This past week it’s Joe Biden’s turn in the #MeToo barrel, and like many Democrats, I’m torn about what to think. The allegations by Lucy Flores — that in 2014, when she was running for lieutenant governor of Nevada, the vice president touched her shoulders and kissed the back of her head — cannot exactly be dismissed as an outlier, given that another allegation of guerrilla nuzzling followed just 72 hours later (this time from 2009) and that multiple photo montages online suggest a similar pattern.
And so we have another debate about male decency and respect, trying to weigh creepiness against over-exuberant affection, handsiness against glad-handing, all the while remembering that this is Joe Biden we’re talking about, a retail-politics guy from another era, known for arm grabs and bear hugs (you’d see this all the time on the Senate floor — the shoulder squeezing, the close-talking).
He is, by nature, a physically expressive fellow. Hugs are not unfamiliar to him, and he seems to sense when people are feeling fragile, as Stephanie Carter, the wife of Ash Carter, a defense secretary under Barack Obama, wrote in an essay for Medium, noting that the “creepy Uncle Joe” photo featuring her as the recipient of a shoulder rub was quite welcome, thank you very much.
These gray-zone allegations are of course still worth examining. But because they are salacious — because they are embodied, because we can actually see them — I wonder if we spend more time discussing them than another gray-zone problem that, in my view, is far more pervasive and often less easily solved with a sharp rebuke or a complaint to human resources: not being taken seriously.
Because here’s the truth: Some of the women I know have #MeToo stories. But most of the women I know have stories about feeling dismissed, invisible, less-than.
What are they talking about? They’re talking about seeing their ideas gain traction in a meeting only after a man has said them. Or being told after they’ve asserted themselves in a meeting that they dominated it — or at the least talked too much.
They’re talking about seeing weeks or months of work being casually dismissed by their superior after he’s had a 10-minute conversation with a male colleague.
They’re talking about being mansplained.
Personally? I’ve been mansplained about my own book. And about Congress, which I covered on and off for 20 years. You know what didn’t help? Saying Hey, I wrote a book about that! Or Hey, I started my career at The Hill!
They’re talking about contradicting a male colleague and watching him get really mad.
They’re talking about being called boastful when they’re invoking a necessary credential.
They’re talking about having their recollections dismissed until they’re Googled.
They’re talking about being given soft or detail-oriented responsibilities while the fellas are delegated the big think.
They’re talking about chatting with another woman and a male colleague walks by. “Planning a rebellion?” he asks. (That, admittedly, happened early in the careers of most of the women I have talked to. Have men stopped doing that, I wonder? (Maybe. Hopefully? Probably not.)
Many of these problems are happening in organizations with supposed enlightened politics. They can still have feudal habits.
Note what I’m not mentioning: Ambition = pushiness. Too obvious.
Or the motherhood penalty.
Or a national policy that guarantees only three months off with a newborn, unpaid, if you’re lucky enough to work for an organization to which the Family and Medical Leave Act applies.
Or that we have no subsidized child care, and often get looked at as if we’re nuts if we ask for reimbursement for it when we work extra hours.
Younger women sometimes look at women of my generation — I’m 49 — and wonder why we may be a little wearier, a little warier, a little less noisy. But it’s not, I don’t think, a matter of false consciousness, or that we don’t know our rights; nor is it that we’re resentful about having had to swallow our own stories as we were coming of age. (Even ancient infractions of a minor variety are, in this climate, the functional equivalent of a loaded gun.)
It’s that some of the more ambiguous #MeToo experiences might seem more manageable, or maybe just more ridiculous — and certainly less insidious — than the subtler biases many of us have faced in how men think. They’re about an attitude. A mindset, hiding in plain sight.
Sometimes the two are connected. It can be a short leap from taking physical liberties with a woman (even if they’re minor, even if they’re done out of sheer obliviousness) to dismissing her ideas. Both involve a certain inability to see.
Maybe my younger peers have been fortunate enough to see most of these behaviors melt away. But I suspect they haven’t, and they, too, deserve our attention, maybe their own hashtag. I don’t care what it is, just so long as they’re discussed. They’re common. They’re powerful. They’re corrosive and confidence-pulverizing. They’re every bit as real.
