TRỜI CÓ MẮT JOE BIDEN (BỊ ĐẦN) ĐỊNH TRANH CỬ 2020 NHƯNG BỊ NHIỀU PHỤ NỮ TỐ CÁO LÀ 1 TÊN NHAM NHỞ THÍCH SỜ MÓ RẤT MẤT DẠY./-TCL
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How gross is Joe Biden’s touching? There’s no point system for determining harassment.
Former vice president Joe Biden speaks at the Biden Courage Awards on March 26 in New York. (Frank Franklin II/AP) 
Here are the Joe Biden facts, spread out like Scrabble tiles, waiting to be combined into something coherent:
Joe
Biden hugs women, in a way that can look creepy when caught on camera,
in a way that can apparently feel creepy to the women experiencing it,
as former Nevada lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Lucy Flores shared
last week. He came up behind her at a campaign event, she says, leaned
in, smelled the back of her head and slowly kissed her hair.
So
Joe Biden does more than hug women, apparently — he also does “slow
hair kissing.” He’s been doing these sorts of things for years. He’s
been doing them, sometimes, to men, as well. Exhibits: placing his hand
on the thigh of a state trooper, appearing to nuzzle former senator Al
Franken’s ear.
Joe Biden says it was “never
[his] intention” to make anyone uncomfortable. “The boundaries of
protecting personal space have been reset,” he said in a video posted to
Twitter on Wednesday. “And I get it.”
Joe Biden doesn’t make everyone uncomfortable: Stephanie Carter, who had been the alleged “victim” in a “Creepy Uncle Joe” meme, wrote an essay
on Sunday clarifying that Biden is a friend. She’d viewed his extended
shoulder rub as comforting and supportive at her husband’s swearing-in
as defense secretary.
Those are the Biden tiles;
we’re all playing with an identical set. The facts aren’t in question,
as there were almost always photographers present. But over the past
several days, some people have arranged them, ominously, into
“PREDATOR,” or earnestly, into “TEARDROP,” and some people have arranged
them innocuously into “PARROT,” and Scrabble morons like me have
spelled out “TOE” and called it a day.
Into the
facts, we can throw the nuances. The double-letter and triple-word
scores. The context, the backstory, the things we’ve gotten better at
understanding and talking about.
Things like:
People
of all genders have vastly different comfort levels when it comes to
being touched, or being touched by strangers, or being touched by vice
presidents.
People are allowed to be the
narrators of their own stories. They do not have to be offended by
something because someone else was; they also don’t get to declare
something inoffensive just because it wouldn’t personally bother them.
Sometimes, the exact same gesture is welcomed when one person performs it and unwelcome when it comes from another source.
Some
gestures are generally accepted as friendly rather than predatory — a
handshake, a smile. But in certain circumstances, even those can feel
wrong, in ways we can struggle to articulate and feel crazy if we try.
Some gestures look creepy but in certain circumstances aren’t creepy at
all, in ways we can struggle to articulate and feel like chumps if we
try.
Not
all buffoonery is malevolent. Not all buffoons can perpetually get away
with saying, “I didn’t realize,” because after a while, after enough
onlookers have said, “Hey, that’s gross,” they should have realized.
As
the vice president of the United States, could Joe Biden — a man
accustomed to supporters lining up for handshakes and autographs — have
wrongly assumed women and men to be more comfortable with physical
contact than they actually were? Sure. As vice president, should Joe
Biden also have been ultra-aware that women and men who were
uncomfortable might feel they were unable to say so? Sure. Yes.
Definitely.
Playing Joe Biden Scrabble is a
losing proposition because the context you’re applying to the game can
have such a drastic impact on the final score.
Where
is the Anita Hill square, for example? Where is the square that
acknowledges Biden’s presiding role during her agonizing Senate
testimony and how his explanations for his handling of it have continued
to be tepid?
Where is the ugh
square? The square that acknowledges that most people criticizing
Biden, including Lucy Flores, are not classifying what he does as sexual
assault. They’re classifying it as an ugh. A withering sigh that
says: “Ugh, don’t do that.” You won’t be arrested or fined for it, but
if you want to model impeccable good-guy statesmanship, then don’t.
Or,
don’t do it to everyone, at least. Going forward, remember that
Stephanie Carter and Lucy Flores received nearly identical treatment,
and one of them ended up spelling “COMFORTING” and one of them used
nearly the same tiles to spell “MORTIFYING.”
This
is the point in the discussion where a lot of folks want to throw their
hands in the air and threaten to stop playing the game. To claim that
it’s too hard, there are too many rules, that it’s impossible to
navigate a world in which some women are fine with things and some women
aren’t — that the subjectivity of it all makes it impossible.
The subjectivity doesn’t make it impossible, though. The subjectivity makes it human.
I
can’t help but feel that every time we have another national
conversation about sexual harassment, what we’re looking for is a way to
make it into a Scrabble game. A way to say: Here is the instruction
manual, here is the point system, here’s how you win.
But it doesn’t work that way. It never will.
We
can’t learn universal lessons by analyzing Joe Biden’s actions, because
his case is full of subtleties — just like every human interaction. We
are not Scrabble tiles, we are made up of particulars, not points.
The questions we need to ask ourselves are not, Am I playing the game the right way? How many points is a shoulder rub or slow hair kiss? The question we need to ask ourselves is, Am I playing the game that the people around me want to play?
This column has been updated.
Monica Hesse is a columnist who writes frequently about gender and its impact on society. For more visit wapo.st/hesse.
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