Reading Salon is like having 7-UP mixed with Grey Goose randomly.

You never know when its going to kick.

Trivializing a perfectly serious person does not do any good to Salon. My God, what were you smoking???

I mean, have you EVER looked at Jacqueline Kennedy???

Stop comparing Michelle with Jackie. They are literally poles apart in every sense: and i mean everything.

Dumb salon editors.

It's bad enough that Michelle Obama has to endure the deprecation of her accomplishments and submersion of her identity into mommy-hood, but this is absolutely ridiculous. Comments on any professional woman's "butt" or other physical attributes are demeaning no matter who they come from. In case you don't realize this, Michelle Obama's accomplishments are NOT YOUR accomplishments. Her achievement does not reflect on YOU. You are free to think whatever you want about the importance of your ass, but you are an ass to even bring this up.

I never thought I would read an article about my First Lady's posterior, but I have to unequivocally say that your article was truly amazing. There's been all this talk about the racial dialogue finally getting underway because Obama was elected, but, Jesus, now I know that dialogue has really begun.

I'm not black or a woman, but this article made me wish I was.

I ask again: is this site like a Wikipedia deal? Good night nurse.

How is discussing Michelle Obama's backside any more demeaning than the more general African American sentiment the media has been rolling out since November 4th that we "finally have a President who looks like me"?

Barack and Michelle Obama, like all other human beings on this planet, don't really look that much like any group of people. At least Ms. Kaplan is interested in a physical resemblance that goes beyond the apparently "appropriate" discussion of the Obamas' skin tones.

As for sexism (or racist sexism), it's no less amusing to hear these charges when leveled in defense of Obama than when the McCain camp tried to claim that people calling his running mate "hot" was a sexist slur. It's not that compliments can't be sexist, of course, but if you lined up the sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton's hair, headbands and failure to be either stunningly beautiful or white-haired and matronly in 1992, I suspect she'd be happy to exchange it all for a few weeks of obsessive talk about how hot she is.

To wonder where the article about "Laura Bush's nipples" was in 2000 is to assume that Laura Bush's style and attractiveness were never mentioned in 2000, which is reasonable insofar as that was nearly a decade ago and Laura Bush always insisted on keeping a low profile.

To wonder where the articles about Barack Obama's ass is a much graver offense, since Obama's phyiscal attractiveness has been paraded about since the beginning of his national career. His shirtless body was splashed over magazine covers to be ogled, examined and judged. "Obama Girl" became an internet star by expressing what is only too obvious: it doesn't hurt to be attractive in America.

It's natural to enjoy the physical beauty of others. The feminists who disdain such enjoyment have the option of making themselves as ugly as possible. But Michelle Obama has chosen to look fantastic. This is plenty of evidence to me that she enjoys her own beauty enough that we need not be guilty in enjoying it ourselves.

This is the most ridiculous topic I've read in a serious news publication in some time.

An article about Michele Obama's butt is exactly, precisely like writing an article about her big lips or her nappy hair. It reduces a prominent, dignified woman of letters to the very sort of fetishized cultural stereotype you scornfully refer to.

I'm not an easy guy to offend, but this bugs me a little.

5000. - N.

Neither funny nor insightful. Pathetic.

And I just renewed my subscription - caveat emptor.

The question "would you accept this from a male writer?" doesn't work. The thing about gender politics is that gender is always relevent. Coming from a man, this topic would likely be an issue of objectification. Coming from a woman, it's an issue of identification. The underlining messege is "I never expected somone with my physical characteristics—i.e. a black woman—to be First Lady." That idea is conveyed with pride in the beauty of the writer's own race, a form of beauty often marginalized. Specifically black characteristics are "urban." In otherwords "ghetto." To be "refined" is theoretically to display white characteristics. Which is, of course, nonsense.

A male equivalent would not be about Barack's package, but more likely, "I can't believe someone with my flared nostrils" or "my crinkly hair." Because again, as unpleaant and uncomfortable as it is to bring this us, the fact is a lifetime of socialization has taught us that people with these physical characteristics don't get into power. That article wouldn't be as funny, because those black male physical characteristics haven't been turned into a sexual plus the same way a large butt has. But the essential point would be the same.

I mean, come on, look at the number of black models, actresses, etc. who are famous, yes, but look more like white women with a deep tan than like African Americans. Michelle Obama is not one of those kinds of women. She represents a kind of beauty specific to black culture, and that has appeal to the black culture (but not necessarily only to that culture). The article is about pride and identification, not about reducing the First Lady to her ass.

Erin Aubry Kaplan has ignored the famous rear-end of Marilyn Monroe because she's got carried away with her own thesis. Yes, Monroe was an actress and this bummer essay is supposed to be about First Ladies, with predictible raking over the coals about Jackie Bouvier-Kennedy-Onassis but no mention at all about Mamie Eisenhower, surely an American fashion icon/totem in her day. Ms. Kaplan's crowing about the wonders of the black arse (an ass is a donkey) is extemely discriminatory as she could be responsible for pushing the mingy-arsed ones to the cosmetic surgery for implants and tightening, of course, as wobbly is woeful.

Bountiful buttocks being the topic on which Ms. Kaplan has chosen to write, it's a pity that she confined herself to the female of the species. Nevertheless, I believe in literary licence. Does she think that Michelle Obama has cabriole legs, in the style of Queen Anne furnitur, or was it only Hillary Clinton's legs that were up for a giggle during that unforgettable Primary?

As regards her wishes for Michelle's hair, surely she knows that America's first self-made millionaire was a black woman called CJ Walker who made her fortune from selling straighteners for kinky hair ("Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties" by Lucy Moore). That was also the era of the great blues singer, Bessie Smith. I don't suppose anyone was interested in getting lyrical about Bessie's gable-end. It was her talent that mattered.