Vanity Fair interviewed several women who attended Holton Arms at the same time as Christened Blasey Ford.
It was and is an elite prep school.
“Ford’s story ignited a national news cycle. More locally, it lit up the Holton alumnae network almost immediately, in part because the community is so tightly knit: each class is made up of about 65 young women, many of whom are still in touch, some of whom still live in the area. Many of the 1,800-odd members of the private Holton alumnae Facebook group immediately rallied behind their fellow classmate, whose story has dominated the national discourse—even as it spurs an equally crucial dialogue in the suburb she once called home.
“To many Holton students, Ford’s description of the party she attended in 1982 felt familiar. Beginning in middle school, there were parties with young men from surrounding schools like Georgetown Prep, Landon, and St. Albans every Friday and Saturday night, at big houses set back from winding, dimly lit streets. There was money to get alcohol. Parents were absent. The homes had pools and movie theaters and sweeping yards. They were teenagers in a candy store. “It was a highly professional culture of parents, many of whom self-selected those schools to be a big babysitter . . . a lot of them just parked the kids and left,” one 1980s Landon alum who socialized with Ford in high school told me. A woman who graduated from Holton in 1988, and lived down the street from Ford, recalled students from the boys’ schools pulling up to parties with duffel bags full of alcohol. “I never went to a party where there wasn’t alcohol; it was a drunk fest,” she said. “You’re living in a bubble where a lot of the families are exceedingly wealthy, a lot of parents are not tuned in to their kids, and, a lot of times, parents were away and the mice would play.””
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just a thought about the comments that have Kavanaugh in them and that go to moderation. LinkedIn allows a person to view who looks at his/her page. I don’t know how one gains that access. Could an entity be allowing a person or persons to see Ravitch commenters’ posts based on key words or, by commenter name?
Thus far, all comments that include the word “Kavanaugh” are put into moderation. Not by me.
Mark Zuckerberg might be behind censoring content that hurts Kavanaugh.
That is really alarming. I think most readers understand that you need to breathe and have a life beyond this blog, hence the need for you to put comments in a holding line.
Now I wonder if there are other trigger words that kick a comment to a person or an algorithm that “decides” moderations. I also wonder if other WordPress users have noticed this.
Every woman on Diane’s site this is a MUST READ link about the 1980s Boys Will Be Boys, but at age 76, I am here to tell you all this kind of unsupervised partying happened in other wealthy suburbs too, like on the North Shore Chicago area and not just involving private schools, but public schools in super wealthy areas with similar mansions along Lake Michigan. Probably all over USA and I am talking the 1960s. But likely before that!
I find it absolutely revolting that so many of these privileged children can waste their opportunities at school and still know that they will become the elite with power.
My parents didn’t have money for gas to even go to downtown Boise unless it was absolutely necessary. [It was about a 15 minute ride.] I had scholarships, loans and worked to get through college and never had any money to spend on booze, movies, food at restaurants [ate dorm food] or any activity outside of class work. I have an appreciation for fairness, compassion and sympathy for those who have been abused.
K had it all and feels nothing. It is a show. I am becoming more and more concerned about the effects of wealth.
“…a lot of parents are not tuned in to their kids, and, a lot of times, parents were away and the mice would play.”
Forgive me for the length… for posting theMOST IMPORTANT words from the link…. BUT as a journalist I get many feeds, and have read hundreds of opinions and punditry on this extraordinary moment. I BELIEVE that after all the finger -pointing and drama is over— THIS IS WHAT WE MUST GRASP!
If YOU trust MY voice… here it is, from the nY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/opinion/sunday/sex-education-ethics-assault-boys.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
For me this final statement says what must be done:
“Rejecting Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court would be one way to let them know their actions matter. On an individual level, adults need to talk to boys early and often about sexual ethics, gender dynamics, consent, pleasure, healthy relationships and the risks to them of mixing sex and alcohol. As challenging as it can be, boys need to learn to stand up against sexism when they see or hear it, despite the potential social cost. That education can never begin too early!
