Ok, I got high-jacked from writing silly verses (actually I am finishing up lead sheets of my songs before the table read, but that music stuff is pretty fun too.)

Men, here's the thing...We don't hate you. We have never hated you. Even - and this is on us - when you got drunk and incredibly stupid.

I saw my mother help my drunk teenage brother crawl out of the car he had just driven home. I watched her lift my dad from the floor after he fell in his drunken vomit. I did similar things. I said I was driving when my stoned boyfriend wrecked my parents' car. The lesser drunk, I drove shit-faced men home routinely. I rescued a guy friend with epilepsy who took acid and had a thirty minute seizure. This is what we do.

We have a song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDnlU6rPfwY

Up on Cripple Creek she sends me, If I spring a leak she mends me, I don't have to speak she defends me, A drunkard's dream if I ever did see one!

We have a movie: Leaving Las Vegas

We have a book: Women Who Love Too Much

,

So yes, that's "on us" to be naive enough to think we could change you. Oh hell yes. 

I am mentioning all this because - oh so predictably! - the Kavanaugh hearing seems to have unearthed new victims and they are not women but men who have their panties twisted because they feel vulnerable, I guess. 

And this is a good thing. 

Not because we hate you, but because it's a human condition and women have known it since, well, before our ancestors stood upright. 

It's part of our - women's - physiology, of course. We carry on the species, so yes, we were dragged into caves or under bushes or behind trees where our screams wouldn't be heard. And that cave-mentality continues even to today, where some (likely drunk) men think that what they want (from women) is their right to have. Yes, the brutality of it IS archaic, I know. But we all still have that tiny brain stem to blame. The thing is that we have also have thousands of years of evolution and the glorious functioning of the rest of our brains; we can choose to not be apes. (Apologies to all earlier primates.)

So we have all shared a role in this and what's appropriate - now - is that we ALL acknowledge it. 

In a nutshell, here's what we - I - would have preferred to hear from Brett Kavanaugh...

"Christine, yes, I remember you. We were not close friends, but I do remember you. I have hazy memories of those days but I did drink a lot at those parties. We had drinking games where the idea was to get as drunk as possible. If I forced myself upon you, I am so sorry. Those aren't details I recall - I have no memory of what you have described  - but I understand that someone sexually assaulted you.  I want to help you in any way, but more importantly, I need to be certain of myself - of who I am or who I could be with enough booze. Maybe a lie detector test or an FBI investigation or interrogations of every one of our friends from back then will give you and me some measure of comfort, and IF a drunken stupid me did this to you, I need to know for sure."

So is that hard?

(Please, please, please, please forgive me; but I MUST end on a lighter note.)

"That's what she said."

I