"We didn't call it rape" - a woman's account of her HS years, published 2 days ago in "Slate"

[Leghorn21]

Link to tweet

...I wish I were surprised. A week ago Sunday when Ford first shed her anonymity, detailing her sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh to the Washington Post, I wrote a note in the Facebook alumni group of my high school, National Cathedral School. I told my 1988 classmates that Ford’s story was bringing back disturbing high school memories. Apparently, I was not alone. A lot of women now in their 40s and 50s, who went to these single-sex D.C. prep schools in the 1980s, have been reaching out to each other in fraught emails and chats over the past week. Not only did the Holton-Arms alumnae start a petition in support of Ford, their fellow alum; there’s also one for anyone to sign who survived that toxic time and place.

I don’t personally know Ford now, and I didn’t know her in high school. But as the Holton women wrote, what Ford is alleging is “all too consistent with what we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves.” And what Elizabeth Rasor alleges Mark Judge told her is not foreign to me, either. Whether and how the nation comes to hear more about these specific stories, they have evoked a collective scream.

A large part of my high school experience were the parties at cavernous houses with multiple bedrooms, huge dark basements with enormous sofas and yards, and lots and lots of beer. No parents—thinking back on it now, as a parent myself—were ever around. We traveled in groups and knew never to leave a friend alone at a party, but there was so much drinking that we sometimes lost track of each other. It could be difficult to know where your friends were and—if they were in a room with a boy—what was going on in there.

Every June, we had Beach Week—a tradition also described in a Washington Post piece about Ford—in which teenagers actually rent houses to party at the beach, something I still don’t quite comprehend. I distinctly remember being at a Beach Week party with my then-boyfriend when it dawned on us that there was a drunk girl in a room down the hall, and boys were “lining up” to go in there and, presumably, have their way with her. We didn’t know for sure, but my boyfriend and my friend’s boyfriend went to interrupt it and sent her on her way down the stairs. All I remember about her is that she was in the class above us and had dark hair. My friend has told me she remembers boys saying, “I’m next,” which was why our boyfriends went to stop it. That was the only time I can clearly remember a situation that was so obviously a “lineup,” as it was referred to by some at school. My friend remembers witnessing another, and though there weren’t lineups of this nature at every party, they happened often enough that we had a term. We didn’t call it rape.

Much more at link:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/09/kavanaugh-judge-prep-school-parties.html

[Ilsa]

1. Lots of men and women need to come forward and vouch

for those telling the truth.

Once when I was at work in an office, a really big guy told the story of breaking up one of these "lineups" in a dorm. It was the 1980s in Texas, I think, or maybe Oklahoma. He pretty much scared anyone who gave him lip. He and a girl took the victim, who was incoherent, to the hospital. That guy was a hero, real man, in my book.

[Leghorn21]

2. I think these stories are about to bubble to the surface as more and more students from back

then get their memories jostled MOST unpleasantly

I had no idea at all, ever, that gang rapes were - apparently - an accepted weekend occurrence - I wonder if it’s still going on???

And yes, that really big guy you speak was a %100 hero, NO QUESTION

[malaise]

3. I heard a guest on one of the programs this morning suggest that the FBI

should investigate them the same way they went after the perpetrators of civil and human rights crimes including murders decades after these crimes were committed.
I thought that was a great suggestion. I suspect that a blind eye was turned given the connections of many of thee youngsters.

[lamp_shade]

4. Kick for visibility.