Wow
In the early ninteen-sixties, the journalist Sally Quinn was a twenty-year-old sophomore at Smith College when she met Tower at a cocktail party given by her parents. In a memoir, “Finding Magic,” published last year, Quinn recounted how, after the party, Tower asked her to lunch on the Hill, a date that was postponed to dinner. He attempted to rape her in the back seat of a taxi afterward. Quinn described how she was in shock, how she pleaded with him, “Senator, Senator, please stop,” and how she begged the cab driver, who realized what was happening, and hurried her to her parents’ home. “Overwhelmed with guilt and shame,” she told no one about it for years. When Tower was nominated for the Pentagon job, in 1989, Quinn was a famous journalist married to Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post, when two F.B.I. agents knocked on her door and asked about the incident. Quinn refused to talk to them. She did not believe her account would remain confidential. Besides, she had no corroboration, no proof. Who would believe her.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/none-of-this-was-fair-the-kavanaugh-nomination-marks-the-triumph-of-trumpism-on-capitol-hill-susan-collins
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Dr. Anita Hill was a highly accomplished farmer's daughter, the youngest in a very large family with no status who,had achieved academic status for herself. She was dismissed and vilified.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is a highly accomplished woman whose high- status parents were in the Country Club set, private schools, exclusive colleges. She was dismissed and has received death threats.
Sally Quinn, well, see above. She would not speak because she knew she would be dismissed.
The only thing they really have in common is that they are women up against powerful men.
No matter the status (high or low) of our husbands and fathers, no matter the extent of our personal accomplishments or lack of them, no matter our color, we are always seen as women first.
And to a very great many men, it allows them to believe they are superior by birthright. That job or place in college or lifetime appointment belongs to them. And if they choose to act as though our bodily autonomy also belongs to them, who are we to object? And right now Trump is speaking directly to those men, educated and uneducated, rich and poor, smooth manners or outright pigs. He wants them to know that he is on their side and that women are against them. He wants them to feel uneasy around women and to fear what women might do to them as men.
