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Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifying during his confirmation hearing on Sept. 5.CreditCreditAndrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse â Getty Images
 By Gail Collins


Itâs been a long time since I last thought about the Technical Virgins Association.

The T.V.A. â which is not to be confused with the people who generate electricity in the Tennessee Valley â was a joke my friends and I made up early in our college careers. It referred to the then-popular idea that girls could go as far as they wanted with a boy as long as everything stayed, um, intact.

All of this brings us to Brett Kavanaugh, who appears to have been a T.V.A. member.

âNever had sexual intercourse with anyone in high school?â asked a Fox interviewer. âCorrect,â said a somber Supreme Court nominee, who added that he had maintained that record for âmany years after.â

Except maybe not.

âPerhaps Brett Kavanaugh was a virgin for many years after high school. But he claimed otherwise in a conversation with me during our freshman year in Lawrance Hall at Yale, in the living room of my suite,â tweeted a history professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The professor, Stephen Kantrowitz, said he remembered Kavanaughâs account of losing his virginity distinctly âbecause it was the first time I had had such a conversation with an acquaintance who was not a friend.â

So, people, it sounds as if a young Brett Kavanaugh was bragging â to virtual strangers â about having done the deed. That was, of course, before he was nominated to the Supreme Court and became a charter member of the T.V.A.

Hit Pause on Brett Kavanaugh When it comes to the relationship between men and women, weâve been on a heck of a journey. The sweep of change in my lifetime just knocks me out. First, after a long struggle, the nation accepted the idea that women had the same right to education and job opportunities as men. Then we confronted the fact that if women were going to work in every part of society, shoulder to shoulder with men, we had to do something fast about predatory bosses and male colleagues with grabby hands.

Now, itâs sex outside the workplace. Follow the Kavanaugh story and youâre traveling back to the days when men were supposed to try to go all the way and women were supposed to hold the line. If you failed, he got to boast and you were awarded a scarlet letter.

By the time Kavanaugh was a teenager we had, at least in theory, gotten past that point. Clearly, everybody didnât get the message at Georgetown Prep. And maybe not even today in Washington, D.C.

Where our president, once a proud grabber of private parts, is convinced the charges against Kavanaugh are âa big fat con job.â This was during a press conference in which Donald Trump pointed out that he got 52 percent of womenâs votes, missing the actual number by only 11 percentage points.

And wow, hereâs Representative Kevin Cramer of North Dakota describing the night in which Christine Blasey Ford says Brett Kavanaugh pinned her on a bed and attempted to rip off her clothes:

âThey were drunk. Nothing evidently happened in it at all, even by her own accusation.â

Nothing happened at all, since Kavanaugh lost his grip and Blasey escaped. No penetration, no complaints.

Cramer is, by the way, running for the Senate against Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat generally regarded as vulnerable in Novemberâs election. The Republicans really want to win there, but not enough to nominate a woman themselves.

The party is so embarrassingly short on women in Congress that the Judiciary Committee had to import a âfemale attorneyâ to question Blasey in order to paper over the fact that every single Republican member is a man. (There are only six Republican women in the entire Senate, and you canât expect them to be everywhere.)

That makes a huge difference. Only women can really call up memories like the ones the Kavanaugh hearing is resurrecting â of a double standard so unbreachable Trumpâs imaginary wall pales in comparison.

During his historic Fox interview, Kavanaugh repeatedly urged America to listen to 65 women who knew him in high school and signed a letter âsaying I always treated them with dignity and respect.â One was Renate Schroeder Dolphin, who did not know, when she attested to Kavanaughâs good-guyness, that he had reportedly enjoyed trash-talking about her as a teenager and posed with some fellow football players in a yearbook photo of âRenate Alumni.â

âI pray their daughters are never treated this way,â she told The Times.

You could look upon the Kavanaugh decision as a vote on whether anybodyâs daughters should be treated that way. His critics may not conclusively prove that he sexually assaulted a teenage girl when he was in high school, or drunkenly waved his private parts in a classmateâs face at Yale, or â good Lord this keeps on coming â fed women drugged punch in a prelude to gang rape.

But heâs still a reminder of the bad old days. The Senate could show the country that even though weâve got a president who exemplifies all thatâs depressing and creepy about male attitudes toward women, weâre still moving on.

Kavanaugh isnât on trial for his life. The question at hand is simply whether the country should give him an extraordinary honor and lifetime power to make decisions that will affect everybody in the land.

Itâs perfectly fair to just say no.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: Weâre in Virgin Territory. Order Reprints | Todayâs Paper | Subscribe