The Weekly Screed (#879)

The pathological preppie

by David Benjamin

“What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.”

— Brett Kavanaugh (2015)

“You've got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women.”

— Donald Trump

MADISON, Wis. — Until I moved to Boston, I had little experience with prep school boys. Even those I’d met were atypical. Two were Midwestern hayseeds. One, even worse, was a Jew. But once I landed near Plymouth Rock, I entered an East Coast realm veritably infested with preppies and fratboys. 

I learned that they are both a breed apart and a Petri dish of pathologies. As I’ve studied the progress of Brett Kavanaugh from his days as a political stagehand and mouthpiece for the high and mighty to — almost certainly — a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, I’ve smiled at how classically he manifests the personality distortions ingrained by the all-male preparatory school.

Especially if it’s Catholic.

Especially if the kid is Irish.

It’s possible to recover from an elite male parochial education, but it takes time, uncommon maturity and, almost always, it requires a wife so strong that she can, with her bare hands, rip to shreds the yards and yards of apron string that bind her Catholic preppie’s husband to his mother. 

One of Kavanaugh’s most striking successes has been his ability — for more than 50 years — to present to the world a blank, insipid face suggestive of the choirboy innocence that he probably possessed when he was in grade school at the (all-male) Mater Dei School in high-falutin‘ Bethesda. 

There, it probably wasn’t so troubling that young Brett had virtually no contact with a female human being other than Mom. But as he entered ninth grade at Georgetown Prep, he was enduring — as we all do — a sexual awakening. Suddenly, unlike never before, he was strangely drawn to girls.

However, as far as his eye could see — for four long years of showering and towel-snapping with other boys — there were no girls. He was marooned on an island with Ralph, Jack and Piggy.

One of the more convincing arguments in support of Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual-assault charge against Kavanaugh was TV commentator Lawrence O’Donnell’s reaction to a glowing pro-Kavanaugh letter signed by 65 women who said they knew Brett in high school. O’Donnell, also the product of an all-male Catholic high school, explained that it was impossible for a boy in that environment to know even six girls, much less 65 of ’em.

Girl deprivation during those years of raging pubescence is both mystery and trauma for boys. Boys nurture voluptuous myths and rape fantasies about girls whom they can’t easily compare to reality. Nor is reality so exciting! As the British boys school tradition has shown — with reams of testimony from authors like Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Paul Fussell and Siegfried Sassoon — a cloistered all-male adolescence is a strange mixture of salacious misogyny and latent homosexuality. Without routine daily contact with subjective girls, boys objectify, defining girls either as goddesses or prey. They perpetuate an ethos of hyper-masculinity and a vernacular of sexist contempt.

In the film, Lords of Discipline, set in an all-male military school, an early scene depicts four roommates running the gamut of their sexual education. While one roomie treats a photo of his virgin sweetheart as a sacred object, he and his friends riotously reduce all other women to a set of genital fractions — pussy, poontang, tits and ass. 

They see girls thus, without guilt or self-awareness, because they don’t hardly know any girls. They won’t know any, ’til they get out.

Moving to Boston, I was surprised — even shocked — by this level of  demeaning vulgarity in adult male discourse, particularly among alumni of Catholic boys schools. I learned that disgustingness about girls, from boys who’ve been cut off from girls, is a sort of code. It denotes manhood in a world where the only prospect for romance is to love another man. 

No wonder then that a kid like 17-year-old Brett, confined exclusively among boys for almost all of his conscious life, would be awkward and crude in his approach to girls like Chrissy Blasey. His charm would be further compromised by his habituation to another prep-school tradition — amateur drinking.

Ill-equipped — or too drunk — to make conversation with a member of an alien, inferior species, what else to do but throw her down and jump on top of her?

I figure that Brett Kavanaugh did to Christine exactly what she said he did, because — except for her patriotism — she has no reason to bring it up, re-live the nightmare and submit herself to a tendentious third-degree by dismissive geezers like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch.

I also figure that alleged witness Mark Judge was there and remembers. I figure he’ll never say a word against Kavanaugh because preppie ethics are similar to those of Bloods, Crips, Mafia button men and Donald Trump.

I figure there’s enough preppie in the the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to squeeze Brett through the charade and install a second sexual predator on a Supreme Court where once, long ago, jurists like Louis Brandeis, Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren and Sandra Day O’Connor served. 

The silver lining is this. Most Catholic boys-school alumni, despite all their dirty talk, never try to rape anyone. Most of them either grow up and get civilized by their wives, or they move in permanently with Mom.

I guess our best hope is that Justice Kagan or Sotomayor, or maybe Ruth Bader Ginsberg, might look to Brett, even a little bit, like his mother.