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So the American public has sounded off—and the stank-face has it! The "angry" Michelle Obama is oddly compelling to some of the average men and women surveyed—the counterintuitive, apparently gender-neutral enjoyment of a spanking speaking. I can't help but have many opinions on Michelle Obama, which range from praise for her double-dipping in home life and work life, her evasion of ready-made racial categories for black women (Mammy or Jezebel?) to distaste for her meta-modeling of a White House victory garden. But oh man does Stanley Crouch have an opinion. From his piece on The Root today:
Michelle Obama is much more than the superficial assessment of being a “real” sister or “too real,” which is usually attached to some sense of pathology and deprivation. Every background contains stupidity and evil, and no one seeking to understand the troubles and the mysterious aspects of human beings should ever forget those facts of life. It is quite clear that this is not a bitter woman, and it is just as evident that she has forgotten nothing. She embodies that quality of deep Americana essential to what got us through slavery and all of the tribulations that followed it until the votes were counted on Nov. 4, 2008.
She is both brilliant and down home, free of the solitary confinement of ethnic nationalism and low expectations for the nation. Like her husband, Michelle Obama embraced the deathless presence of the bitter and the sweet in both human life and our national history. That embrace retooled American patriotism and established a maturity that was not expected in our time of protracted adolescence and overstatement.
Above all else, the first lady has done everything exactly her way, never seeming to hide her heart behind a pit bull exterior, which is the crucifix of the contemporary female for whom respect arrives with far more regularity when the tool used to beckon it is a cold, cold bark.
OK, get through it. Now: I like Crouch’s embrace of Obama’s embrace of the sweet and sour, the contradictions that come with making it to the middle class in a place where the black middle class came to make it; of going to a great school (and enjoying every advantage that comes with it) at a time when faces like hers were few and far between; and of being the closest thing America has to a real-life princess at the same time that Disney is getting around to its ragin’ Cajun version.
I accept that the global public is coming around to the “pit bull exterior” they so disliked during the 2008 campaign—but am convinced that there is a meaningful difference between affection and respect. A barking woman (and let's not forget, bitches bark) may be respected, but she doesn’t elicit the warm sentiments Crouch feels toward Michelle. Rather, I think that public adoration of Obama (rather like the self-styled “fighter” Hillary Clinton) is still leavened with a little bit of fear. Would Obama prefer pure affection? Perhaps—though fear is good for the eat-your-vegetables business of being FLOTUS.
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Hanna, the counterpart to your post about the dangers of prostate screening appeared in today's New York Times—a story about whether annual mammograms may be doing more harm than good. This isn't the first piece I've read that questions the mammogram orthodoxy. There's no argument that finding a potentially fatal breast cancer can save a life. But the skeptics say that many, many woman who have indolent cancers that would never progress are forced into surgery and chemotherapy. The problem is that medicine cannot sort the dangerous tumors from the relatively benign ones (and who'd have thought we'd hear that some cancers are better just left alone?). The piece ends with an expert in health risk saying having mammograms or not having mammograms are both reasonable choices for women to make. That's helpful!
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Madonna wants to adopt another Malawian child. And according to news reports, she's picked Mercy James—or maybe she was offered the little girl by a country grateful for the millions Madonna donates to care for other needy children.
Here's the problem: Mercy's grandmother wants to bring her home too, according to the London Times, which reports:
Lucy Chekechiwa, 61, Mercy's grandmother, described Madonna's interest in her granddaughter as "stealing". "Why doesn't this singer pick other children? It is stealing. I want to go to court, I won't let her go," she said. Mercy has been living in an orphanage and Mrs Chekechiwa claimed it had been agreed the child would go to her when she reaches the age of six. Mercy's 18-year-old mother died five days after her birth, according to The Sun.
Orphanage is the confusing word here. Few Westerners understand that in much of Africa and Asia, what we call "orphanages" are actually boarding schools for poor children—places where extremely poor families in temporary distress drop their children off for food, education, and shelter, and then they bring the children home when things get better. Offering to house these children temporarily and then selling them for international adoption (er, "accepting donations" in exchange for adoption) is one of the common ways of defrauding poor birth families out of their children. (Need I say that not all internationally adopted children are illicitly acquired? But hundreds, and more likely thousands, are—and however large or small the proportion of the total, it's too many. Find more documentation on the extent of the problem here.)
