I am a spectacular beauty.
It’s May now, and I walk the streets of the nation’s capital free from my shrouding winter coat, making it impossible for male passersby to concentrate on their conversations. Cars slide to a precipitous halt at the mere sight of me, fishtailing as their brakes lock. Heads swivel on necks made suddenly rubbery by the merest glimpse of me. Eyes goggle. The glint of my ankle bracelet, the hint of a thigh as my skirt blows around — it’s unfair, really, and I know I need to stop showing off “them fine legs.” At least that’s what the helpful truck driver yells after swooping to a stop in his deuce-and-a-half mere inches from me. My perfume, mingled with the inchoate sorcery that is moi, produces a fragrance so entrancing, so beguiling, it can only be called eau de Debra and it drives men to lunacy. How could they not sniff and snort with orgasmic pleasure, lips loudly smacking, nostrils piggily flaring, lest I fail to notice their gyrations? What good are offerings made to a goddess who notices not?
So by all means, come a little closer. After all, I am woman and therefore a natural wonder. Like a waterfall or a pretty stand of trees. Feel free to waylay me. Block my path to inform me that you heartily approve of my “tight-ass” dress. Thank God that’s settled. And don’t forget to thrust your pelvis at me while you address my breasts. We beauties like it. Why else would we dress “that way”? Don’t just scream at me from the far side of a four-lane road (across which I am apparently supposed to jog so that our destiny can be fulfilled at the bus stop named Federal Triangle). Come up from behind and whisper intimately, preferably Ebonically, in my ear. Mais oui, I’d love to “get witchou” ce soir, cherie. And you, Mr. Businessman. Come right on over and “accidentally” rub your penis against my “gorgeous ass,” as you put it, as we wait at a light. Then look at me expectantly, waiting for the nooner which will no doubt now ensue. I can take a compliment.
And you, in the beat-up Pontiac: Should I cruelly refuse to answer your catcalls of love, by all means get out of your car and dog me for three blocks expressing your pain. I have now become a “fat, fucking skank,” not a beauty, but I understand. You have every right to be angry. And don’t worry. No one will intervene. But don’t ask me for spare change while you’re at it: Panhandling is strictly regulated and the cops will be all over you.
I am a vision. I must be.
God, I love spring.
“It was spring for me, too,” chuckles Northwestern University law professor Cynthia Bowman. “That’s when I got the idea for the article.” Well, that and Thelma & Louise. It was 1991, two years before her controversial article (“Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women”) would appear in the Harvard Law Review and cause a national sensation. Already interested in the subject of sexual harassment, she saw that infamous movie and came away struck by the audience’s approving blood lust when the movie stars blew up the pig truck driver’s rig. An article was born when she ran afoul of her own pig truck driver shortly thereafter. She was captive at a red light with her windows rolled down to enjoy the beautiful weather when the two men in the next vehicle laid into Bowman with a stream of sex talk and ridicule that crushed her. The confluence of events made her realize that she’d been repressing a lifetime of such incidents. Canvassing her friends, she found that she was far from alone. Hooray for Hollywood; the professor decided to fight back.
In her article, Bowman labels street harassment a grueling, humiliating and frightening fact of women’s lives “that has not generally been viewed by academics, judges or legislators as a problem requiring legal redress, either because these mostly male observers have not noticed the behavior or because they have considered it trivial and thus not within the proper scope of the law.” It’s certainly the case that many men haven’t noticed it. When I discussed this article at our staff meeting, a male colleague asked, “Are you saying that when you leave this office, say to go to lunch, you’ll be harassed?” He was shocked.
In her first-of-its-kind academic article, Bowman proposed an anti-harassment ordinance, featuring a $250 fine, “but, if I had it to do again,” she said, “I might leave that out. It was an afterthought. Everyone fixated on the ordinance, but that’s just the kind of thing you do in a law review article, you propose a remedy. I just wanted to stimulate discussion of how the law too often ignores women.” Stimulate discussion she did. She was denounced from one corner of America to another as the epitome of political correctness and feminism run amok, then held aloft as an icon by legions of pissed-off women who wanted her to go even further. “I was astonished by the response,” the rueful professor said this week, tired from grading end-of-year exams.
She wouldn’t have been astonished if she lived here in D.C. “Women who’ve lived lots of places tell me it’s worse here than anywhere else,” says Denise Snyder, executive director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center which offers training in dealing with street harassment. Quantifying an essentially untraceable phenomenon is extremely difficult, but it’s certainly true that street harassment is a historically controversial topic here. In 1990, a summer series of three Washington Post articles on street harassment — one journalistic, one essayistic, and one op-ed — caused a firestorm.
But it wasn’t until 1993, the year of Bowman’s law review article, that war broke out, first locally, then nationally. Washington Post writer Phil McCombs wrote “StareMasters: Every Day at Noon They Sit and Watch Their Dreams Go By,” detailing a benign week of girl-watching at a construction site. The letters-to-the-editor pages and phone lines at the Post were so clogged with responses that the paper’s ombudsman had to weigh in. D.C. Men Against Rape staged a protest at the construction site and national columnists took sides. ABC and CBS called. Maury Povich even wanted to fly McCombs and the construction workers to New York for a show. “Don’t they have construction workers in New York?” he sensibly mused in a follow-up piece.