But it is this that reverberated with me- who was born in 1941 and have endured the entire spectrum– were the words of this woman who interviewed high school & college-age men for a book on their experience of physical and emotional intimacy.and who said: “I’m not convinced they are always reliable narrators of their own experience.”
She goes on to say:
i”At times, I can almost see the shadow of a girl behind them as they speak — a girl who is furious, traumatized, grieving over harms big and small that the boy in question simply didn’t recognize, or didn’t want to.
and…..
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT ‘TAKE-AWAY’ –> “At some point in our conversation, these young men usually referred to themselves as “good guys,” and mostly, I would say, they were. They had also all been duly admonished by some adult in their lives — a parent, a coach — to “respect women.” But that, along with “don’t get anyone pregnant,” was pretty much the totality of their sex education. As one college sophomore said to me, “That’s kind of like telling someone who’s learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course, you think you’re not going to run over an old lady. But you still don’t know how to drive.”
“Although there is now broader understanding that young women are most likely to be assaulted by an acquaintance, friend or date, no one — and especially not parents of boys — wants to make a true reckoning of what that means. We still want our rapists to be monsters, exceptions, degenerates whose expulsion from the community solves the problem. The image of the stranger jumping out of a dark alley has been replaced by Brock Turner, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby — men whose behavior is patently egregious: men who are clearly not “good guys.”
“In a quick, informal survey on Thursday, some of my interview subjects honed in on Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that Brett Kavanaugh placed his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming. They were disgusted. They said that neither they nor any of their friends would ever do such a thing, and I believe them; but that repellent detail also allowed them to distance themselves from the more common coercive or nonconsensual behavior that too many young men do engage in.
“You never think that you’re part of the problem,” a college junior in Chicago told me when explaining why he’d engaged in only a single conversation with another boy about the implications of the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. “It’s always someone else that’s the bad guy, so you never think about addressing something that doesn’t concern you.”
An influential 2002 study on campus rape has not helped matters. It reported that 90 percent of assaults were committed by a small group of serial perpetrators, allowing most parents to breathe a sigh of relief. But that statistic has since been debunked. A more recent analysis of the same research, co-written by Mary Koss, a University of Arizona professor who published the first national study on campus rape in 1987, found such men to be a small minority of offenders.
Rather than a deviant’s expression of pathology, assault among adolescents is more likely to be a crime of opportunity. Boys do it because they can: because they are oblivious, because they are ignorant, because they are impulsive, because they have not learned to see girls and women as fully human. And yes, science has confirmed what common sense presumes: Boys are much more likely to rape when they are drunk. And the more they drink, the more aggressive they are, and the less aware of their victims’ distress. By contrast, sober guys not only are less sexually coercive but also will more readily intervene to prevent assaults by others.
A boy who assaults once in high school may not do it again, which in some ways is good to hear. At the same time, that means a seemingly “good guy” may well do a bad thing. A very bad thing. And afterward it is completely plausible for him to get away without apologizing, facing consequences, making amends. The monster-good guy dichotomy contributes to his denial: He could not possibly really be a rapist because that would make him a “monster,” and he is a “good guy.” So he rationalizes, forgets, goes on to professional success and even a happy marriage. Meanwhile, he may have derailed the life of another human being, causing her years, decades, of pain and trauma.
I HAVE TOW SONS NOW 48$ 50 YRS OLD, so the following REVERBERATED too:
“It is natural for parents to think their own sons would be incapable of sexual misconduct, but that does not absolve them of responsibility for educating their boys. Yet according to a survey of more than 3,000 18- to 25-year-olds published last year by the Making Caring Common project, which is part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, more than 60 percent of respondents had never had a single conversation with their parents about how to be sure that your partner wants to be having sex with you. A similar share had never been told about “the importance of not pressuring someone to have sex with you.”
“Essentially, said Richard Weissbourd, the lead author of the survey, parents have abdicated responsibility for talking with their children, especially their boys, about sexual ethics or emotional intimacy. “If you ask many parents whether it’s really important that your son has a lot of integrity and is a good person, they would absolutely say yes,” he said. “But if you were to ask, ‘Have you talked to your son in a concrete way about the many ways you can degrade women?’ Most parents, I think, would say no.”
