Whether the audience is a group of schoolchildren at a Saint Patrick’s Day parade in 2001, Chuck Schumer’s niece in 2011, or a voter’s granddaughter in an Iowa coffee shop this month, Joe Biden has a ready quip for young girls.
“Hey Jasper,” he told the brother of a 12-year-old girl during a 2017 swearing-in ceremony. “You’re going to have a hard job keeping the boys away from your sister.” Again and again and again, Biden has told girls, “no dates till you’re 30” and urged their fathers and brothers to build fences to keep men away.
While some supporters defend this as natural, if slightly retro, bonhomie, a growing number of feminist authors and thinkers condemn such language for at best revealing a “classic benevolent sexist” and at worst sexualizing young girls and telling them that they should define themselves as men’s prey.
This is the sort of old man, they say, who divides the world into protective or predatory men and boys and vulnerable women and girls who are sexual objects.
The latest occasion was in Eldridge, Iowa, this month when he asked a voter’s granddaughter how old she was. When she told him she was 13, he informed her brothers: “You’ve got one job here, keep the guys away from your sister.”
There was a swift and ferocious social media backlash.
It also teaches the boys that the reason girls need protection is because boys are natural predators. We need to undo THAT conditioning as well.
— Leonora Pitts (@leeleepitts) June 12, 2019
“This is a disturbing mindset that keeps repeating,” said Amy Siskind, president of the New Agenda, a women’s advocacy group. Actress, author, and activist Stephanie Wittels Wachs interjeted: “This dude literally can’t help himself. His sexism is as ingrained and involuntary as breathing.”
Laura Cregan, executive director of the Access Project, which helps students from disadvantaged backgrounds, recounted how she was at a small event held by Biden’s 2020 rival Kamala Harris a few weeks earlier, and the candidate gathered the small girls in attendance around her and told them: “When you decide it’s time to lead, don’t ask anyone’s permission. Just do it.”
Andi Zeisler, author of the book We Were Feminists Once, said: “Biden has a pattern of talking to young (white) girls this way, as though they are nothing but future sex objects who need protection.”
This incident came just weeks after the 76-year-old former vice president acknowledged changing “social norms” after he was criticized for touching women without their consent.
The Washington Examiner has found evidence of 15 occasions when Biden has told girls not to date until they are 30 or joked with brothers and parents that they should build a fence around their home or even to install machine guns to protect their daughters from men.
Whether it is Marco Rubio’s daughters in 2011 — “Girls, no dating until you’re 30” — or a firefighter’s preteen daughter in Ohio — “I hope you’ve got a big fence around your house” — commentators see a common theme.
Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, described Biden as a “classic benevolent sexist.”
His words, she said, reflected a society where men and boys were conditioned to find identity and manhood in protecting and providing for women and girls. “The problem with that framework, of course, is that the masculine ideal requires girls and women to be vulnerable,” she said.
“And so the ‘provide and protect’ ideal constructs a world that tolerates a certain type of predation, that tolerates a kind of gentle sexism as less harmful than hostile sexism, and that’s all evidenced in the language he uses when he says things like this.”
She added his comments might appear innocuous compared with the words and history of President Trump, but that made them all the more insidious.
Molly Jong-Fast, author of The Social Climber’s Handbook: A Novel and daughter of feminist novelist Erika Jong, said society had moved on but Biden had not.
“With Biden you have someone who is a super goofy, kind of inappropriate, very old guy. If you compare it with Trump it’s nothing — but the question is whether this is what the party wants.”
Lauren Claffey, public affairs consultant and communications adviser to Republican campaigns, said some might shrug off Biden’s comments as the clumsy joke of a grandfather.
“However for the liberal base, this is an example of exactly the type of patriarchal attitudes that they have been fighting against,” she said. “Biden is further distancing himself from his party base, or as Biden refers to them, the ‘New Left.’
“I’m not sure how he can demonstrate this lack of understanding of the conversations happening within his own party and expect to win the primary.”
