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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
You missed half the fun if you stuck to the front page. I clicked on a link to Open Salon and was greeted with a celebratory post (along with cheering comments) about how wonderful it was that Michelle Obama was calling herself the "Mom-In-Chief". Lately, I've felt as if I've wandered into an alternate reality where "Progressive" values have been replaced by "good old fashioned" values. You know.... women at home in pearls, underwire bras, and high heels vacuuming and caring for the babies while their husbands go out and provide for them.
I really did NOT appreciate references in this article to certain parts of the anatomy. They are inappropriate and have no place in a publication designed for intelligent adults.
Please also understand. I am hardly a closet Victorian.I recently retired after a life-time teaching in an inner city high school in South Los Angeles. I supervised the school newspaper and even remember once meeting or seeing Erin Aubry Kaplan at a jouranlism conference..
Perhaps because of my background, certain words simply do not impress me. For years a special ed class met in the classroom next mine. The denizens of that classroom not only swore like drunken sailors, but they also threw chairs. In addition, I occasionally had a phenomenally misguided adolsecent who, in spite of my warnings, would try to shock and upset me by writing about his sexual misadventures, real or imaginary. Do you have any idea how boring and/or ridiculous those essays were? (For commentary, I simply wrote BRING in big letters across the front of the essay.) Maybe that are reasons that I find certain terminology used in this article BORING as the essays penned by a precocious, wanna-be teeny-bopper. I certainly would not permit my journalism students to write about each other in this way.
Also, like many other retired teacher, I've decided Barack Obama and Michelle are my honorary ex-students. After all, had history been different they both could have been in one of my classes. So in the back of my aging imagination, it's only yesterday that I was telling Michelle that throwing a choke-hold on Barack was not a good way to get his attention. I really do not appreciate any one's writing about my former students the way Kaplan wrote about Michelle.
Michelle Obama is a wonderful woman. Let's concentrate on her intelligence, her personality, her spirituality - NOT on contours of her body. Let's focus on what really matters.
Salon got rid of its Sex (Porn) section I have been having trouble drawing masturbatory fantasies from the site. THANK YOU SALON
... from the shock of reading such garbage. Just a couple thoughts:
This is L O W C L A S S, super sleazy and a reflection of the sicko who wrote it and the degenerate editor who OK'd it.
What's next? BO's package specs? Pondering on the stats of their private encounters? Vicarious yearning for some other form of low class behavior like sitting around in underwear in the Oval Office all day (I made that up, I totally have no idea what other travesty such a degenerate mind as this author's could dream up next!) or some other weird imagined racial bond they might have with the O's, something they hope the O's undertake "in the White House" to "make it Black"?
Come on, people! Show some class - if you want to talk about this kind of stuff, do it with your buddies and not out in public. There is a line of civility and you've crossed it. This is just in extremely poor taste! If I ran Salon, I'd fire anyone involved with publishing this tripe.
And I did not even vote for BO -- but this self-indulgent "literary" vomit is just super disgusting and way out of bounds, requires a swift kick to the pants via a response, so there you have it!
A Princeton and Harvard Law School graduate and all Kaplan can do is talk about her ass?!? Does Salon have to print every black person's opinion on the future first lady no matter how asinine?
I saw that too. Have we stepped into an alternate reality?
Michelle Obama is the Mom-in-Chief? I'm a mom, and I don't acknowledge any chief. I also have a career, which Michelle Obama used to have before she made a full-time job out of being married to power instead of wielding it. She might as well be Laura Bush, despite all her "accomplishments."
Wow. Next thing you know we will be debating Obama's anatomy. Is it true what they say...? I guess this means free speech is alive and well. Even the morons get published.
I guess it's not enough that Michelle Obama has the hardest-working, least compensated public service job ($0 annually) in the nation. With all her education, class and strength, and everything she represents as a person, you now want to talk about...her rear end. I may hold feminism in great scorn in most areas, but feminists could at least be counted on to find something more substantial to discuss about our new First Lady than her gluteal volume.
And no, being a self-described black woman with similar buttocks does not excuse this. If anything, you should be twice as embarrassed. Your immature approach disrespects a hell of a quality lady who deserves far better in life than to have people excited about her rump.
.....a whole article about Michelle Obama's buttocks.
Anybody remember that article back in 2000 about Laura Bush's nipples?
No?
Me either.
I voted for, canvassed for, and gave 990.00 to the camapaign of Barack Obama. I'm in my late 40s, white, and grew up with no father around in the 1960s, in the poorest, black section of New Haven, Connecticut. All my childhood friends, and most of my adult friends were, and are, not white. I'm a professional IT consultant and a writer living with my wife and 4 children in Massachusetts. And I take issue with the culturally ignorant, willfully naieve, indolent, callow, bigoted tone of Ms. Kaplan's article.
"...She looks like she could kick Barack's ass, if need be..."
She looks like she’d never *have* to, as in, no black or white ghetto justice necessary, intellect & character are with Michelle- enough with the ‘kick ass’ stuff... or are you just trying to extend the metaphor? Clumsy and simplistic, no matter the intent, girl!
"...Ever since slavery, it's been both vilified and fetishized as the most singular of all black female features, more unsettling than dark skin and full lips, the thing that marked black women as uncouth and not quite ready for civilization (of course, it also made them mighty attractive to white men, which further stoked fears of miscegenation that lay at the heart of legal and social segregation). In modern times, the butt has demarcated class and stature among black society itself..."
Big black booty makes black women equally attractive to black men, but also the ‘other’ makes white men attractive to black women and black men, the ‘other' makes white women attractive to black men and black women, the ‘other makes black men attractive to white women and white men, etc... beginning to get it?
"It's OK for black women to be heavier than most, but we still have to conform to a universal (that is, white) standard of thinness and shape..."
Ummm, so do *white* women, and Asian women, and every woman who voluntarily submits to the white, gay man dressing a live ‘Barbie Doll’ iron rubric of modern fashion.
"...(the closest it gets is "hips," but even white women know that's not equivalent)..."
Vilifying white women, again, by implying they are inherently cluelessness and stupid, because they’re ‘white women’? Niiiiice.
"How sad that, in order for a black family to prevail -- because Michelle and the girls were all running for office, not just Barack -- they had to sublimate their blackness like crazy, starting with the visuals. Michelle's ethnic butt might have snuck under the radar, but an ethnic do wouldn't have stood a chance."
Let me clue you in, girl- we ALL sublimate, especially any 'family' who runs for President. How long have they all had the hairstyles they’ve had now? How do YOU know what they like? How do YOU know they had to ‘de-ethnicize’ their hair to have Barack win? Do YOU think they have to wear their hair a certain ‘ethnic' way to pass ‘ethnic authenticity’? You're content to pontificate and bloviate, rather than marshall
a serious, yet funny and entertaining essay. Being 'Ghetto' is only cool when you know the difference. For all your sass, you're as culturally and ethically hidebound as Patrician country club member defending his club's 'No Blacks' policy. And glib. THAT'S really white, and you should know better. That you don't only defines the sanctimony and churlishness of your essay, Erin. Nice premise, though.
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