Vice president of the patriarchy Joe Biden used a common anti-woman epithet to describe the strains of being a second in command during a visit to Harvard University Thursday. The misogynistic slur was treated as a harmless bit of Joe-will-be-Joe japery by local media.
“Isn’t it a bitch, that Vice President thing?” Biden said after student Sietse Goffard identified himself as student-council vice president at Harvard — whose former president Larry Summers famously said in 2005 that women might be underrepresented in science and engineering due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” (Summers went on to serve on the Obama administration’s economic brain trust but was later beaten by a woman in his quest to become chairperson of the Federal Reserve.)
In a report on Biden’s use of the term “bitch” — a technical term for a female dog that is frequently used to deny women agency and silence female voices — Boston magazine’s Steve Annear treated the comment as good fun, saying the vice president “didn’t disappoint” and mock-warning in a subhed, “He’s joking, he’s joking. He’s only joking.” The vice president, indeed, went on virtual bitch-fest, defining the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as an “SOB” and downgrading the threat of the woman-hating Islamic State terror group.
John Adams, the nation’s original veep, described the vice presidency as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”