Sexual stigma is out-dated and a source of criminal level behavior. It creates opportunities for profit at the same time as it motivates rape and murder. Once based on fertility so that it shamed sterility, now babies have become a commodity for surrogate mothers, gay partners, and sterile professionals. A nearly irresistible force in some emotional lives, it can also be nearly missing in otherwise satisfactory lives.
We've begun the try to create human beings from cells not meant to be germ cells, much less the frozen raw materials: ova and sperm. We're told that male fertility in some countries has sunk by 50% and also told that a pill that sustains erections by dilating blood vessels (Viagra) will also give you a very bad headache and -- if you have the wrong heart condition -- kill you dead.
The difference between male and female average ages of death diverge everywhere, a difference that appears most obvious in countries that don't value little girls enough to feed them. Or finds young men in opposition to the tyrants, to be so dangerous that they must be slaughtered en masse as rebel soldiers before they are even adolescent.
Elite privilege, whether based on money, family, credentials, or wartime, has always traveled from high male to low female -- an entitlement to being the penetrator, often backed up by a stronger physique or helpful pals. To even the level of force, women must resort to bear spray, sirens, knives and possibly handguns, but they don't usually think of that at an academic party. A new technological defence is the small cell phone. After the fact, DNA evidence can be powerful.
Mixing secrecy with sex is traditional, but it is not just the dark alley that offers secrecy. To have info like names, car license numbers, addresses, phone numbers, property (wallets!) and friendship circles works, When attacks reach the criminal level, they are valuable evidence. Events should be written down or recorded, repeated to friends and authorities, and kept safe. If secrecy is a power element, identification is the counter.
Alcohol and drugs play into this, dropping cultural moral inhibitions in both sexes, though it's a mistake to misjudge the level of not-caring on either side. The element of death is also here, either because of unleashed emotion or because both substances can be lethal in the wrong amounts. The worst unconsciousness is not drugs but social denial, often controlled by class, even the classes who are bequeathed entitlement. It is not the sex itself that is immoral, but its use to oppress others.
Kavanaugh, to whatever degree he has any consciousness of anything but himself, can't have good judgment because he can't grasp the facts. This is a deadly fault in a judge. It's not that he doesn't know what women feel, it's that he doesn't know that they DO feel. (I worry about his wife and daughters.) Morality to him is whatever the boss wants.
He seems to think that the slang in his yearbook is inoffensive if it's about drinking. He thinks that sexual meanings would be worse -- but a good argument could be made for the opposite, that self-destructive substance abuse might be worse than talking dirty. (We don't know what he actually did, but our imaginations quickly supply mental images of him boofing, for example.) Naming people means taking little care not to hurt others. But this sniggering boasting, whatever it's about, is clearly meant to make him seem more powerful. He doesn't understand that to others this sort of graffiti is childish. At this point he is supposed to be ready for Yale. Yet much of his frustration seems to be due to failure to understand basic cultural standards. He really doesn't know where he falls short.
Now I'll turn to the sneering at Avenatti. I get impatient with the use of "porn" as a signal of decadent character. "Porn" is highly variable and one style is not equivalent to another. Cosplay is not the same as fisting. Getting turned on by imagining you've been swallowed by a whale is not the same as being actually whipped. If you watch the movie called "Kink," you'll get an idea what I'm talking about. (It's mainstream enough to watch on Netflix.) I would suspect that some people watching this hearing got turned on by watching Kavanaugh bawl without a hankie. Sex is very plastic and not always a matter of anatomy, but often about weakness. Crying is weak, and a gift to cartoonists.
The rules for lawyers who are hired by people who perform burlesque shows are the same as rules for lawyers defending anyone else, even for murder or treason. That's the whole point. The lawyer doesn't at all need to be disreputable, although Avenatti is pretty sexy to some people and not everyone thinks sexwork is immoral. On the other hand, porn has been an aspect of money as long as there has been money. Also a familiar corruption of lawyers and much of the law.
Kavanaugh has been a flunky, a dependent, a version of a "coffee boy" who carries things around and keeps them organized. He was first nominated by George Bush for the D.C. Circuit of the US Court of Appeals and stalled for three years over charges of partisanship. That is, he could not make the case that he would be fair. "Kavanaugh had the most or second-most conservative voting record on the D.C. Court, in every policy area, in the period 2003 to 2018." That means he continued to keep his thumb on the scales.
Sex is an effective distractor and deceiver. Kavanaugh's past sex life seems to me criminal but trivial. It's his political life that discredits him far more. In a thread on Twitter that I can't find now (is it removed?) the speculation was made that Kavanaugh or his patrons merely has strong material for blackmail. The idea is that Justice Kennedy's son, the one Trump audibly complimented in the reception line at his inauguration, was Trump's "man" at Deutsche Bank, the main source of Trump's Russian "loans." Kennedy was "owned" through his son, a Mafia strategy.
The description was detailed, believable, and a version of treason that ranks high on the list of many. It includes efforts by leaders to dissuade Trump from his fixation on Kavanaugh. I suspect the FBI and Mueller both know all about it. Trump is "owned" by competing forces. He doesn't consider sex a very important issue and in the context of this, it isn't. This theory of collusion explains quite a lot.
Making sex of all kinds except those involving force or deception will take a weapon off the table for a lot of people. But for politicians the real source of corruption is money and power. Sex is only a route to children who can become surrogates. An old man's sex is money and power.
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