Filmmaker Maggie Hadleigh-West believes D.C.’s street harassment is among the worst. “My hard-on about street abuse formed when I lived in D.C.,” she said. By the time she was living in New York, she had become so fed up she made a documentary about it, “War Zone,” in which she confronts men who harass her. The original was shown in 1993 and caused the same kind of explosion that Bowman’s article had. The sequel debuts Friday at Chicago’s Facets Cinematheque. Some of the men she confronts become quite abusive. “When we oppose street harassment and speak up, we make them suddenly self-conscious, we make them give up a privilege. They don’t like it.”
Indeed they do not. And on this issue, women’s anger crosses ideological lines. Amy Holmes, a policy analyst with the conservative Independent Women’s Forum and a widely featured political commentator, frequently fights back. Recently harassed by a small group of men as she left her office alone at 10 p.m., they cursed her when she ignored their “hey, baby”s. “I was so mad, I whirled around and yelled, ‘That’s why I don’t talk to guys like you!’ I’ve even flipped some of these guys off, and I’m a polite, normal young woman. It’s just gotten so bad.” So bad in fact that TLC, a popular R&B trio of young women recently recorded a song, “No Scrubs,” about the losers who hassle women on the streets.
Why do they do it? We’re not talking about gallantry, or playful flirting or simple, unfrightened compliments. Why the abuse, the privacy invasion, the intimidation? Why do the construction workers on my block, for instance, make sudden loud noises with their machinery as I pass so they can laugh when I jump? I don’t ask them. I’m afraid of escalation. When I lived in San Francisco, panhandling/drug addict/psychotic bums supported by asshole tourists congregated in my North Beach neighborhood and figured out my name and apartment. Remembering them tapping on my windows, I go to a different neighborhood and ask street harassers why they do it.
“Aw! There y’all go, there y’all go!” one man goes off. “Always complainin’ when you should be happy. We like you, get it? We human men. We like your bodies. We like your … your … okay, I’ll say it and it’s your fault because I don’t even talk like this — we like your titties! We like titties. We men. We like women, ain’t no fags round here.”
“Can’t please a woman these days less you ready to go to jail,” opined one man, fury twisting his features and making his nostrils flare.
“It’s a compliment, alright, jeez,” another said, eyes rolled heavenward in disgust. “Why is it so wrong to tell you that you’re pretty? How much time you spend getting dressed this morning? How much makeup you got at home? Huh? It’s for me, right? For men.”
And if I don’t care what random men think? “Maybe you’re gay. Maybe that’s all the problem, right there?”
His buddy, a quieter type who, alone among the five, had said nothing as I passed, added tentatively, “I’m a human being, too. All you have to do is say hi.” And if we don’t want to? He thought for a minute. “Why not just say it?”
“It’s a big miscommunication,” Hadleigh-West says. “What they think they’re sending is not what we’re receiving. They say they’re trying to tell us we’re attractive, desirable, sexy. We feel assaulted.” Says Snyder, “Men claim they do it to meet women. That’s bullshit. There’s a power dynamic at work with street harassment. It’s at the base of any sexual harassment. They don’t really think they’ll get dates that way.”
Adrian Davis, law professor at Washington College of Law at American University says street harassment has to be understood as on a continuum with sexual assault and stalking. “Women’s impulse is to react. We want to respond when insulted but we fear assault. Sexual harassment in the workplace tells women they can’t have an ‘economic personality.’ Sexual harassment on the streets prevents women from being able to fully enjoy the public sphere. If you leave home ‘inappropriately,’ i.e. to work or without a man, you are disciplined with sexual harassment.”
As does Bowman in her article, Davis points out (rightly, in my experience) that women are much less likely to be harassed while with old people or children or, of course, a man. If I’m so devastatingly gorgeous, why is this never pointed out while I’m with my fianci?
“Because they know it’s wrong,” says Snyder flatly.
Does it matter that this is most often pointed out to me (in graphic detail) by black men? Courtland Milloy, in one of those three 1990 Washington Post pieces, lamented the “black men who [make] the district a living hell for their sisters.” Many of the female letter-writers made the same claim. Julianne Malveaux as well has written about her own abuse from black males and the “contempt” some of them exhibit for black women. “We are at the low end of the food chain for them,” she writes. So, yes, it matters if only because 95 percent of the harassment I receive comes from them. If that’s group loyalty, I can live without it.
This summer, the New York chapter of NOW’s anti-violence committee is planning a campaign against street harassment. “A lot of street harassment comes from men working on the streets — movers, delivery men. If a woman can identity the company the harasser is working for, NOW will send them a letter describing the incident and asking them to take action,” says Joanna Perlman of NOW.
