Brett Kavanaugh Is Nice. That Doesn’t Mean He’s Not Sexist.
We’ve confused “sexism” with meanness — and sexists routinely benefit from our confusion
Brett Kavanaugh is probably a sweet guy. That’s what I’ve picked up from the various op-eds about his “character,” several of them written by female acquaintances. In the Washington Post, Julie O’Brien praises Kavanaugh’s “personal kindness” as a “carpool dad,” noting that “he coaches not one but two girls’ basketball teams. His positive attitude and calm demeanor make the game fun and allow each player to shine.” In the Wall Street Journal, Amy Chua praises his “decency” toward women, collecting a fistful of testimonies from the (female) clerks she’s referred to his office: “I’ve never seen him be rude to anyone in the building,” one says.
It’s good to hear that Kavanaugh hasn’t cussed out any janitors lately. But there is something disingenuous here. When it comes to judging Kavanaugh’s qualifications for the Supreme Court, the writers demur. Yet we’re clearly supposed to conclude something about his jurisprudence from these testimonies, or there would be no reason to publish them. Most likely, we’re supposed to look at these stories (note the female bylines) and conclude that Kavanaugh — who will almost certainly cast the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade — is too nice to be sexist.
The problem is that niceness and sexism are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of perfectly nice, kind, polite men do and say sexist things. Sexism is not merely a behavioral problem; it is a political ideology aimed at restricting the rights of women. The only people who benefit, when we conflate rudeness and sexism, are the sexists themselves — which is why they work so hard to promote that confusion.
This problem isn’t specific to Kavanaugh. Conservative politicians have a history of cultivating paternal, kindly images to deflect attention from their lethally anti-woman policies. Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s previous Supreme Court appointee, was also given the nice-guy treatment — he was a “decent man” who was “not fiery or pugnacious,” a “mild-mannered good boy” with an “open and gracious personality” — despite the fact that his law students claimed he’d taught them that women got pregnant to scam their employers out of…
