The Case For Biden

Reading Lucy Flores’ account of her experience with Joe Biden, in which she described him putting his hands on her shoulders and kissing the back of her head just before she was to speak, I was keenly aware that I was supposed to find his conduct charming. I wanted to find it charming. Rationalizations rose up unbidden: Oh, calm down, I thought to myself, he’s just being affectionate. I imagined him as he might have imagined himself in that circumstance—a kindly man lending his protection to a young woman earlier in her career. I imagined him feeling proud of his generosity and goodness as he put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her head. Nothing predatory or malign about it. So yes: I felt mildly exasperated with Flores for making this an issue. This surprised me because I completely identified with what she described. I physically shuddered at the very idea of a strange man smelling and kissing my unwashed head. But a machine started up in my brain whose function it was to suppress that reaction. Neither shudder—hers or mine—was supposed to be part of the propriety calculus; it lived in the domain of flinches and squirms and private preferences it’s impolite to mention. Biden’s conduct was avuncular and public. It was well meant. As another woman told the Washington Post, similar unwelcome intimacy from Biden made her uncomfortable “even though it was intended as a compliment.” That his behavior made Lucy Flores want to disappear from her own campaign event—that the very idea of it happening to me made me writhe in sympathy with her—was somehow coequal to or less important than our own mannerly, socialized need to acknowledge Biden’s apparent good intentions.

In BuzzFeed, Katherine Miller correctly observed a certain automaticity infecting our discussions of this incident. There are lazy formulas: Is Biden “canceled”? People say they “believe” Flores—but there’s little to doubt, since Biden has literally been filmed doing exactly what she describes. Belief here is standing in for the framework we use for survivors of sexual assault, one that doesn’t quite work. Biden defenders are offering refutations, saying, He and Flores were never alone! when she didn’t claim that they were. They are claiming close friendship with Biden, when those who have complained had no relationship with him at all. Miller writes that these reactions are so bizarrely out of step with the incident itself that they register a mismatch between the scripts we have available and the reality we’re trying to describe.

It seems the younger women were more creeped out than the older ones and I truly think it is a generational thing.