Holmes disagrees with this tactic. “It’s not a legal or employer problem. It’s a social problem and that tattletale approach will only exacerbate the problem. We need to ask why these guys feel entitled to say these things, why men have forgotten to be civil and gentlemanly. The people who witness these incidents, men especially, need to speak up. We need social pressure. If the police or companies are the enforcers, people can tell themselves that harassers will be ticketed, it’s not their responsibility.”
I won’t hold my breath until the people of America rise up and shame street harassers. I’ll just keep hiding behind my sunglasses and Walkman until winter comes again and I can disappear into my big, shapeless coat.
Anger gets a bad rap. It’s the universal disguised denunciation (“Why are feminists so angry?”), the wink-and-nudge code word to signal contempt while fronting as pity for the deranged. That label gives those at whom the anger is directed a get-out-of-jail-free card to abandon the debate since anger is, in one fell swoop, deemed irrational. Neat trick that, changing the subject from the offense that provoked the response to a feigned disgust over the angry person’s “unseemly” behavior.
Here’s hoping that Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker holds onto his newfound rage over his city’s crime rates. A recent column in the Newark Star-Ledger lays out the stark reality that has turned this Zen-y, post-race, teetotaling philosopher, Rhodes scholar, Stanford football star and Yale Law grad into Martin Luther King Jr. If he doesn’t see progress soon, we may be heading for Malcom X territory. A year into his mayoralty, Booker’s million and one grad school-infused plans to save Newark have come to naught and will continue to do so as long as the war on drugs remains a war on the urban poor.
Booker staked his campaign on making Newark safe, yet the city’s as dangerous as it ever was. Its tally of 105 murders last year is the highest in 10 years. But that die was cast long before he nailed his shiny diplomas to his office wall, because New Jersey‘s urban and crime policies are designed to keep Newark an enclave of despair, violence and race-based underachievement. Drugs remain about the only game in town for an urban poor denied entree to the legit life. And, once in the drug life, talk about cutthroat competition; dealers are ruthlessly assassinating each other, up close and personal. The only good news is the decrease in random killings. The number of people hit by gunfire is down 31 percent — people who aren’t drug dealers, that is.
What do we expect as a society, when we fail to educate and embrace “the usual suspects” and send them out into this brutal economy with no way to make an honest living? What’s more, once they’ve fallen into that trap, we do everything possible to ensure they’ll have to repeat the pattern. Cherry on top? The millions that the Halliburtons of America make off the prison-industrial complex. I’m not one given to easy racial tropes, but prisons are indeed the new plantations. New Jersey spends a billion dollars a year on prisons, one-third of which are filled with nonviolent offenders, our nation’s highest rate.
Not surprising, considering that the entire city (save the airport) is within a school drug zone, which means that illegal drug activity in the area carries a mandatory minimum of three years’ incarceration. According to Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran, 96 percent of those so sentenced are black or Hispanic, though virtually none of the drugs in question were sold to children. Even so, the state Legislature voted down a proposal to shrink the school zones from 1,000 feet to 200 feet, offering instead proposals to make the mandatory penalties, already among the nation’s toughest, tougher still. It also refuses to fund more than token levels of drug treatment or sentencing alternatives for the nonviolent, with predictable results.
A staggering 1,500 state cons are released back to Newark each year. One thousand of them will end up back on lockdown, probably on drug charges, within three years. In between prison stays, the state’s post-release restrictions on employment (or basic adult necessities like, say, getting a driver’s license) are among the nation’s most draconian. Given the underperforming schools most in this group attended, it’s a wonder we don’t just round them up, à la the hapless Baghdad-cabby-and-tea-shop guys of our war on terror raids, and lock them all in conveniently located Gitmos.
In tracing the arc of Booker’s road to rage, columnist Moran noted, “At a time when even states like Texas are changing course, we are sticking with our failed strategy.” Booker told Moran that he was willing to go to jail himself to change things. “I’m going to battle on this,” the mayor said. “We’re going to start doing it the gentlemanly way. And then we’re going to do the civil disobedience way. Because this is absurd … I’m talking about marches. I’m talking about sit-ins at the state capital. I’m talking about whatever it takes.”
Booker’s right. It’s time to let America know that we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. Urban policy, in most of America and especially in Newark, is what we GIs called a self-licking ice cream cone: It exists only for its own satisfaction and benefits no one but itself. This is a reality that dreamy-eyed young leaders like Cory Booker are learning the hard way. Let no one say that he didn’t try to work within the system. Now, the same energy he put into genteelly lobbying Trenton politicians with pie charts and spreadsheets must now take to the streets. No justice, no peace.
Could it really be? Is the NAACP, the civil rights group that rocked the entire planet so hard that even the students in Tiananmen Square invoked it, really on the verge of collapsing with a willfully self- destructive whimper?
With Bruce Gordon’s recent departure as president after just 19 months and the recent announcement that the NAACP is shuttering its regional offices, the future does not look bright for the nation’s oldest advocacy organization.
