Confessions of a former Deke

I was a Deke. I'm not proud of it. But I think it's important to acknowledge the experience, what it meant to me at the time, what I learned from it, and what it means to me today, looking back on that time now, as a father to one son and two daughters, during this period in our history when gender roles are bubbling up to the surface as one of the fault lines along which we are fracturing.

I was coming to college from a boarding school that had gone coed shortly before I arrived. I was a runner, cross country and track, with good enough times by my junior year in the mile and half mile to make the coaches list at Yale.

I think I spoke to three girls in my three years at boarding school. I wasn't a football or hockey player. Not a stud. Maybe a total of maybe five very short-lived conversations with the opposite sex. Seriously deprived was how I felt. But not entitled. There is a difference, a big difference. The summer before Yale I had spent working on the Cape. I think I lost my virginity, I'm not sure. I was drinking heavily that summer, and that drinking continued my freshman year. I think her name was Margy, and I think it was a beach party at her house on the back side of Chatham. Anyway...

I was flattered to be tapped. It was a new experience. There were a lot of boys like me, former high school athletes, playing sports at some level at Yale, boys who valued physicality, prowess, male camaraderie, and oh, yes, drinking beer -- as a now ratified Supreme Court Justice named Brett Kavanaugh has noted. We all liked beer, some excessively so. I was one of those. What I was not was a misogynist.

At first it was fun, the weekly keg parties. I just ignored the occasional side swipes at the expense of a black person, some anti-semitic joke, or snide remarks about women. But by my sophomore year, the toxicity got impossible to avoid. That year Jody Foster had matriculated at Yale. She was a star, and some of the older bros got the idea of stealing her underwear. What an awesome prank. Not.

It wasn't just a prank; it was clear that it meant more to them than just a silly prank at the expense of some celebrity status chick. This was an attempt to demean and defame, and now I could suddenly see. I was woke. There was something more at play here, some resentment, some need to punish that I just didn't share. Women were a stand in for all the people who had a step on them. This was a pack mentality, bringing down the game by hounding, some primeval reenactment that was just out of place at Yale. Not my pack, not my game. Quite the contrary.

I stopped going to the keg parties. I suppose I could have burnt my jockstrap on the sidewalk outside the hall on York Street were they were held on Thursday nights as a more formal gesture of renunciation, but I didn't think of that.

Life went on. I learnt a lot more about men and women. I'm still learning, of course. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings brought back a lot of the memories of those college days. You can't judge someone for the peccadilloes of a misspent youth. But you can judge someone for not having learned what respect and empathy means over the course of an adult life.

I actually believe Kavanaugh maybe has learned from his past. Maybe he is a better man now. I hope so. For all of our sakes, our sons and our daughters.