Is it OK to swoop into a country and take someone else's child just because you're rich? Is wealth all it takes to have a "better life" ... or might it matter that you get to stay with the family you already know and love? Madonna's not alone in what she's doing, although she is unusual in knowing there's a family that wants Mercy back. Save the Children and other human rights groups want her to back off. She is setting a dangerous example, leading more Westerners into a "humanitarian" mission that is anything but.
Ethica, an American nonprofit that advocates for ethics in adoption, has launched a fundraising campaign to help Mercy stay home with her family. According to Ethica, Malawi's average annual income is $160. Ethica's goal is to raise $2,240—an annual salary for her grandmother until Mercy reaches adulthood—so that she can stay home. You can donate here.
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A guest post from Slate intern Emily Lowe:
I have to disagree with you, Jessica, on the idea that college admission boards favoring rich kids is not a problem. There are already plenty of ways in which the children of deep-pocketed parents have a leg up on their less-privileged counterparts. Starting as early as pre-K, wealthy families have the option of sending their kids to swanky private schools, where the combination of stellar faculty, name recognition, and powerful alumni networks paves the way for admission to top-notch colleges.
College students from wealthy families can also take unpaid internships in New York City and Washington, D.C., while their not-so-wealthy counterparts spend summers working jobs to cover living expenses that might not be so résumé-boosting. (I'll openly admit to being one of the former; I get to intern for the XX Factor this semester while many of my classmates must dedicate those out-of-class hours to paying gigs.) There's also the more extreme example of some parents buying internships for their kids, a phenomenon Slate's Tim Noah discussed here.
Jess, you ask in your post: "Is it worth going into serious financial jeopardy so you can have an Ivy League degree?" But the recession's impact isn't limited to the biggest and best private schools. It's hitting everyone, from the Ivies to the smallest liberal-arts colleges. That means students in need of financial aid will have trouble getting into any school where money is tight—and that's every school. Sure, it would be great for the next wave of coeds not to have huge student loans to pay back when they enter the workforce. But if the alternative is no college degree at all, a few thousand dollars' worth of debt doesn't sound so bad.
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Meghan McCain. Bless her heart. From the side ponytail to the fake catfight, she had us all fooled. We thought she was a dingbat. In reality, she's clever like a fox. Writing a column for the Daily Beast? Everyone scratched their heads. She's so ... vapid. So ... devoid of ideas. Was there something we were missing? After her weak attempt to draw Ann Coulter into a "debate" that even Coulter wouldn't stoop to partake in, McCain has finally made her writerly mission clear. She's looking to get laid!
This week's installment reads like a masturbatory reverie in homage to (gasp!) our youngest (swoon!) congressman, Aaron Schock (insert "shocker" joke). Mr. Illinois is Mini-McCain's "GOP's House Hottie"! ZOMG, Megs, I am, like, so with you on this one! Frankly, the Schockster had me at that photo of him greased up by the pool, browner than fried pig fat, basking in the shade of a faceless young woman's hot pink ta-tas, but Meghan closed the deal with her 1,500-word essay on how he's, like, totally smart, and also supergreat, which is, like, superawesome for the GOP!!! Yay! Schock in 2012. Or whatever.
According to McCain, who only figured out who Schock is because those half-naked shots of him appeared on TMZ, Schock is, well, interesting. As she puts it: "Schock’s rapid rise to the national level is, if nothing else, interesting, especially given the serious soul-searching the Republican Party is experiencing." So, he's interesting because he's ... interesting? I am intrigued.
Apparently, McCain likes Schock because: a) he's young, and her dad was old and that was bad, so Schock being young is good, b) he's not a radical, just like Meghan!, which is good, because the Republican Party needs all the help it can get at this point, c) he totally understands the power of the Internet (see: half-naked photos), which can be bad, but which can also be good, or, as Schock opines of the American people with an eloquence that suggests McCain may have found her intellectual match: "They watch pop culture, but they are also voters." Obvs.
