BMOC

Yeah, I knew Brett Kavanaugh in high school. We all knew this guy in high school.  He was the class president, the quarterback of the football team, the captain of the debate squad. He wore a letterman jacket and spent a lot of time and money on his hair.  We called them jocks and "soshies" (short for social), and they occupied the farthest end of the social hierarchy from the freaks I ran with. We even had a name for them: BMOC, Big Man On Campus. These boys strode the halls like they owned the school because they did. They stood in judgement of all who inhabited their world. They decreed who belonged and who didn't.

They called us faggot, dyke, whore, pig. They threw things at us as we walked by. They tripped some kid in the cafeteria and screamed with laughter when he landed hard and his tray went flying.  That laughter, like the baying of rabid coyotes, it still rings in my ears. They didn’t fuck with me as much as the quieter kids, I was too big, too loud, too angry to qualify as an easy mark. But, they would murmur among themselves and hoot their hideous laughter as I walked by. I didn't need to hear their words to know what they were saying.

When they got drunk, watch out; that's when things turned really ugly. Weekend keggers at someone's house, the parents out of town, classic rock blasting on the stereo, some girl puking in the bushes. Wasted frat boys making themselves as big as possible, generating as much noise as possible, howling giant primates careening through an over-sized suburban home like coked up rats pinballing off the walls of a maze.

We were drunk too, we girls. We drank Boones Farm Wine or Jack and Coke until we didn’t know any better, or at least didn’t care. Girls like me, we were so desperate for male attention, so hungry for their approval. Male attention was how we measured our worth and it was the only marker that mattered.  If you were pretty, rich, graceful, if you had a certain quality, it was easy to attract a lot of male attention. From what I hear, that kind of attention carried its own costs, but at least you were on the inside and at the top. For the rest of us, for girls like me, male attention was harder to obtain, but it was always the most important goal. I sought that attention like a diver seeks oxygen. I needed it.  I catered to male egos, flattered their vanity, relented to their drunken aggression, acquiesced to their clumsy moves. This is their world and that’s how women like me live in it. We mold ourselves to fit. I had to squeeze myself down, shut myself up, make myself sweeter, lighter, less intimidating. Liquor did the trick. I drank until I felt like I was seen, heard, valued, because desire equaled value. I drank until I found myself in some dark bedroom or cramped back seat with a sloppy, out-of-control animal who had never heard the word “no” in his life. It was not in his lexicon. It didn’t apply to him.    

I don’t apologize. I was just trying to survive the only way I knew how.  Sometimes I felt powerful. Sometimes I felt beautiful.  But, mostly I just felt used. 

Yeah, I knew Brett Kavanaugh in high school. Not him, but dozens just like him. We all did. When I think of that entitled, self-satisfied, racist, misogynistic, elitist frat boy on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, it makes me literally sick.