Sexist Beatdown: Biceps of Change Edition

Good morning! Or, afternoon! It depends on your time zone, maybe! Anyway! I have news for you: did you know that Michelle Obama is the First Lady? And also, on the cover of Vogue? And also, has nice arms?

Oh, wait, you totally knew that. Well, good news: Amanda "Deltoids" Hess of The Sexist and I knew that too! Therefore, in our weekly session of stimulating political and/or arm-related discussion, we shall be discussing these facts, along with what it means to wonder what Michelle's dress means, dressing for the robot overlords of the future, and what Joe Biden looks like whilst having sex.

Oh, and: you will not be able to read this without thinking about what Joe Biden looks like whilst having sex. Do his teeth gleam? Does he use "taking the train" metaphors? Is he able to get through it without blurting out something embarrassing? These are the things you will be thinking about. I just thought I would warn you. You know, before it is too late.

Illustration: ARMS! Oh, and the First Lady.

SADY: I cannot believe that I bought a copy of Vogue, first of all. I have not done this in years. Actual quote from Anna Wintour: "when people stop shopping, other people lose their jobs." BUY THIS DRESS OR THE PROLE GETS IT, is what Anna Wintour is saying to you.

AMANDA: coincidentally, there's been a lot of talk about Anna Wintour losing her own job.

SADY: haha, so you REALLY need to buy that dress.

AMANDA: Yeah man. Ok first of all---Michelle is the second First Lady to grace the cover of Vogue. Hillary was the first, and then they skipped Laura! I hope Laura got Good Housekeeping or something at least.

SADY: yes, and only the fourth black lady, which is really shocking to me.

AMANDA: I know, that was truly amazing. I do not follow fashion magazines too closely, but four?? That's crazy

SADY: Yes, well, if it had been Palin it would have been "Guns & Ammo" so I'm happy that it didn't turn out that way. But I really think that like, race, and gender, and Michelle Obama being as smart and as open as she is have sent people into a tizzy. Like, the concept of this woman has driven people out of their minds, everybody needs to write something about what she means and who she is. Including maybe me!

AMANDA: Yes, and all of this has something to do with how cut Michelle Obama's arms are.

SADY: I KNOW. Arms are the new erogenous zone! Some Irish lady wrote! I mean, seriously, I can't help thinking how weird it is - and maybe the fashion magazine aspect of this has something to do with it - that everybody needs to process her as A BODY. and sometimes discussion of who she is gets cut out of that altogether. like, the fascination with her arms is almost fetishy... yeah, she looks like she works out. super. but THE ARMS have come to dominate our national discourse.

AMANDA: well, to be fair, some of the discussion did touch on whether the backdrop was flattering to her skin tone.

SADY: oh, good! i'm glad we are getting to the deeper issues at hand.

AMANDA: I think Michelle Obama is a really interesting figure because she is such a nontraditional first lady in so many ways but really hews to tradition in others. She's clear about being a mom to Sasha and Malia first, and she's I think reluctantly embraced the fashion icon role, too, in a way that other independent first ladies (Hillary) didn't, really. Though Hillary did say yes to Vogue, too.

SADY: True enough, but not during the Presidential race! It's weird how we encourage women to be All About Teh Fashions and then view fashion as somehow trivial.

AMANDA: I know. I think the arms are sort of an interesting thing to focus on, because the discussion around them represents (ARMS REPRESENT SOMETHING NOW) both seeing her as a "strong woman" and still holding her to a physical standard of beauty

SADY: Yeah, exactly. There's all of this discussion of her being tall - yet svelte! and opinionated - yet a mom first! I think some of it is well-intentioned, like they are trying to take her seriously, and thereby demonstrate that they CAN take the first first lady of color seriously, but then it gets into this weird thing where it's like, "have we mentioned she has pretty dresses? She has suuuuch pretty dresses. and is pretty." It's weirdly overeager, like everyone wants to define the Michelle conversation and come out looking good. Oh, holy crap, that was a long speech of mine.

AMANDA: That's an interesting point, actually. I've heard a couple people say, you know, "Michelle Obama? I don't get what the whole fuss is, I don't think she's that stunning." Or, "Michelle Obama's dress the other day was not my thing at all." And people will just jump on them for voicing that opinion, it's not really acceptable. But why is the "pretty pretty pretty" discussion acceptable?

SADY: exactly! it's kind of like making a Barbie out of her. I think people get weirdly tripped up around expressing approval of women, like, well, isn't the nicest thing you can do to compliment her shoes? or something?

AMANDA: yeah, and also, O think there's a bit of a compensation going on here, too. she's married to a guy who people just went crazy about---his politics, yes, but his looks, too.

SADY: Yeah, exactly, and I think that - here is the thing where I Get Serious - we need to be careful around that, because people of color have always been portrayed as somehow hypersexual. like: Obama Dildo? editorials about ladies having sex dreams about Obama? that is creeeeepy, and racially charged... and michelle becomes part of that too. like, the "at last" dance was really charged, but then afterwards people were like "I BET THEY GOT BUSY AND NOW MICHELLE HAS A BABY IN HER TUMMY." seriously, can you imagine people speculating about laura bush's sex life?

AMANDA: Yeah, people often voice their speculations about the Obamas doing it. And part of it, I think, is that they're younger, and they seem very happy with each other.

SADY: True true.

AMANDA: But on the other hand, I mean, we all know that Jill and Joe are probably doing it on Observatory Circle. And I have heard NOTHING about that.

SADY: Yeah, I think because you would start to wonder if his teeth were gleaming, it gets into a weird area.

