The XX Factor: What women really think.

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The Stank Face Has It

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.