerful figures into wrecking her life. Still, in contrast to Hill’s and Lewinsky’s half-forgotten victimisations, it may now be Ford’s achievement finally to expose the process itself to irreversible public shame.

Where Ken Starr’s career, and those of Hill’s inquisitors, somehow survived their creepy enthusiasm for public sex talk, it is now time for senators, prompted by Ford, who need to explain why, in the US, serious questions about a man’s fitness for high office should repeatedly require a woman to elaborate on sexual experiences or molestation, for the entertainment of the masses, in a roomful of hostile men.

‘We’re in a screwed-up world’: Trump accusers respond to Kavanaugh hearing Read more

Admittedly, the very circumstances in which Ford felt obliged to detail her story left men confessing, on social media, that they had never understood, previously, why assaulted girls and women might not disclose their ordeals in an orderly fashion. As for those whose response to any #MeToo account short of rape has been, “but it wasn’t rape”, this account of what it is to be shoved, groped and pinioned by strong, heavy, drunk men whose intention is to rape, seems also to have achieved some broader understanding of the terror that even non-raped complainants may have lived through and why it stays with them.

Maybe, even if Kavanaugh is, sniffs and all, promoted, Trump’s “I just grab them by the pussy” will sound, henceforth, a bit less locker room. Although nothing can be compensation enough for Dr Ford and her family, the excruciating spectacle also seems to have been vital for the American Bar Association to understand that an assault on that scale is, after all, something worth investigating, even 36 years on.

The reflexive ease with which Kavanaugh’s supporters rejected Ford’s account suggests, however, that in one part of Trump’s constituency, an American’s sacred right to grope is fast acquiring the status of an amendment. If Kavanaugh’s name stays uncleared, his promotion marks the moment when Trump’s free pass on sexual molestation is extended to all Republican dignitaries, including those legislating on women’s physical autonomy.

What other messages, critics of Kavanaugh ask, does his appointment send to impressionable young people? There are so many. But if you thought Trump had voided the word “presidential” of all meaning, take a look at what he’s done to “judicial temperament”.

• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist