Inappropriate Joe Biden

About

Inappropriate Joe Biden refers to a number of photographs and animated GIFs in which United States Vice President Joe Biden is shown as being overly affectionate to women during press conferences and events at the White House.

Origin

On January 6th, 2015, Vice President Joe Biden swore in the newly and re-elected members of the U.S. Senate, including Chris Coon, the second-term senator of Delaware from Biden’s home state. As part of the custom, each senator’s oath of office is usually followed by a group photo opportunity with his/her family and the vice president. As Biden, Coon and his family awkwardly posed for the photo op, the vice president was seen whispering something to Coon’s daughter before trying to give her a kiss on the cheek, which she coyly fended off by pulling away. The animated GIFs of the awkward exchange was quickly entered circulation online via Twitter, as well as political news blogs like Mediate and BuzzFeed.

On February 17th, 2015, Redditor gaylord__focker uploaded a photograph of Biden whispering into the ear of Stephanie Carter, the wife of the newly appointed U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, in a post titled “Biden strikes again at new Def Sec swearing in speech” to the /r/cringepics^[1] subreddit (shown below, left). Within one week, the post gained over 5,000 votes (96% upvoted) and 700 comments.

Spread

On February 18th, Redditor Maxb176 posted a collection of photographs in which Biden is whispering into a woman’s ear titled “Joe Biden: Serial Whisperer” to /r/pics,^[5] where it accumulated upwards of 5,600 votes (96% upvoted) and 2,700 comments in six days (shown below, left). On February 19th, Redditor GodTroller submitted an image of Biden titled “Inappropriate Joe Biden” to /r/NSFWFunny^[4] (shown below, right).

On February 20th, Tumblr user makibanzai^[3] posted several photoshopped images of Biden touching and whispering into the ears of various female anime characters (shown below). In four days, the post garnered more than 8,000 notes. On the following day, Redditor Raymond Lawrence posted an Imgur gallery of the anime photoshops titled “Joe Biden and his waifus” to the /r/justneckbeardthings^[2] subreddit, where it gained over 1,600 votes (96% upvoted) and 60 comments in the first 72 hours.