Testifying to Perfection

For most of my writing life, I’ve been plagued with an unrealistic belief that success is only possible if my work is perfect, or near perfect.  A fool’s errand, to be sure.   Since this ridiculous belief, at its worst, causes so much mental anguish, I’ve often wondered where it came from and why it continues to have such a persistent hold.   My friends and family can attest that I’m not a perfectionist and I don’t hold myself to standards of perfection in other areas of my life.   It’s only in my professional life – which is a public life — where unrealistic demands on my performance dog me.

Last month, watching the public testimony of Professor Christine Blasey Ford, I observed a woman attempting perfection.   And it has helped me understand some of the covert forces at play.

Credibility was the goal of her testimony.   To achieve credibility, she had to tell her story and answer questions with a perfectly calibrated demeanor.   There was no margin for error.   Her tone of voice couldn’t be too loud or too emotional.   Her facial expressions had to show some emotion but not be too expressive.   The slightest deviation from perfect comportment threatened to invite an onslaught of condemnation.   Words like “hysterical,” “emotional,” “unhinged” lurked in the wings, ready to make a quick entrance if she made the mistake of speaking too loudly, too angrily.   But by the close of her testimony, it was clear that Dr. Blasey Ford had succeeded despite the constraints of testifying-while-female.

Kavanaugh testified under no such similar constraints.   He was afforded a wide berth.   In his opening statement he yelled, sneered, cried, ranted.   In his responses to Democratic Senators, he was pugilistic, evasive, and misleading.  He also lied.  But none of it ultimately mattered.   His demeanor and tone were rationalized away.

The playing field was wildly tilted in Kavanaugh’s favor for much of the same reason, twenty seven years ago, that it was tilted in Clarence Thomas’s favor.   Nothing much has changed in a generation.   Testifying-while-male confers authority even when credibility is lacking.

The rationalization Republican Senators used to confer credibility on Kavanaugh’s testimony is worth noting.   Many GOP Senators told the media that they too would sound angry if they had been unfairly accused of sexual assault, if they were innocent. Of course this begs the question, if Kavanaugh’s ranting is what an innocent man sounds like, then what does a guilty man sound like?

And not one Republican Senator said, “If I had been sexually assaulted, I would’ve sounded just like Dr. Blasey Ford.”  It says something tragic about our world that that sentence rings silly.   Empathizing with a woman isn’t even on the menu.

Male reality remains consensus reality, a place where there’s little room for the reality of female experience.  And this is where I believe my forlorn strategy for perfection comes from.   There’s no place for me.   My body and mind know this at a very deep level.   I know, no matter what I do publicly, I will always be evaluated through a male lens, a distorted, biased perspective that discounts and devalues my experience even before I act.   And there’s no escape because I can’t be anything but female.   So perfection, an impossible requirement, becomes an attempt to compensate for being female.   And it doesn’t work.  Just like it didn’t work for Professor Blasey Ford.

After the hearing, I turned on CNN where a panel of pundits was asked to weigh in.  CNN Chief Legal Analyst, Jeff Toobin, started on an ironic note, saying “I’m going to give you my most sophisticated legal opinion,” and then his tone darkened and he stated solemnly, “Women always lose.  That’s my analysis.  Women always lose.”   A stark, depressing indictment that right now feels more true than untrue.  Two women on the same CNN panel jumped in, immediately disagreeing with Toobin, protesting vociferously by alluding to a couple of feminist victories from decades ago.   I wished I could be as hopeful as they were but their dissent possessed a “They-doth-protest-too-much” ring to it, as if the truth was too much to bear, and must be shooed away.

Right now it does seem like women always lose, that the obstacles against women remain overwhelming, that the game is rigged, that justice is a sham.   And the attempt to overcome being female, through perfection, is a pathetic strategy, albeit the only one available to Blasey Ford.  It’s a strategy aimed to keep women hoping that there is actually something that can be done about being female, some perfect testimony, some brave act, good grades, a college degree, anything, something, but in fact, it only reinforces how the entire system remains unrelentingly hostile.

In this environment hope feels more like a necessary delusion to keep one’s spirit up rather than a reality around which to rally.   Conditions may change and I should always leave open that possibility.  But I don’t believe a substantive realignment of the world – one where a woman could succeed with the same appalling imperfections as Kavanaugh — is anywhere in our near future.