Upon further review, Joe Biden was more on target than you might think in the major speech he gave Tuesday evening. His main point was that we all must “change the culture” that allows or encourages women to be victimized by sexual assault. Cutting through a lot of typically Bidenesque effluvia, the former vice president is right at least on that point.
First, though, it’s important to clean up the effluvia, because there’s no shortage. Earlier, I criticized Biden for furthering the myth that law professor Anita Hill had been wronged when a Senate committee investigated her 1991 claims that Supreme Court then-nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. Facts matter, and Biden was pushing a false narrative.
The other effluvium in Biden’s speech — the one that garnered most of the headlines — was Biden’s attack on what he called “white men’s culture.” This attack was nonsense.
As David Harsanyi aptly explained at the Federalist, Biden’s effort to kowtow to leftist political correctness showed “historical illiteracy.” There is no more reason to say that white men, rather than black men or Asian men or native Americans, are especially prone to abuse women, or to condone the abuse of women. And there is a long, long strand of “men’s culture” — especially an essential part of the “English jurisprudential culture” that Biden excoriates — which is particularly protective of and solicitous toward women.
Indeed, that is why the rest of Biden’s speech, the main bulk of it, was hardly original or brave. Still, he made good points. Providing copious examples of instances where both law and what should be a gentleman’s culture failed to protect women from predators or drunken college athletes, Biden said all of us must make sure we don’t just assume it’s just boys being boys when girls or women are treated with disrespect.
“If you see a brother taking an inebriated co-ed up the stairs at a fraternity house and you don’t go and stop it, you’re a damn coward,” Biden said. “You don’t deserve to be called a man.”
Well, aside from the cliched portrayal of all frat houses as hotbeds of sexual assault, Biden is right. There are times and places where women are treated as disposable objects. There are subcultures that act as if women who put themselves in awkward circumstances deserve whatever happens to them. There obviously are plenty of examples from Hollywood and the media world where harassment has been par for the course, way too long unpunished.
Sure, Biden ought to have offered at least a few words warning against the hysteria in response to these stories that allows false accusations, such as the Duke lacrosse case or the University of Virginia fraternity case, to gain credulous traction. Yet for every false accusation, there surely are assaults that still go unreported because the victim is embarrassed, confused, or afraid.
Had Biden proposed the typical liberal bromides of more and more laws that might harm the due-process rights of the accused, he would have been off base. But he didn’t do that, and this may be what separates him from the 2020 Democratic field. If one listens to the whole speech and pays attention to its measured tones, one can appreciate that Biden was appealing more to hearts and minds than to legislators and regulators. Even though his blasts at “white men’s culture” were off base, he was correct to focus on culture rather than on laws and punishments.
Biden’s message was for us as individuals and as communities, to change our outlooks and assumptions. Effluvia aside, it was a message worth heeding.