“Other research has found that parents are vastly more likely to talk to their daughters about sexual readiness and disease protection, perhaps because they believe girls are more vulnerable, emotionally as well as physically. But that leaves boys to learn appropriate behavior from one another as well as the digital street corner.”
“In locker rooms, fraternity houses and other all-male spaces, they hear that sex is about conquest, about asserting masculinity through domination of girls’ bodies. “It’s not like guys say, ‘Dude, I made her feel great!’” a high school junior in New England told me. “That never happens. It’s always, ‘Bro! I slammed her!’” They’ve banged, they’ve nailed, they’ve smashed, they’ve torn up, they’ve destroyed. It all sounds less that they’ve had sex than that they’ve just returned from a visit to a construction site.”
“Boys grow up in a world in which women are either hyper-sexualized or absent. In the G-rated movies little boys watch, according to researchers at the University of Southern California, fewer than a third of the speaking characters are female — a figure that has held steady over the 10 years it has been tracked — and the percentage of skin women show is similar to that in R-rated movies (and that’s not because R-rated movies have gotten more conservative).”
“By their teen years, according to survey results released this month by PerryUndem, a research and polling firm, about half of boys say that several times a week or more they see female characters in video games presented as “hot,” as well as “unrealistic images” of female bodies, or “women whose bodies are more important than their brains or abilities” on TV and in movies and videos. Frankly, 50 percent seems low — and “unrealistic portrayals” an almost comic euphemism.
“These days, many parents (myself included) have been vigilant, nearly obsessive, about providing our daughters with positive images of women to counteract the incessant messages telling them their greatest value comes from their body and appearance. We buy them “Nevertheless, she persisted” T-shirts. We provide books and videos featuring estimable female characters. We encourage bravery, intelligence, resilience. We point out the misogyny of the culture and engage them in media critique from the time they can say “Snow White.”
That has had an impact: Most of the young women in the PerryUndem survey believed that while sexism was still rampant, there were “many ways to be a girl.” Still, that is only half the equation, and I fear that the quest for equality — including a reduction of violence against women — will stall if we don’t start providing more powerful counter-narratives about women’s worth, particularly in sexual encounters, to boys.”
The comment that many “parents, many of whom self-selected those schools to be a big babysitter” resonated with me based on my experience as an independent school teacher. While that certainly wasn’t the case for the vast majority of students, some really fit that description.
I live one county over from all of this and I can tell you that it is still like this today. I have a kid who play sports with some of these wealthy kids and the parents are quite indignant about our drinking laws in the state. The parents are just as much to blame because they are the ones that provide the alcohol. Having to go on week end hockey tournaments with these parents is quite an eye opening experience.
I am NOT speechless, just very, very sad for those rich kids. Look at that dump.
Didn’t Kavanaugh break the law just by drinking beer under age 21? He already admitted that much…
Máté Wierdl: I believe the drinking age was 18 and he started drinking at 17. I guess if you’re wealthy enough, this doesn’t matter.
Federal funding for charter schools started even earlier in the Clinton administration.
I think it was 1994.
It is now $440 Million a year. For a sector that is by no means needy.
And that $440 million is just the money from the federal government. Billions are being sucked out of state revenues that should have gone to the real public schools, the schools that are the same or better than most of the misleading charters, the schools we don’t have to worry about going out of business and closing their doors because they went broke due to owners sucking out too much profits.
Even if BK had been caught, who would have been punished: him or whoever bought and/or sold the beer for him and the other underage drunks?
Thanks. Actually, I just watched John Oliver’s piece on the K hearings, and, as often, I found his summary better than any of the articles in leading papers.
I mean, ‘Devil’s Triangle’ is a drinking game?!
Even if they were all “drinking games” what does that say about BK’s quantity consumed. I swear he sounded like he had a drink or two before the hearing. His voice sounded like so many I’ve heard after a few when the buzz is on and before you drink enough to be blind blogger drunk.
BK has been cursing all his life on the merits of his family pedigree. He is not qualified to pick up trash. If he started life at the bottom instead of closer to the top, he’d probably be working a poverty wage job or be in prison a broken drunk and drug addict.