Back in the late ’90s, I was fresh out of law school and raring to take on the system with the tools that NAACP and other civil rights leaders had won for me. Working in D.C. at the time, I remember seeing a photo of then NAACP president Kweisi Mfume in the paper. I was transfixed by the reverential image of him being arrested outside the Supreme Court during a protest against the dearth of black law clerks — an essential steppingstone for young lawyers wanting to enter the upper reaches of the legal profession. Eyes closed, on his knees, handcuffed, he looked with beatific stoicism to the heavens, à la Dr. King en route to the Birmingham jail. A shot for the ages.
But as inspired as I was by traditional civil rights activism, I was also having some nagging doubts about the efficacy of the old-school struggle the world has been watching us play out since the ’60s. After two generations of activism (preceded by NAACP’s earlier dogged war against Jim Crow, beginning with the group’s founding in 1909) racism has changed. Thanks to the sacrifices of the heroes and the martyrs, the battle against overt white supremacy has been won, however imperfectly. Now a critical bloc of black professionals are entering the halls of power and the black masses have a real, though obstacle-strewn, shot at achieving the dream.
As I studied Mfume’s photo, I couldn’t help thinking: Shouldn’t the NAACP have been using its moral authority to extend black influence throughout the nation’s institutions instead of submitting those institutions to unceasing frontal attacks designed merely to expose their racism? Instead of playing the faux martyr on the steps of the Supreme Court, shouldn’t he have been inside, respectfully but firmly lobbying Clarence Thomas and any other justice he could buttonhole? Holding my newly minted law school diploma, I was beginning to think so. It was time for the NAACP to evolve into a problem-solving organization for black America.
That’s why I was thrilled when the NAACP tapped veteran businessman Gordon to lead the black community into the future. Finally, after the organization had spent years clinging to a focus on confrontation without much action, Gordon promised to retool the NAACP to focus on social services and to leverage the civil rights movement’s gains into practical results. A star businessman whose career had been made possible by organizations like the NAACP, he was living proof that black success now requires more pragmatism than protest.
With a membership that peaked during WWII, long-running budget shortfalls, and a leadership and membership dominated by politicians, preachers and the elderly, the NAACP was in danger of becoming all but irrelevant. A history of poor management and disagreement with the group’s protest-focused agenda dried up the corporate and philanthropic monies that had earlier bankrolled black freedom. When former Verizon exec Gordon was named president in 2005, it seemed a tacit admission that America had changed, and that the NAACP would change, too.
Gordon was the ultimate insider motivated by a social accountability ethic born from the civil rights struggles that made his success possible. He had long used his clout, working from within, to significantly increase minority hiring and training programs in the telecom industry. “Civil rights leaders throughout this country did what they did and died,” he said in his acceptance speech, “so my generation has full responsibility to walk in the doors those brave people opened.”
In his brief tenure, Gordon used his corporate ties for Hurricane Katrina relief and brought in staffers with résumés impressive enough to lift morale in the beleaguered organization. He met three times with President Bush, who had shunned the NAACP for nearly six years. But after 19 months of constant warfare with the NAACP’s board over his lack of interest in protest, he was out. With him went the corporate funds and credibility desperately needed to save the NAACP.
In defending the NAACP’s change of heart about the leader who was doing exactly what he’d been hired to do, Julian Bond, chairman of NAACP’s ungainly 64-member board of directors, said, “Put simply, we fight racial discrimination and social service groups fight the effects of racial discrimination. Service is wonderful and praiseworthy and fabulous, but many, many organizations do it. Only a couple do justice work, and we’re one of those few.”
Gordon’s departure was only the beginning of NAACP’s troubles. Now, just three months later, the group has announced it will be “temporarily” closing its seven regional offices and slashing its national staff by 40 percent. It has also had to “delay” moving its Baltimore headquarters to Washington, D.C. The nation’s oldest civil rights organization is on the brink of extinction, defeated by its inability to evolve, a fact that no amount of rhetoric will be able to conceal at its 98th annual convention next month.
If it had been up to me to join a Freedom Ride or face Bull Connor or be spat upon and dragged from lunch counters to a Deep South jail, I’d be cleaning Salon’s office today instead of writing this column. I am in awe that civil rights activists, symbolized by the NAACP, found the courage, and indeed the hope, to lay their lives on the line in a seemingly lost cause. Which is why it breaks my heart to be writing this. Those of us who were not required to find out what we were made of then are required now to find the courage to speak truth to a venerated black power that has lost its way. Sadly, the NAACP seems to have outlived its usefulness.
Poor MeMe Roth. She had a misguided crusade against tubby “American Idol” contestants all ready to go, then the damned facts got in the way. All the anti-obesity crusader needed was a hapless scapegoat, but cruel fate denied her that simple request.
Roth, the leader of a wannabe movement called National Action Against Obesity, was surely praying that LaKisha Jones would win “American Idol,” so she could make her the poster girl for the nation’s obesity epidemic. Jones, for all that heavenly voice, was actually obese, whereas bubbly belter Jordin Sparks is merely kittenishly chubby. No matter. Roth was camped out at Fox News before Sparks finished the song that got her into the finals. Her message? Skinny Blake Lewis should win (a singing contest) because Sparks, according to Roth’s warped standards, is fat. Won’t someone please think of the children?
