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“In the middle of her telling Biden about a friend who had died by suicide he took her hands and pressed his forehead against hers. This is not a crime but it’s deeply inappropriate.” gu.com/p/b6ta3/stw Is it? Truly? "Deeply inappropriate?"
That's a gesture of affection, support, and warmth. Sounds like a spontaneous one. Without touch and affection, babies wither and die. Adults, deprived of affection, become depressed. Humans touch each other to comfort each other. This is not "deeply inappropriate."
I don't want to live in a world in which men think twice about--and suppress--their instinct to comfort me when I'm in distress with a gesture of physical affection. It sounds unbearably cold and lonely. It sounds inhuman.
The more of this non-scandal I hear about, the more I like Joe Biden. And I would like him even more if he took this opportunity to lead, that is, to say that metoo goes war too far when it pathologizes the behavior that represents what's best in our human nature--
empathy, the urge to comfort, the impulse to give someone who's having a tough time of it a hug, or an arm around the shoulder, or a gesture that says, "I'm with you. Literally with you." You can't get that from an App or from someone who won't touch people of the opposite sex
Was the kind friend--a man--who held my hand after my mother died, and walked with me around the grave site before she was buried, exhibiting a "deeply inappropriate" instinct? Or was he exhibiting kindness, warmth, empathy, supportiveness--the things people need most, above all,
on the day they're lowering their mother into the ground, knowing they will never again see their own mother? Is that the time for men to be worrying, "Will she misunderstand this?" Or is it a time for them to listen to the voice in their heads that says, "She needs this?"
"She can barely stand up, she can barely speak straight, she will never speak to her own mother again, the least I can do is help her get through this day, help her feel--literally--supported?
Why are we waging war on affection, this most human of instincts?
Why are we waging war on affection, this most human of instincts?
Why have we suddenly decided that reaching out to comfort the distressed is not the gesture of human solidarity we have always thought it to be, but "creepy" and "deeply inappropriate?" Do we really want to live in a world in which we squelch these human instincts of compassion?
I don't. Celebrating the rise of cold, barren, fearful relationships between men and women is sick. Is there nowhere now that isn't under the sway of the idea that women are "traumatized" by such gestures, precisely the kind of gesture that got me through that terrible day?
