Brett Kavanaugh and the Revealing Logic of ‘Boys Will Be Boys’
There’s been a lot of talk, over the weekend, about youthful indiscretion—about kids being kids, about boys being boys, about the liminal space that separates adulthood and its stark accountabilities from the heady years that precede them. The discussion’s most recent round has come because, on Sunday, a research psychologist and professor named Christine Blasey Ford revealed that she was the author of the letter that had been sent to Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Anna Eshoo earlier this summer: a document addressing the character of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
In the letter, Ford—she is speaking publicly only after an initial, and , reluctance to come forward—alleges that Kavanaugh, when he was a 17-year-old in the early 1980s, sexually assaulted her. She was 15 at the time. She alleges further—the , as they will be with
