Reiterating the Twitter to Talk About Joe Biden

I have a personal, informal ranking of the Democratic candidates for president so far, and Joe Biden was already at the bottom of my list, even before Lucy Flores's article was published in New York magazine. I already knew he kissed and touched women in public in ways that made me — and, I assumed, at least some of them — uncomfortable. Here's an article from 2015 with lots of examples, for instance. It was obvious to anyone paying attention.

Plus Anita Hill. Plus the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, the crime bills of the 1990s, and lots of other issues he has been wrong about. I like some things about his performance as a politician, but on the whole, smiling Joe gets by way too much, in my opinion.

I wanted to call attention to two tweets in my Twitter round-up from yesterday that could have been referring to it, though they do not, since they were written before this news came out. The first is by feminist next door, @emrazz:

Women: “please stop doing this thing that you believe is helpful or harmless because it is neither.”
Man [says]: “it was intended to be helpful or harmless though.”
Man [means]: “my ego and construction of your experience is more important to me than your actual experience.”
And by the way if asking for consent “ruins the mood” it’s because you were the only one in the fucking mood. Literally.

The second is by Jarrett Walker @humantransit, who was talking about something in the built environment of cities, but it applies just as well to Biden:

When you ask powerful people about the consequences of their actions, and they respond by talking about their *intentions*, they have evaded the question and the questioner should persist. Most people have lovely intentions. It's consequences that matter.

And here's a later-arriving tweet from April 1 that fits into all of this, from writer Jill Filipovic:

Not every untoward or inappropriate thing a man does is a #MeToo. We can talk about gender dynamics and subtle instances of sexism without the really narrow frame of "is this sexual assault Y / N?"

Just because Biden's actions are not assault or even harassment — they are still not okay. They are sexist. They are demeaning.

The consequence of Biden's behavior is that women feel belittled. They feel like objects for him instead of subjects in their own stories. Does he treat male candidates the way he treated Flores? No, he does not. That seems like a good guideline to follow. He may have touched Barack Obama's arm — I know he did — and he clapped him on the shoulder — but he never stood behind him snuffling his hair and kissing the back of his head. Can you imagine?

Stop it, Joe. Own it, take responsibility, and more than anything else, stop it.