Newly-minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s close associate Mark Judge has quite the YouTube history. Take a peek behind the curtain… and probably bring a towel.

Though we all may have used whatever means at our disposal to block it out of our memories over the past month, Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court. He demonstrated the noble American goals of gaining one’s donor-funded, elite birthright and, according to his Wall Street Journal op-ed, making Mommy and Daddy proud. It cost only the small price of forcing an entire nation of survivors to futilely dig up, expose, and relive their trauma, while simultaneously further eradicating any sort of respect of the validity of the decisions of a political body whose very functionality depends on that respect. Really, a completely understandable trade-off.


All that is clear, obvious, and tragic; if you think it isn’t, please try again! (Some may use this sentence to cast doubt on my persuasive writing skills, but let’s remember I used my persuasive writing assignment in elementary school to convince my parents to buy me an Adventure Quest membership, and it worked, so nice try.) But amidst the ninth circle of Hell that was that entire nomination process, it was easy for some facts and stories to get lost. And some key revelations came forward about Mark Judge, the other Georgetown Prep dudebro implicated in Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations. Judge is the acclaimed author of books such as I Totally Don’t Understand Swing Dancing History But Here’s My Poorly Argued Analogy of Why It Shows the Patriarchy and Reactionary Politics are Good (AKA It Ain’t Got That Swing: The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture, a book Judge issued a homophobic death wish over when someone disagreed with his thesis) and articles such as “Rape Is Bad But Women Are Asking For It With Their Clothes” (AKA “Feminism and Body Language: A Double Standard?”). Mark Judge is also the recipient of, so far, over $110,000 from the “Funding Morality” GoFundMe clone, created under the presumption that Judge is the real victim here. After the allegations, Judge immediately lawyered up, refused to speak publicly, was never subpoenaed, and hid in a beach house in Delaware, because honestly, who ever pays any attention to Delaware? But more importantly, Mark Judge scrubbed his social media accounts. Thankfully, the Internet, specifically archive sites, never forgets, and some of his important social media highlights were brought from obscurity into daylight. Specifically, his YouTube videos. Even more specifically, his fetish videos.


Now, I know what you’re thinking. Are we about to devolve into kink shaming? What does this have to do whatsoever with the nomination process? Is interrogating someone’s sexual proclivities the new low of the Loony Left? As AMP’s resident fetish analyst, I’m happy to answer your inquiries. First of all, of course not; AMP has an official No Kink Shaming policy, except when it’s funny. Second, people’s online engagement with sexual and fetish media is becoming more and more a part of our political discourse, and must be addressed when it appears. Otherwise, we become like Ted Cruz innocuously liking the porn tweet and being ill-prepared for the backlash. Or like Arizona State Representative Kelly Townsend, who this year had no idea what was going on when furries descended onto her Twitter account after she asked what they were, leading not only her feed to be inundated with gifs of cartoon wolves having sex but her to surprisingly overcome all of that, change her profile picture to a fursona someone drew for her, get involved in Furry Politics all weekend, instigate a fight about commissioned fursona art, and eventually distance herself from the entire episode. (To AMP management: You are about to receive a lot of e-mails that not all furry content has to do with sex. I’m so sorry.) Clearly, the intersection of online pornography and fetish content with the political world is happening faster than we can cope, and we must adapt our political discourse accordingly. Third, these were public videos on Mark Judge’s YouTube channel that he voluntarily attached his name and face to, so he obviously has no qualms about public discussion surrounding them. But hell yes, this is the new low of the Loony Left! If you criticize it, I will hide behind the “this is the comedy part of the magazine”, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.


Now, onto the analysis itself. While the videos have hence been aggressively scrubbed from the Internet, when they were first discovered, I took upon myself the sacred and daunting duty of watching (fast-forwarding) through each one. And let me tell you, a novice fetish analyst would be completely ill-prepared for these videos. These videos are not linear; they borrow from a faux-avant-garde script of interposing every few seconds with “aesthetic” cinematography and pans to random rural or urban scenery. The women in question sometimes are only present for a single minute of a six-minute video; I would doubt some were even fetish videos if it weren’t for the occasional horny Facebook and YouTube comments. They are what it would look like if an asshole second-semester film studies undergraduate suddenly awakened sexually after one experimental cinema class and set out to document his newfound bedroom curiosities. These are professionally-shot montages of pages of magazine cartoons, innocuous rooms, pool settings, beaches, restaurants, bathtubs, hotel rooms, women eating Krispy Kreme donuts and posing in said hotel rooms, women eating oysters, scantily clad women smiling, scantily clad very young women on the beach, scantily clad women by the pool (which are also all over his Facebook feed, as shown on archives), scantily clad women reading magazines, scantily clad women going underwater, scantily clad women playing with their hair, scantily clad women breathing, you get the drift. And the holy grail — a scantily clad woman pushing a toy boat out across a pool, with a toy car on it, which soon catches fire and explodes, followed by said scantily clad woman bathing in its ashes.


Some of this content is easy to classify and is well-documented by fetish experts such as Anil Aggrawal, whose archive of 547 fetishes is specific enough to include fetishes such as nemophilia, or “the normie fetish,” where one is aroused by doing acts normal to one’s religion or society, anolingus, where one is aroused from licking lizards, and moriaphilia, where one is aroused from telling dirty jokes (which I promise this article is not an example of). In the case of Mark Judge, we have clear cases of aquaphilia, which is arousal from baths and swimming pools, pictophilia, which is an arousal from pictures and videos, and sitophilia, which is arousal from food. Some of the weirder elements can be explained by science, such as his obsession with oysters, which are actually an aphrodisiac.

But some elements are so outlandish as to not be contained within even a 547-category long archive, and this is where the true heroes of sexual academia, undergraduate students like me, step in for analysis. Now, the I-don’t-know-how-to-describe-it toy car exploding on a toy boat, combined with his continual obsession with recording stills from children’s magazines and newspaper cartoons across almost every video, could be evidence of anaclitism, a fetish where one is obsessed with objects from one’s childhood. And the Krispy Kreme donuts could be…uhh…I don’t know, they have holes in them?


But I propose we go deeper than that (again, this isn’t moriaphilia). Does Mark Judge really have specific sexual proclivities so rare as to not be contained in a comprehensive archive? Or is there more to the story? Based on no evidence whatsoever, I propose that the rarity of Mark Judge’s fetishes in these cases demonstrates some implicit connection to not only a sexual zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist as a whole. He has been blessed with specific manifestations in his life of fetishes capturing the core of his history, and in this case, possibly his connection to Brett Kavanaugh and the nomination (I mean come on, his last name is Judge!). Let’s look at the ship and the car. The toy boat is most likely the Ship of State, found in Plato’s Republic Book VI, representing the U.S. government. The toy car is most likely the car mentioned in Mark Judge’s memoir Wasted that “Bart O’Kavanaugh” (Brett Kavanaugh, come on guys) vomited and passed out in. Setting the car on fire is Mark’s way of getting off to Brett and him purging their alcoholic past so that Brett can sit on the Supreme Court, and the woman bathing in the ashes is Mark getting off to women suffering the consequences. The magazines and children’s cartoons are Mark getting off to the way Brett and his ilk will characterize the stories surrounding sexual assault the nomination process will bring forward — childish, cartoonish tales not worthy of being taken seriously. And the donuts? Well, we all know the connection between donuts and cops. Thus, we can only hope they represent any sort of justice happening to these assholes.