Reasonable people can disagree over whether President Trump’s interaction with a female reporter from Ireland on Tuesday, beckoning her forward during a phone call to compliment her smile, constitutes sexism. Even as someone who rarely sees sexism in anything, I’m inclined to believe it does, though on a small enough scale that it wouldn’t bother me personally.
The reporter, Caitriona Perry of RTE News, has since racked up viral media coverage and earned scores of new admirers, all for handling the incident like an empowered professional woman and providing others a case study in how manage weird situations without victimizing yourself.
As you might expect, however, anti-Trump liberals are fully outraged by the incident.
But to those people, I ask they consider that men making creepy comments is not a partisan phenomenon. In fact, two of the most beloved figureheads of the Democratic Party have committed similar acts in recent years.
Introducing then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris at a fundraiser in 2013, former President Barack Obama sparked controversy for saying she was “the best-looking attorney general in the country” after running through a laundry list of Harris’ professional qualifications. Obama later apologized. He was also forced to apologize in 2008 after saying, “Hold on one second there, sweetie,” to a female reporter on the campaign trail.
According to a 2013 New York Magazine article, after telling a 32-year-old Republican legislator that she didn’t look a day over 23, Obama reportedly quipped, “Come on, honey! I said you’re pretty! I said you look 23!” when someone joked she should become a Democrat.
What about Joe Biden?
In 2013, he asked a group of young women in Japan, “Do your husbands like you working full-time?” A year later he told a group of middle-school girls learning to code, “you’re as smart as any guy.” The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York compiled an entire photo collage documenting Biden’s “woman-touching habit” after the former vice president massaged Ashton Carter’s wife Stephanie, intimately whispering in her ear as she looked uncomfortable, during her husband’s swearing-in ceremony.
Do I even need to bring up Bill Clinton?
These are all men who enjoy the widespread support of the Democratic Party. And, yes, could become an easy case of “whataboutism,” but the point is that things are different now that Trump is president. Reflexive outrage from his impassioned detractors too often drives people to jump to hypocritical conclusions, blinded by disgust, without pausing to think anything through. We could be left with four long years of hyperbole that distances political observers too far from reality.
Again, whether any of those offenses listed above constitute actual sexism is debatable, especially in a world where many women suffer from much more serious and brutal sexual repression outside of our country. And even if they are technically sexist, with the exception of Bill Clinton’s actions, creepy comments from men are not insurmountable obstacles to sexual equality. In fact, Perry demonstrated as much just this week when she leveraged her experience to advance her career, drawing attention to her work without complaining or victimizing herself.
That should be a lesson to us all.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
