Dear Mr. President Barack H. "Stands for 'Hope!'" Obama,

What's happening to us?

You and I have been involved for about a year. I'd eyed you from afar at the DNC in '04, and hoped that something might happen. Then there was that crazy, intense period last spring, when we were definitely doing something, but neither of us knew exactly what - I mean, should I commit to you, or keep my options open for the first female president? Was what I was thinking, and I know you felt that - but, by June, we seemed to have it all figured out. I was committed, and not just in some bullshit "you'll do for now" way, which (I hate to admit) is how I've been with most other candidates. I could see a real future with you. 

That's why these past months have been so rough. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that my mental picture of your campaign was like this:


Whereas the actual pictures of your campaign have been like this:


Now, Jon Favreau may have many great qualities as a speechwriter, chief among which seems to be an ability to utilize the progressive rhetoric specific to his generation (it is mine as well, so I recognize it!) which Bush's disastrous presidency made popular even among people with no real commitment to social justice issues, while skillfully blending said rhetoric with some lyrical passages and some crowd-pleasing ambiguities, managing to convey a take on social issues and that particular subset thereof which we call "identity politics" which far outstrips that presented by any other President in terms of its intelligence, depth, and nuance, while cleverly distracting the reader or listener from the fact that nothing has been promised or even said outright. I know you like that. However, I always thought that you were more than just talk. Together, you and Jon convinced me that you knew what you were talking about - that you got it. If this photo is any indication, then Jon, at least, does not.

I get the feeling that I don't really know your gender politics any more, Mr. President. Maybe I never did. However, it says something that you kept Jon around, knowing - as you must have known - about these, shall we say, tendencies of his. What it says is not good.

That's not the end of it, either. The Larry Summers thing really hurt. I mean, it was such a betrayal. I tried to convince myself that you didn't know about his "girls are dumb" thing, but it didn't work. I mean, my mom knew about that, and she's hardly the type to spend 50% of her day surveying the feminist blogosphere like I do. You're clearly smart - my smartest President ever, I think - which means that, when you do things like this, I can't really convince myself that you "just don't know any better." You always know better. The question is whether you care.

Rick Warren, Mr. President? RICK WARREN?! Be honest: how little respect do you actually have for me? The worst, most humiliating part of it all is that I blame myself. I finally go ahead and trust a President - something I've never really done - and the next thing I know my friends are coming at me with news like this. Then you have the gall to defend yourself by saying that you "[disagree] with Pastor Warren on issues that affect the LGBT community." Um, great, me too, but what about issues that affect my community? You know: the one comprised of women? Women, whom your new BFF Rick believes should be in submission to their husbands (they will all have husbands in Rick's ideal world - even the Ls! - just as the Gs will have wives and the Bs and Ts will not exist), and to whom he would like to deny access to safe and legal abortion? Or does that not merit a mention - is that just one of those "other issues" you disagree on even though you don't apparently disagree so much that you can refrain from giving this man a crucial role in your inauguration (and your tacit approval thereby) because it's "bringing together all sides of the faith discussion in search of common ground?"

Mr. President, I'm tempted to say that you have found your common ground with Rick Warren, and it consists of being utterly dismissive and clueless re: women's issues, which at this moment both of you seem to be.

You know about my last Democratic Presidency, of course. Everyone knows about that shitshow. It was long, and intense, and although Bill and I had some good times - I'll always be grateful for the deficit - for the most part it was just scandal, scandal, scandal, all the way through. I had to overlook Paula Jones. I had to overlook Gennifer Flowers. It was fucking impossible to overlook Monica Lewinsky, although (sick to say) I tried. I was the very picture of an abused, codependent feminist voter. "I mean, I guess if you looked at these things from an outsider's perspective," I would say, "it might seem like my President is a misogynist with severe impulse control issues who exploits his institutional power in order to seduce or sexually coerce young women, engaging in sexist, demeaning, belittling cigar-in-the-pussy behavior verging on sexual assault, which I would find utterly revolting and unacceptable from any other man on the face of the planet. But you don't know him like I do. He really tries. And he's better than some of the other guys out there." Looking back at myself, all I can say is: YIKES.

I do not intend ever to get back into that place, Barack. I certainly don't intend to go there with you. As far as our Presidency goes, there will be a zero-overlooking policy.

So, Mr. President, here's the sand. I want you to watch me very carefully while I draw this here line in it. I'm going to be generous and say that you haven't crossed it yet, but you are close, very, very close, so close that the outermost grains of it are brushing against your shoe. You need to back away from this line, this line you have not quite crossed, at a speed so great it could break the sound barrier, if my support for you is to continue. Do something to show me you care. Lifting the Global Gag Rule would be a good start. I know this comes across as "needy" and "demanding" and all those other things us chicks are always being warned against - it creates a division in your party! people will be reluctant to ally themselves with you! blah! blah! blah! - but frankly, I'm a little tired of being ignored.

You do not want to cross that line, Mr. President. Hell, as they say, hath no fury like a voter base scorned. You think you had a tough time with Hillary? Just you wait.


Love,

A Lady Voter

UPDATE: Again! "Accidentally unoriginal posts" are the new "terrible sex puns" of this blog. Next week it will be "jokes that were old four years ago" and all the posts will be about Zach Braff. In summary, I guess what I am saying is: do not hire me, or consider me a person worthy of your respect. Also, read this. It's good. I guess she broke up with him before I did, but: don't all of your exes sooner or later sound the same? 

