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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 November 2024
There is nothing like the sound of women really laughing. The roaring laughter of women is like the roaring of the eternal sea. […] [T]his laughter is the one true hope, for as long as it is audible there is evidence that someone is seeing through the Dirty Joke.
Mary Daly, Gyn/ecology (1990: 17)Laughter's the best medicine, they say. I don’t. I reckon penicillin might give it the nudge.
Hannah Gadsby, Nanette (2018b)On 27 September 2018, Dr Christine Blasey Ford testified to the US Senate Judiciary Committee that she had been the victim of sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge at a high school summer house party in 1982. Ford alleged that an intoxicated Kavanaugh and Judge trapped her in an upstairs bedroom, pinned her on a bed, covered her mouth, groped her and tried to remove her clothing. Ford recalled not being able to breathe and believing that the young men were about to rape her (The Washington Post 2018). Asked by Senator Patrick Leahy to identify the strongest memory she had of the assault, Ford delivered a startling response:
Ford: Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the laugh – the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.
Leahy: You’ve never forgotten that laughter. You’ve never forgotten them laughing at you.
Ford: They were laughing with each other.
Leahy: And you were the object of the laughter?
Ford: I was, you know, underneath one of them while the two laughed, two friend – two friends having a really good time with one another.
Drawing on her training as a psychologist, Ford explained that the laughter of Kavanaugh and Judge – not the physical attack or her own feelings of fear or pain – etched itself into her memory most permanently. Without further prompting, Ford recalled this ‘uproarious laughter’ several more times over the course of the hearing, describing how Kavanaugh and Judge were ‘drunkenly laughing during the attack’ and how she ‘could hear them talking as they went down the stairwell, they were laughing …’.
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