As unbelievably manipulative and self-serving as Roth’s agenda is (how she must regret having missed XXXL-size Reuben Studdard’s win in Season 2, before he dropped 100 pounds), she does help lead the way to a worthy point: the culturally accepted high level of obesity among black women and its related health problems. But Jordin Sparks isn’t the poster girl for this issue. Buffie the Body is.
According to a Village Voice article by Ben Westhoff, there are a slew of “urban” magazines finding success with men of color by replacing the traditional photo spreads of well-known bony models and actresses with unknown, “round the way sisters.” Looks and fitness — not required. Gi-normous butts (and weaves) — must have. Buffie, with a 45-inch ass, is the reigning queen of this scene and her popularity speaks to blacks’ normalization of a very un-p.c. fatness. Besides being a cover girl, Buffie appeared in the movie “ATL” as Big Booty Judy and is “as recognizable in the black community as some supermodels.”
Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder and need not justify itself. I love (non-steroidal) body builders’ physiques and, pre-kids, I was that hardcore gym rat haranguing co-workers over the contents of their lunch sacks. My own mother found my buff body distasteful, though it would have taken Gitmo to make her admit it (my family deputized a representative to ask me if I was gay). So, my issue is not with a butt fetish per se. Fetishizing large rumps (though “large” doesn’t tell you the half of it without the pix) is, of course, no better or worse than fetishizing plastic blimp-breasts, except that the latter could be considered safer. Their supply can be halted, surgeons are regulated, patients are monitored and, of course, the bearers themselves can have the implants removed. But the best way to get a gargantuan ass of urban-lad-mag size is to be obese; this is also the path to ill health and early death for black women, as Buffie’s lifestyle amply demonstrates.
According to the Voice, Buffie “eats nothing but junk food and sugary drinks, and she doesn’t work out.” Starting out at only 120 pounds 10 years ago, she developed her “attributes” by chugging supplement shakes in order to gain weight. “Black women don’t want to be skinny,” she said.
It’s fairly common knowledge that many black (and Hispanic) men prefer their women larger than do other groups, a reality that launched Buffie on her path to glory. It is perhaps less well known that that preference has contributed to extremely high levels of obesity among black women. While I’m all for subverting the dominant (white) Barbie paradigm that equates beauty with starvation, I’m also for subverting the black paradigm of thumbing our noses at mainstream beauty standards just because they’re mainstream. Obesity is killing us, and our obesity is in part cultural; Buffie’s butt-growing supplements and rejection of exercise are a choice, a preference. When significant numbers of black women tell researchers they don’t work out because the sweat will ruin their expensive hairdos, it’s time to take stock of black culture. Not everything about us should be either encouraged or celebrated.
Recent press reports show why black women should be alarmed: More than half of us are obese — 78 percent are considered overweight. And, according to the American Obesity Association, the pounds are not coming off easily, due to “cultural factors related to diet, exercise and weight among African-Americans.” The Centers for Disease Control finds that rates of diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cancer and premature death are higher among black women, and when we get these diseases, we’re sicker than white women. But here’s the kicker: Womenshealth.gov reports that “compared with overweight white Americans, overweight black Americans are two to three times more likely to say their weight is average — even after they’ve been told they are overweight or obese by a doctor (emphasis added). It’s one thing not to “see” that you need to lose weight. It’s quite another to reject that knowledge from the medical professional you sought out.
To the degree that this black fat preference is simply a determination to pooh-pooh anything “white,” blacks need to grow up. If it’s simply ignorance, well, now we know and when you know better you’re supposed to do better. Sorry, brothers, but just as I learned to reject “hard bodies” that are the result of steroids, y’all need to reject “lard bodies” that are, at least in part, the result of slow suicide to please you. Just as other cultures have had to discourage certain customs — bound feet, corsets and hoop skirts — blacks have to learn to see a seriously overweight sister not just as freewheeling and “down” enough to enjoy her fried pork chops but as a woman who might be putting her health at risk. Sisters, there ain’t nobody to blame but yourself when you Southern fry yourself, complete with coveted ass, into Forest Lawn while your kids are still in elementary school. MeMe Roth’s anti-obesity campaign may be seriously askew, but so is sacrificing your health to blimp yourself into a Buffie.
You knew it had to happen.
Damn it all, Michelle Obama has quit her $215,000 dream job and demoted herself to queen. Though the party line is that she’s only “scaled back” to a 20 percent workload, I doubt her former co-workers will bother alerting her to many staff meetings. She’s traded in her solid gold résumé, high-octane talent and role as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals to be a professional wife and hostess.
