SOURCE:
HOTAIRURL:
https://hotair.com/archives/2019/04/19/intersection-hugging-consent/by Jazz Shaw
Lucy Flores was among the first women to come forward this year and object to Joe Biden’s unwanted physical contact in the form of hugs, shoulder rubs and kisses on the head. Since it’s considered impolite to point out that she was a Bernie Sanders staffer and remains in his corner, we should probably offer the benefit of the doubt and simply consider the charges she’s brought forward on their own merit. But right from the beginning, it was a struggle to define precisely what those charges were. With the conversation having largely moved on, Flores was back in the news this week with a new editorial at Buzzfeed. She attempts to describe how the entire discussion about Biden’s handsyness quickly went off the rails and left her feeling as if her complaints weren’t being framed correctly or taken seriously enough.
When I decided to come forward with what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Joe Biden’s inappropriate behavior, I knew I would face criticism. I didn’t anticipate that my truth would be so easily manipulated and distorted.
I intended to describe what it was like to be inappropriately touched by a powerful man who would likely declare his presidential candidacy. Instead, I watched as the conversation about my essay, published in the Cut, morphed into a simplistic — and misguided — discussion of hugging in America. I had made it explicitly clear that I didn’t consider Biden’s unwanted intimate touching to be sexual in nature and his behavior to be harassment or assault…
I have repeatedly said that I suspect part of the reason Biden’s inappropriate behavior is not taken seriously is because this kind of behavior, while considered wrong by most people for a very long time, hasn’t been exposed or debated in a public way before.
Flores goes on from there to reset the definitions of the actions under discussion. As she states in the excerpt above, she took pains to clarify that Biden’s actions were not, in her opinion, any sort of sexual assault or harassment. Instead, she wants us to understand that Joe Biden’s uninvited hugging, shoulder rubbing, head kissing and hair sniffing are “wrong and unwanted.â€
I have some questions for Ms. Flores and those who come to her defense, but first, we need to agree on a couple of definitions of the terms involved in this discussion.
When saying that Joe’s actions are “wrong and unwanted,†half of that conclusion is fair enough. Using the word “unwanted†is acceptable because each individual is responsible for defining what they want or don’t want. “Wrong†gets a little dicier. Humanity has struggled with the whole concept of right and wrong since the beginning of recorded history. And there’s clearly a line between wrong and “illegal.†We have communally decided which human actions are so unacceptable that they need to be defined as crimes and merit punishment by the government.
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