Dudes I Might Possibly Have Dated Once: The Groundbreaking Social Study

So: while I am writing a long and terminally unwieldy piece which aims to set forth a postmodern theory of pornography (yes, I am doing this, may God have mercy on us all), it seems like a reasonable time to be catching up on books in the ever-growing and slightly bullshitty field of Masculinity Studies.

Specifically, I really wanted to read Guyland. The basic premise of the book seems sound: young middle-class white men are raised with a tremendous sense of entitlement, which is threatened by the successes of women and people of color in formerly all-white, all-male environments, and they are therefore retreating into all-white-boy societies where they can act out a particularly virulent and ugly strain of masculinity without actually taking on any responsibilities or having their perceived superiority challenged in any meaningful way? Yes! Okay! Tell me more!

Fifty pages into the book, however, I regret to say that it is not very rewarding. The reasons for this are twofold: first, Michael Kimmel is a horrible writer, and second, he does not get the young people, which would be fine - does anyone ever get the young people, really? - except that it renders his thoughts about youth culture quite suspect. See this:

You can find them in New York’s Murray Hill, or Silver Lake and Echo Park in Los Angeles, Houston’s Midtown, or Atlanta’s Buckhead district, sipping their mocha lattes in the local Starbucks… They are the “friendsters” with their wi-fi computers looking for love, friendship, or hookups, or on monster.com looking for next month’s job.

The kids today, with their fancy coffees and their Internet and their baggy pants! It is crazy, I am telling you. And their music?

… is some of the angriest music ever made. Nearly four out of every five gangsta rap CDs are bought by suburban white guys. It is not just the “boys in the hood” who are a “menace to society.” It’s the boys in the “burbs.”

OH GOD MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOPPPPPPPPP.

Yet it does not stop. As far as I can see, the writing remains precisely this terrible throughout the entire book.

There's also the fact that Kimmel views terminal boyhood (which is, I can confirm, a very real thing with the dudes today) as an escape from the "responsibilities" of manhood, by which he chiefly seems to mean that these men are not angling for high-powered corporate jobs and getting married at twenty-one. I find that this is actually the least annoying thing about contemporary dudes - the conflation of manhood with social power and the possession of a wife was one of the chief targets of second-wave feminism - and Kimmel's constant insistence that all of these men need to "grow up and settle down" (and stop "hooking up," a phrase which he uses constantly and with the prim, scandalized air of an old schoolmarm) is fairly grating. Yes, there are men who can only ever hook up, men who shy away from the word "girlfriend" as from a branding iron, men for whom an equitable and serious relationship with a woman seems akin to hacking one's balls off with a dull knife and putting them up for sale on eBay, and these men, my friends, these men are assholes - yet, when Kimmel's exploring how male sexual entitlement can lead to rape, it would perhaps benefit his study if he did not speak about consensual, casual sex in the same breath as if it were the same thing.

This is not to say that the book is entirely worthless. If you're looking for an Anatomy of the American Douchebag, this might be not be the worst place to start. It just has the same problem as a lot of social research: the person making the study aims to explain the culture at hand without absorbing it, and therefore ends by concluding that these people are freaks, so that while the actual behavioral patterns and insider perspectives can be enlightening, the framing narrative carries a strong whiff of normative crap. That problem is compounded, in this case, by hugely, spectacularly, breathtakingly bad prose.

Anyway, it's all worth it for this:

Guyland now even has its own literature… in such recent novels as Booty Nomad by Scott Mebus, Love Monkey by Kyle Smith, and the widely praised Indecision by Ben Kunkel.

This is transcendence. There can be no greater joy in this world. My entire life up to this point has been justified, and I know now why I was born - for I have seen Indecision referenced in the same sentence as Booty Nomad.

Actually, wasn't Booty Nomad the original title of Indecision? Either way, it would work.

SCIENCE FACT: People Who Benefit From Privilege More Likely To Think Privilege Is Awesome

So: there is a study which states that men with "traditional" views on gender earn more than men with egalitarian views. Surprise! (By the way, I love the euphemistic use of "traditional" rather than "sexist." Like, if I burned a woman to death because I thought she'd been blighting my crops with her menstrual blood, that wouldn't be a witch hunt - that would be "traditional agriculture.") Here, the authors of the study, Livingston and Judge, struggle to explain this puzzling new phenomenon:

"It could be that traditional men are hypercompetitive salary negotiators -- the Donald Trump prototype, perhaps," Judge said. "It could be on the employer side that, subconsciously, the men who are egalitarian are seen as effete."

Oh, "effete!" Yes, that's probably it: employers only give raises to sexist men because non-sexist dudes are giant pussies. By Jove, Science, you've done it again! 

Anyway, it's probably true that sexist men are rewarded more than non-sexist men (and all women) for their work. It might even be true that sexist dudes are super-powered ultra-negotiators who earn higher salaries because of their manly fortitude, although I really doubt it. However, it really seems not at all groundbreaking to point out that the people who benefit most from sexism are the people most invested in preserving it. Call me an idealist, but I generally think that a study should, if at all possible, be slightly more enlightening than an average episode of Mad Men.

Because, seriously, Mad Men has this: 

And he wears shorts.