Now, the energy and drive that had her up jogging before dawn and a gratifying day of work and family will mainly be spent smiling for the cameras. Just as we watch curvy, healthy-looking singers and actresses like Lindsay Lohan become anorexic too-blonde hoochies before our very eyes, so we’re now in danger of having to watch the political version of that process: Any day now, Michelle Obama’s handlers will have her glued into one of those Sunday-go-to-meeting Baptist grandma crown hats while smiling vapidly for hours at a time. When, of course, she’s not staring moonstruck, à la Nancy Reagan, at her moon doggie god-husband who’s not one bit smarter than she is.
My heart breaks for her just thinking about it. Being president will be hard. So will being first lady for the brilliant Michelle — imagine, having to begin all your sentences with “My husband and I…”
I’m in a feminist fury about Michelle (I’ll use her first name to avoid confusion with her husband) feeling forced to quit, but make no mistake: I’m not blaming her. Few could stand up to the pressure she’s facing, especially from blacks, to sacrifice herself on the altar of her husband’s ambition. He could be the first black president, you know! Also, she must be beside herself trying to hold things together for her daughters. I’m blaming the world and every man, woman, child and border collie in it who helps send the message that women’s lives must be subordinate to everyone else’s.
No doubt her modern, progressive husband assured her she didn’t have to quit — probably even tried to dissuade her. It’s also quite likely she’s making this sacrifice so her children will have at least one parent available. But the result is the same. Our daughters grow up knowing that their freedom to work at hard-won, beloved careers hinges on the doings of their husbands.
Still, there’s an opportunity in this setback. Now is the time for feminism to reach out to black women via the contingent of Obama-esque overachievers out there who ought to be chilled to the bone by Michelle’s retirement from work of her own. Given Secretary Rice’s, not to mention Oprah’s, persistent singleness, black women who have earned high status may well wonder why they should bother trying to both date and develop successful careers if one’s going to cancel out the other. No other group is less likely to marry. Given the innate conservatism of the black community, the burden to tend to hearth and home falls disproportionately on its women, sending the message to ambitious black girls that they can’t have both fulfilling careers and families.
It would be one thing if Michelle had tired of working, but she’s clearly ambivalent about leaving paid employment, as the Washington Post’s recent coverage made clear:
“Every other month [since] I’ve had children I’ve struggled with the notion of ‘Am I being a good parent? Can I stay home? Should I stay home? How do I balance it all?’” she said. “I have gone back and forth every year about whether I should work.” When she finally winds down her duties as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals in the days ahead…, she said, it “will be the first time that I haven’t gotten up and gone to a job.” “It’s a bit disconcerting,” she said. “But it’s not like I’ll be bored.” No, you’ll have your well-manicured hands full being your husband’s hostess in chief. Funny how she didn’t mention her husband’s parental angst; there have been whispers that he’s been pretty busy, too, what with being the great black hope and all. Wonder what finally made her decide to quit.
While I’m not blaming Michelle, I am issuing a challenge: This political and professional sutee won’t end until women refuse to step into the fire, disapproval be damned. Sen. Clinton can’t do everything: The rest of us women must stand our ground. Whatever else you think of Clinton, you can’t deny that she blazed a trail for women’s right to work and, like, be smart in public. And, man, what a beatdown she got. Since it was bringing about the end of the civilization as we know it, she caved, took her husband’s name and gave up a public policy role; she had to wait, like a good girl, until her husband couldn’t run for anything else. Valuable years of productivity, wasted. But at least giving up her career wasn’t Hillary Clinton’s first choice, as it is for most of the elite women who are abandoning their careers.
Linda Hirshman was an early observer of the phenomenon of top-tier women leading the retreat back to the kitchen. Following up a controversial article, “Homeward Bound,” with an equally controversial book, “Get to Work,” she harshly chastised elite, well-educated women for choosing not to work once they married high earners. Using census data and interviews, she argues that:
As a result of feminist efforts — and larger economic trends — the percentage of [working] women … rose robustly through the 1980s and early ’90s. But then the pace slowed. The census numbers for all working mothers leveled off around 1990 and have fallen modestly since 1998. In interviews, women with enough money to quit work say they are choosing to opt out. Their words conceal a crucial reality: the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism … Among the affluent-educated-married population, women are letting their careers slide to tend the home fires. If my interviewees are working, they work largely part time, and their part-time careers are not putting them in the executive suite. I am not saying Michelle Obama is just another member of the so-called opt-out revolution; clearly, her reasons for leaving her job are historic — and even so, she clearly seems pained to do it. And I hate to add to Michelle’s load, but even though she’s made the choice to leave work, I hope she’ll keep her role in women’s history in mind and increase the tiny inroad political wives have made into something approaching women’s freedom of choice. With her personal wealth (albeit obtained by marriage) Theresa Heinz laid some groundwork, speaking her mind on the campaign trail and generally refusing to be mealy-mouthed and dull. Kudos to Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean, too, for refusing to give up saving lives to chat up reporters on her husband’s tour bus. But until more women who want to work feel free to do just that, they’ll continue to be mere appendages of their men, and the American workplace will remain just as family-unfriendly as it is now.
