Is he a groper, or just creepy
What’s the difference between saying “Biden gropes little girls” and “Biden’s behavior is creepy”?
Is there any real difference?
If you search Google images for “Biden gropes little girls” you get no shortage of results. The behavior the pictures show is indeed creepy, but is it creepy in some way that has nothing to do with being sexual?
Not that I can see. They look creepy precisely in the sense of lecherous elderly dude copping a feel. Normal adult men do not stick their hands all over little girls that way.
See that tilt of her body? See that pained expression? See that wrap-around clutch on her arm? That’s not creepy as in he’s wearing a Halloween monster outfit. That’s creepy as in he’s being way too handsy and she’s trying to pull away from him. Yes we do get to call that groping.
I think his behavior is inappropriate, and it clearly makes people uncomfortable. I just doubt he’s getting sexually excited by this, which is what groping implies. I think he sees himself as everyone’s kindly old grandfather or favorite uncle so doesn’t see anything wrong with touching their arm or hair or giving them a kiss. I think he also treats kids as way younger than they are.
But I don’t know what’s going on in his head, so I could be wrong. Regardless of his motives, he shouldn’t do it. And if there were some way to prove he has a sexual interest in little girls then obviously the end of his political career should just be the start of the repercussions.
I’m no fan of Jeff Sessions, but he did a good job of protecting his granddaughter from Biden:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c4_D5D3oj-4
I definitely get that he’s doing inappropriate things. In the one where he’s got his hands on the official’s wife it seems to me that he’s treating her like you might a kid who’s standing in front of you. Very demeaning to women as are some of his comments. However, at least one of the photos purportedly showing his hand on a girl’s breast was doctored. Some were from suspect websites. It doesn’t excuse his behavior. He should have been learning all along how to respect women. You need to also consider the source.
he’s
Skeletor – who says getting sexually excited is what groping implies? That’s a pretty male-centered way of looking at it. What if we consult women’s subjectivity rather than men’s? The groping is the groping, whatever the reason.
And as I said, he isn’t just “touching their arm or hair” – he’s all over them, clutching them, cupping their faces in his hands from behind. Come on now. Grandfathers and uncles can do that maybe, depending on how they go about it, but just any old random guy? No. Biden can’t be so clueless that he doesn’t know that. Look at the damn photo. He’s standing way too close, he’s pinning her in place, he’s looming over her, he’s shoving his face into her space – none of that is ok. It’s not the same as shoving his hand in their underpants, true, but it’s creepy and molesty.
The dictionary defines it that way:
Source: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/grope (definition 4)
Otherwise I believe we are in agreement.
I think it hardly matters what Biden’s motives are in draping himself over young girls. He’s either slavering over them or treating them as not properly human or both.
Either way, he seems to think of girls and women as his playthings which ought to be universally unacceptable in itself and also universally unacceptable because of how it makes those individual women and girls feel. And it should be universally unacceptable because of the message it sends to men and boys. And it should be universally unacceptable because of the message it sends to women and girls.
In the security business we have a few terms like “creepy” and “hinky” and “squick” which describe different ways to spot behaviour that troubles us, even if we can’t quite put our finger on what’s specifically wrong in any individual case. The terms are supposed to be applied without considering motive since they are about observation: “something about this doesn’t seem quite right” and then trying to work out what kind of threat, if any, it constitutes. They are necessarily subjective categories, of course, that’s the point.
I feel like we all agree that Biden is creepy and squicky but disagree about whether or not he’s hinky too. Two out of three seems like sufficient warning to me. Plus, I personally feel he’s as hinky as hell.
Skeletor: Groping implies sexual pleasure
OB: No, it doesn’t necessarily
Skeletor: But the dictionary says that one of its four meanings is sexual pleasure!
Everyone else: (waits patiently for Skeletor to get it)
Well, to be fair, Ophelia asked “who says?” and Skeletor answered “the dictionary.”
That’s not an unreasonable answer, although it’s insufficient. As Ophelia implied, victims are unlikely to care much about the distinction, if there is one. Ditto seething observers. The impacts of an important man treating women and girls as objects and playthings are unlikely to depend on which definition we observers prefer to choose.
Picking a particular dictionary definition looks a lot like the sort of things people (still!) use to excuse all those skeptics and atheists many of us used to associate with until they turned out to be shits. When we do that, we’d be wise to examine our own motives, rather than those we attach – without evidence – to the perps.