Clearly, I hadn't given Meghan McCain enough credit. It never occurred to me to use my platform here on The XX Factor to get laid by some guy in Congress. I'll have to work on that.
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Today the Washington Post published the results of a survey on Michelle Obama. Two months ago, people questioned her patriotism and said she looked angry a lot. Now, they love her. Her favorability ratings are at 76 percent, up 28 points since the summer. "The number of people who view her negatively has plummetted," Lois Romano writes. That's great, right? We like Michelle, and we're glad other people do too. And it should count as some species of miracle that America (not to mention the world) is in love with a strong black woman. So why is this survey making me uneasy? More specifically, why is it making me feel like I live in 1967? (the year Guess Who's Coming to Dinner came out?)
Maybe it's these individual testimonies Romano pulls out of the survey. From a 34-year-old white woman:
She definitely has this black woman's attitude. ... White girls have more insecurities, which is why they care more about being ingratiating. I'm not saying this is a bad thing -- I like that about her -- but she's just a very strong woman and that can come off as condescending.
Or from a Colorado independent:
I don't see the angry Michelle anymore.
Or is it the feeling I have that Michelle is putting on a show? Or that America can only handle one specific kind of black woman? Any ideas, ladies?
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Willa, you bring up a great point about the attempts and failures by movies and TV shows to capture courtship and romance as it actually exists in 2009, in all its technological glory. That Drew Barrymore speech from He's Just Not That Into You annoyed me, too, because it's Just Not That accurately getting at the issue. For me, the problem isn't fear of rejection via "different portals." When a conversation meanders from Facebook to e-mails to texts to phone calls, I'm not really all that conscious that the portal is shifting. The problem is that, because of all the portals, the bar for rejection has gone from pole vault to hurdle to metal beam lying on the ground. We've come to expect constant communication and instant responses, which means that five minutes of waiting for a reply from a guy (via whatever) can be agonizing. The other day, I actually instructed gchat never to show my boyfriend in my list of friends, because I couldn't handle seeing that green "available" ball next to his name without wondering why he wasn't responding to that e-mail I'd sent him a few hours earlier. (After a few minutes I realized I was being crazy. But you see my point.)
If these new movies and shows don't capture the way love has changed in the era of smartphones, are there better examples out there? Surely not the early attempts like You've Got Mail (does anyone actually read IMs aloud while typing them?). Quarterlife and Gossip Girl seem to understand how people actually use their computers and cell phones, but both treat all things social as if they are tied to a single Web presence, which isn't quite right either. The stars of One Tree Hill
are too incestuous to bother with dating sites and too up in one another's faces to need cell phones or e-mail. And on Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs they're still using pagers!
Has anyone actually seen a movie or TV show that does this well—shows people meeting and communicating online or by cell in a way that doesn't make you cringe? Accepting nominations in The Fray!
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Willa, if you think dating in the Internet age is hard, try dating while autistic. This is a snippet from the autobiography of Quinn Bradlee, son of Washington royalty Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. (Here is a fuller excerpt.) The book is very moving on the subject of his troubles navigating relationships with women, particularly his powerhouse of a mother, and the average potential date. It's written through the eye of a mildly autistic person but speaks to the Everykid:
I seem to have the worst luck with women no matter how hard I try. I feel they're picking up some vibe from me that says I can't handle a relationship, or I'm not mature enough to be in a relationship. Whatever it is, I am apparently doing something wrong. I've taken and followed all of the advice my friends and my parents have given me about dating, but it hasn't quite worked out for me yet.
I have trouble with reading cues and I can never tell if girls like me sexually. If you're having an intimate friendly conversation and a woman is smiling and you're making her laugh, then you think that maybe it's possible to take it to the next level. But, typically, the day after that kind of thing would happen with a girl, I wouldn't hear back from her.