What can Michelle do? If Obama wins, she should go for it and take on a meaningful public policy role, à la Hillary Clinton’s healthcare work. Just a lot more carefully. Why on earth should such an accomplished woman just arrange white-tie dinners? Until then, she should become more outspoken, building on her husband’s willingness to confront dysfunction in the black community — a black mother can get away with what no one else could. Obama has chastised blacks for apathy, for crime, for equating achievement with “acting white,” for allowing their neighborhoods to deteriorate; Michelle’s street cred as a churchgoing, “round the way” sister who made good makes her “ghetto pass” (her ability to operate as an insider) irrevocable. There will be no discussion of whether or not she’s “black.”
Since the Obamas are liberals, Michelle is bullet proof. Anyone who dares to insult her with the same level of vitriol as has been visited on Hillary Clinton and leading white Democrats like Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein will be trampled by a herd of black ministers, civil rights leaders and church ladies in big hats. (Condoleezza Rice doesn’t get the same protection.) In a post-Imus world, any critiques of Michelle had best be worded very carefully. She could also build on her husband’s interfaith pioneering with mainstream organizations to bring the resources of those well-endowed communities to bear on black problems.
Of course, “black” problems are really American problems; having the golden couple spearheading the fight will make it sexy to help blacks with their systemic problems (education and entrepreneurship, to name two). The two Obamas can de-race these issues (here is where she can use her fancy education) and help America understand that black progress is American progress.
Most important, though, I hope Michelle will bring feminism to black women.
Feminism is rightfully criticized for being irrelevant to black women and ignoring their issues. When it’s not plain arrogant, that is. An excellent example of mainstream feminism’s high-handedness is Maureen Dowd’s recent petty bitching about Michelle’s jabs at her husband on the campaign trail. She sounded like a 1940s white woman reprimanding a “sassy” black maid. But feminism’s failure to engage with black women is only partly its own fault; black men have worked hard to reinforce the image of feminism as not just “white,” not just lesbian, not just a plot to make contented black women unhappy with their lot but also (as usual) a war against black men. This black male victimology has been so successful at changing the subject whenever black women complain that, 20 years after Anita Hill was successfully demonized as a tool of white feminists for daring to “bring down” a prominent black man, here’s Michelle’s tortured answer to the Washington Post’s F-question:
“You know, I’m not that into labels … So probably, if you laid out a feminist agenda, I would probably agree with a large portion of it,” she said. “I wouldn’t identify as a feminist just like I probably wouldn’t identify as a liberal or a progressive.”
How difficult it must be for someone so whip smart and so famously blunt, according to insiders, to have to mouth these political pieties. But if we know nothing else about Michelle Obama, we know she’s determined to live in the world the way it is, not the way it should be. But she’s in a prime position to help change all that.
Now is the perfect opportunity for the movement to reach out to black women by embracing Michelle and black women’s causes in general. Progressive women should be working their way toward the middle ground a political wife must occupy and politely engineer ways in which Michelle can put her postelection time, win or lose, to worthy causes important to the black community — welfare-to-work, hiring and job training, for example.
But even as I seek silver linings, I’m still sad for Michelle. As the Times reports, “She expresses no regret about scaling down her job … where colleagues say she excels at tackling thorny problems. But this winter, after spotting a book on the Obamas’ coffee table celebrating Mr. Obama’s Senate victory, her staff created a matching volume of her accomplishments. Mrs. Obama wept when she saw it.”
Problems don’t come much thornier than this. You’ve got a right to sing the blues, Michelle, so go ahead and cry. Then take action.
Dear Dan,
This is perhaps the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write. I’ve started it again and again but I know now that I’ll never get it right, so just let me stumble my way through, OK? Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be.
Your Savage Love sex advice column not only made me a better lover but a better person. You introduced me to people, places and things I would have never otherwise been aware of. You were my secret gay crush for five years. Or you used to be. But, sadly, this is both a fan letter and a Dear John, Dear Dan. It’s over and it’s better this way. You’ll see. No, please, Dan — it’s not you. It’s me. But I’m hoping we can still be friends.
When I discovered you, Dan Savage — wonderful sexpert, faggot you — I couldn’t believe the new worlds you opened up for me and how blinkered a supposedly sex-positive feminist like myself truly was. In my GI days in the ’80s Third World, I was proud of myself for overcoming my Southern Baptist brimstone against prostitutes once I understood the world those women lived in while I marched about in my shiny uniform making more monthly than they did annually. I ended up with bargirl girlfriends and shamed my whore-mongering male co-workers into treating them well. That led me, during law school, to work for sex workers’ rights. How open-minded, how transgressive I thought myself even as a bottle of wine and a mix tape were the only accessories I ever encountered in the bedroom.
Then you came along, damn your eyes; how I preened as I “allowed” a homosexual to give me advice on straight issues. Such a liberal! The parade of kink you bestowed on me each week (I do nothing on Wednesdays before reading you); the trannies, the furries, the swingers, the cuckold fetishists. I’m a Dead White Man book-lovin’ geek — what gratitude that you were keeping words like “cuckold” in use!