We don’t need to hypothesise a motive to conclude that Biden’s behaviour is creepy, so what is the purpose of making distinctions that don’t matter to anyone except Biden, his supporters and men who want to continue to be creepy without being told off?
I like it that “hinky” is one of the words, because remember how the Tommy Lee Jones character in The Fugitive made an issue of that very word? A curmudgeonly “what the hell does that mean, don’t use meaningless words” ranty issue. It’s a funny bit.
(Slightly off-topic.)
Yep, YouTube remembers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdPciselWuo
Heh, I haven’t seen that film. “Hinky” as a security term comes from exactly that sort of thing. It describes the feeling an observer has when someone seems to be doing a suspicious thing deliberately, even if they can’t say what’s suspicious about it.
But also – on-topic this time – Skeletor @ 4 – do you really not see the problem? Your claim to me that groping implies sexual arousal is a claim that I can’t use the word to mean something short of that, and you try to back that up with one definition of several? Of course I know that groping can imply sexual arousal, I’m simply arguing that one can use the word to describe actions like the one pictured even without demonstrable sexual arousal. You think Biden isn’t sexually aroused in that photo, while I don’t give a shit whether he is or not because the point is how he is grabbing and leaning into that squirming young girl.
It’s a surprisingly good film. Surprising to me anyway, because I don’t generally like action movies all that much but I did like this one. It’s all down to Tommy Lee Jones.
A few years ago I was at a friend’s wedding and a mutual acquaintance in his late 40s spent a lot of time at the reception talking to the bride’s 15 year old daughter. Well, I did too but at the table with the rest of her family. The man I’m talking about managed to find all sorts of excuses to be a little way away from everyone else, talking to this girl.
Do I need to know his motive before deciding that was inappropriate?
And how can we know, anyway? I quit going to a doctor back in the 90s because he creeped me out. He was always touching me, my knee, any thing…always asking me to wait and “chat” after everyone else had gone. I did not believe his intents were sexual, but I quit going to him. It was unnerving.
Later, the next year, he was accused of exposing himself to a woman patient. His license was suspended pending hearing. He went into the police department waving a gun and committed suicide by cop.
If I hadn’t felt “hinky” about it, that might have been me. And I was at the time in serious therapy and on the close watch list because of suicidal intent, at least some of it centered around memories of sexual abuse. I would likely have come undone.
Here is my advice for men: Do not hug women you do not know. Do not hug women you do know unless you know them well, and have a huggy type of relationship. Do not grab body parts – not even arms or shoulders – of women you do not know. Do not put your hand on the knee of a woman sitting next to you unless she is your date and you know she is good with it. Do not leer at women, do not ogle women, do not make jokes about a woman’s ass, legs, chest, or any other body part, especially in her hearing. Do not tell women to smile.
In short, treat women you meet with the same respect you would show a man. If you’re a butt slapper of other men, then treat her with more respect, because butt slapping women is not something you should be doing.
And the thing about these random public gropes and grabs and coppings and the rest – they don’t feel exclusively sexual to us. They feel hostile. They feel like aggression, probably because they are. Boys and men seem to treat the two as inextricably entangled, whether because they’re trained to by the culture or because aggro and sex overlap in the brain or both I don’t know, but they do.
What Biden is doing is above all domineering. He’s bigger than they are, he’s older than they are, he’s a Senator. He may delude himself that he’s being friendly or paying them a compliment or some such bullshit but he’s not.
I went to see Biden back in 07 when he was running for president; he came to the tiny town in Iowa where my mother-in-law lived, and we were visiting, so we went. (Plus I needed some news-type pics for a photography class – what could be better?)
He saw me with my camera, and grabbed my camera to hand it to another person for a pic, then put his arms around me. I didn’t think much of it at the time; it seemed like typical glad-handing politician. But I do dislike being touched by strangers, especially with any idea of intimacy. I figured it was one of those things people do, and I’m sort of getting used to strangers hugging me, though I will never like it (here’s a thing to think about: If you are a huggy sort: DO NOT HUG PEOPLE UNLESS YOU KNOW THEY ARE FINE WITH IT). I have an anxiety disorder, and I was fortunate that it was under control at the time. If I’d had a panic attack right then and there, I could have found myself not only thrown out, but arrested for threatening a US Senator.