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A guest post from intern Margaret Johnson:
A few thoughts came to mind when I saw the video demonstration of Esquire's May "Mix 'N' Match" cover, which, according to AdAge, is "perforated to split into a flip book that will let readers play mix and match with the facial features of President Barack Obama, George Clooney and Justin Timberlake." First of all, a video demonstration? I thought the point of Esquire was to teach men how not to look desperate. More importantly, is Esquire demeaning the president by making his facial features interchangeable with those of an actor and a pop musician? (Not that you aren't Obama-dreamy, George and Justin.) Or is this a claim that we need to focus on the man behind the image, which can be so easily sliced and reassembled to please or amuse the beholder?
And what's with the physical format of the flip book? This is the magazine whose October 2008 issue featured a digital cover. Those build-a-man flaps on the new cover seem decidedly analog to me. The gimmick is, of course, aimed at boosting newstand sales, which every magazine needs right now, but the editors of Esquire know that even October's über-gimmick didn't sell as many copies as Angelina Jolie did on the July 2007 cover or Johnny Depp did this January. Do the folks at Esquire think our attention spans have decreased to the point that we need our magazines to "do something" besides provide a good read? Are they afraid their stories alone are no longer enough to engage us? If so, is that about the quality of the stories, the quality of the readers, or just the fact that to sell anything in this economy you have to throw in some bells and whistles? The video demonstration is pasted below—does it make you want to buy the fancy flip book and play along?
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Though some have speculated that the recession might create more equality in the domestic sphere, apparently the recession means less of an even playing field when it comes to college admissions. According to the New York Times, in this time of plummeting endowments, colleges may be looking more favorably on students who can afford tuition without financial aid.
Colleges say they are not backing away from their desire to serve less affluent students; if anything, they say, taking more students who can afford to pay full price or close to it allows them to better afford those who cannot. But they say the inevitable result is that needier students will be shifted down to the less expensive and less prestigious institutions.
I wonder if this is such a terrible thing. Even without the recession, my generation is crippled with staggering debt, mostly from higher education. If there's no guaranteed reward of a moderately well-paying job at the other end, is it worth going into serious financial jeopardy so you can have an Ivy League degree?
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Does dating ever change? That's the question hovering around ABC's newest dramedy Cupid, about a man who's either the god of love or a delusional crazy who thinks he is. The show, which premieres tonight, stars Bobby Cannavale as Trevor, the maybe-god on a mission to match 100 couples, and Sarah Paulson as Claire, the supremely grounded love interest/celebrity shrink/court appointed guardian with whom he trades witty banter, heartfelt epiphanies and mixed drinks. The show's central tension isn't whether Trevor's really Cupid (he's probably Cupid), but whether Trevor's faith in the big romantic gesture and love at first sight is a better—more powerful, more helpful, more successful—approach to relationships than Claire's level-headed belief in mutual respect and taking it slow. In other words, does a guy schooled on love and dating 3,000 years ago know more about matchmaking than an MD schooled by the Ivy League and Oprah? The show's answer is usually yes: Claire really needs to lighten up.
But dating has changed—not just in, erhm, the last 3,000 years, but in the 11 years since Cupid first aired. Fourteen episodes of the series, with Jeremy Piven (so charming once!) and Paula Marshall in the lead roles were broadcast in 1998 (you can watch them here). Except for a new cast and a move from Chicago to New York, Cupid has weathered its hiatus more or less intact—and that's too bad, because this little thing called the Internet took off in the interim and it really shook up how lovelorn strangers meet and interact with one another.
In both the original and current series, Claire runs a singles group where Trevor finds the heartsick men and women he eventually pairs off. In the old series that was an acceptable narrative trick. Now it's implausible. If Cupid were a mortal he wouldn't be bothering with small-fry gatherings, he'd be running a dating site. Maybe one called something like... Okcupid.com?
The cloying speech Drew Barrymore gave in He's Just Not That Into You ("I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work so I called him at home and then he emailed me to my blackberry so I texted to his cell, so now you have to go around checking all these different portals to get rejected. It's exhausting") irked, but it was onto something. Technology has made dating, and the manners of dating, newly strange. Cupid gives all this fresh weirdness a pass because it's shackled to 1998, a not-so-distant past that's long gone. Cupid's not lacking all charm (it's made by the same guy who wrote Veronica Mars after all), but it's not nearly as interesting, or relevant, as it could be.