Since we supplicants make the pilgrimage to your site to admit that which can be admitted nowhere else, here’s my confession: At first, I read your column the way we “decent” folk rubberneck a perp walk — so we can tut-tut and get our disapproval on. But my Church Lady prurient, “I have no part in this” sniffiness slowly gave way to a raised consciousness of all things sexual. This may be the column that made me realize that for all the schtupping I had so proudly done, I still had a lot to learn:
Like those “straight” frat boys I fucked back at the University of Illinois, your boyfriend wants it. He wants you to fuck around with another guy, preferably in front of him. But he doesn’t wanna want it and wishes it would go away. And it does go away, just like magic, immediately after he comes. Unfortunately, it comes roaring back as soon as he’s horny again. Where did his cuckold fetish come from? Like many fetishes, his cuckold thing is most likely a subconscious, erotic response to a sexually charged fear. While most of us learn to live with and occasionally conquer our fears without eroticizing them, a number of us respond to sexual fears or traumas by incorporating them into our erotic imaginations.
Dan, that’s when I realized you weren’t just enabling my voyeurism; you were dropping knowledge! I had subconsciously assumed a) that a sex advice columnist couldn’t be very deep and that b) fetishists were just natural-born freaks to run from at first sight of those assless chaps and that growling Dustbuster; cerebral me had never thought to wonder where fetishes came from or that most were, however strange, neither harmful nor illegal, in any event. I read you and flipped through my photo album wondering which old lover had secretly lain next to my snoring bod after a thorough, vanilla pounding, and wished he had the nerve to wake me up and order him to mop my floors with his tongue.
No doubt the fetishes you discuss have long been understood, but what a service to have that knowledge broadcast to a general public. And bravo for the top-flight medical expertise you marshal to advise us all on the risks of practices like “water sports,” bestiality and all things poop related. That was when I first thought of writing about you. Working title: That Pervert Dan Savage Is Good for America. Other sex advice columnists turned me off with their faux fey girliness (“you know what happened next”) or their exhibitionism, all but posting their pap smears online. But not you, you’re all business about pleasure, just what a nation so obsessed but so repressed about sex needs.
Dan, you were that lover who turns a virgin out, turns her on, “makes” her do naughty things that go completely against her “nature” and produces a bedroom superstar who looks for all the world like a librarian. You’re the middle-aged housewife who breaks in the lawn boy. (One of the reasons I love you is for your dictum that older lovers should treat their legally aged younger ones like camp sites — left better than when found.) You are a sexual Solomon reigning over a moral universe that’s downright old testament. But.
Alas, maybe it was never meant to be between a middle-aged straight black chick from the Bible Belt and a raging ‘mo with no boundaries. I was with you through your calm instructions to the chick who wanted her pubic hairs plucked with tweezers. The politics of boinking your pets — read every word. But finally, a column from a few weeks ago made my sexual pendulum swing back past the point of equilibrium to a decidedly prudish angle. As I began dating again and anticipating a new, savage lease on sex, the parade of fetishes began to seem like plain old dysfunction to this straight arrow. You didn’t change, Dan. I did. And it was this column that was the final straw, the one that made me dread what was in store for me as I worked on my Match.com profile and looked for porn hiding places my kids wouldn’t find:
My husband … is a diaper-loving, transvestite adult baby … while I’m not into his kink, I’m not against it. I’ve bought him diapers … I’ve set aside a room in our house to be his “nursery,” one weekend a month he gets to be his little-girl self all weekend, and I peg him because he likes to feel submissive and dirty. He knows that I worry — as someone who works with children — that it could get out and ruin my career … lately our vanilla sex life is suffering … he always wants to come in his diapers [OR] he lies there like a lump. Now he’s decided that he doesn’t want to have sex unless it’s playtime … I’ve tried everything I can think of, even compromising the “my turn” rule by letting him whine and cry and pretend to be a baby during my turn. I’m tired of my baby girl; I want my husband back. You trained me well, Dan. I know I should applaud my fellow savage for being so GGG (good, giving and game), but I don’t. I think she should have headed for the hills at the first mention of Depends. I know I shouldn’t think it. But the fact is that I do. Now, instead of regretting what I missed out on sexually, I’m terrified of what I might learn if I give the least hint of a sexual openness. Now it’s me who’s on the down low, repressing my sexual fantasies for fear of what his might be. I’m the hall monitor geek in the coming-of-age movie who cuts physics for an orgy only to wake up with a persistent itch, a stalker and a big, fat secret to keep buried deep inside. I simply do not want to know what bland Dave in accounting keeps in his spare room.
It took a gay activist to convert me to don’t ask, don’t tell, and regretfully, I’m going to have to DTMFA. Hard as I tried, it turns out that I’m not so good, not very giving and definitely gone. I’m not dumping the column — can’t live without it. But I’ll be reading as a peeping Tom, not an acolyte.
Who was I kidding? I’m no wild child.
Signed,
Repressed and proud of it