AMANDA: I just did actually imagine them having sex, and that was a weird, foreign image that I definitely have never heard hinted at before. Even though Joe Biden makes borderline comments about his wife all the time!
SADY: I did too, and now need to purge that image from my brain. Oh God. But, you know: the Obamas are young, and they obviously love each other, and they're both attractive people, but the weird prurient interest in whether they're doing it? That pushes so many buttons, for me.

SADY: Here is a quick change: Michelle Obama! In Vogue! Has a centerfold! Wearing J. Crew! I think it is totally hilarious that the First Lady is wearing the only outfit in Vogue that I could actually afford.

AMANDA: That is funny. She's really become a J. Crew model. She really likes J. Crew, I guess! Which seems a little suspiciously brand-y to me but I guess maybe she knows it fits.

SADY: Tiger: Yeah, true enough. And there's talk about her wearing "American" clothes that are "affordable" in the mag. I think she's trying to make an economic statement.
Why not American Apparel, Michelle? Dov Charney needs your support!

AMANDA: O know. It must be a weird shopping trip where you have to think of the impact of every piece of clothing you buy. like, my kids live in the White House and go to private school and we an afford it, so they obviously would be wearing something nice. but not TOO NICE!

SADY: right? It would be very intense to be Michelle Obama. Because most first ladies are probably like, "well, you know, people are going to pay attention for a while, but then later you could be Chester A. Arthur, which is to say: no one will give a crap." not Michelle! she KNOWS people are going to remember this! so the pictures are going to be around FOR A WHILE. and everyone right now wants to know what they mean.

AMANDA: this is freaking me out. she has to dress for centuries of fashion critics. who knows what toned arms will represent in 200 years??

SADY: right, and throughout history, her message will remain clear: i really, really liked this cardigan.

Illustration: The affordable cardigan for which our age will be remembered. I like her top!

The Sad Ballad of Phyllis and Betty

You know, reader, when I want well-informed, thought-provoking, responsible essays on gender as it pertains to literature (or literature as it pertains to gender) there is one publication to which I turn: the New York Times Book Review. KIDDING! Ha ha ha, woo boy, sometimes I crack myself up.

I read Bitch, of course, which published an article roughly nine billion years ago about NYTBR's tendency to ignore major new feminist works or assign them to obviously hostile reviewers, and its tendency to assign more space to writers who embrace feminist backlash (because that's "edgy" now; think of it as the old-people version of Vice) than to writers who embrace actual feminism. Bitch will no doubt be pleased to note that its article, despite being nine billion years old, is still totally true! For what did NYTBR publish, in this week's edition, but an essay on the life and work of Phyllis McGinley?

They published several other things, actually, some of which might have been good. I couldn't tell! I was unable to read them, because I had been blinded by the terrible, terrible essay on Phyllis McGinley!

Who is Phyllis McGinley? Why is there an essay about her in the New York Times Book Review? Why are she, and the essay, and the essay's author, all so crazy? I will let the essay's crazy author, noted television critic Ginia Bellafante, explain it in her own creepily approving words:

[McGinley lived] contentedly for a number of years as a wife, mother and well-known poet in Larchmont, N.Y., writing reverentially of lush lawns and country-club Sundays in The New Yorker, Harper’s and elsewhere... McGinley’s light verse sought to convey the ecstatic peace of suburban ritual, the delight in greeting a husband, in appointing a room, in going to the butcher. Anticipation pervades her work, the feeling of something quietly joyful about to happen — beloved friends coming for dessert, perhaps.

Have you barfed yet? Get it out of the way now, because this essay ("Suburban Rapture!" Is its title!) is dead set on sickening you, being as it is about how mind-blowingly great it was to be a suburban housewife in the 1950s. History students among you may recall the 1950s, along with most of the 20th century, as a time when women had precious few viable options other than becoming housewives, and even the ones that did work (or had to work, due to social marginalization and corresponding poverty - I'm not discounting that) were relegated to menial, low-paying positions with little to no hope of advancement, due to pervasive, unchecked, institutionalized sexism and racism, which were of course inextricably bound to each other and also to class! Ginia Bellafante, apparently not into this whole "history and also actual well-documented fact" thing, seems to recall the 1950s differently: as a blissful Eden, from which women were expelled when they ate from the Tree of Wanting an Actual Freaking Choice. To demonstrate how very lovely it all was (we grow good people in our small towns!) and how the elitist lib'rul media (referred to here as the "contemptuous... literary and intellectual class") just doesn't get it, she has chosen to utilize the marginal and deservedly forgotten McGinley.

The facts of McGinley's career are as such: the lady churned out a lot of crap. It was extremely commercial crap, mind you - so very commercial, in fact, that some of it was used in actual commercials, as in her many catchy jingles. She was your basic ladyhack (not to be confused with your basic Ladyhawke) and, as a ladyhack myself, I cannot judge her for cranking out women's magazine articles, children's books, and light verse that was... well, about what you would expect from a writer of commercial jingles. I can, however, judge the Pulitzer committee for awarding her a prize in 1961, a gesture which I can only interpret as proof that the nascent second wave was making a great deal of gentlemen very uncomfortable, and that they felt the need to placate the bevaginad masses by rewarding a token female who knew her place and stuck to it - er, I mean, "exhibited a uniquely feminine sensibility." For here is a sampling of the timeless, Pulitzer-worthy verse of Phyllis McGinley:

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe,
She can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby,
She can use her intuition instead of her brain

... She can write sexist poems that drive you insane!

Ginia Bellafante insists (and insists, and insists) Phyllis McGinley loved being a suburban housewife, and so did lots of people, so it's just plain silly that people keep insisting that women who became housewives when it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women did so because it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women. Ginia Bellafante just doesn't understand why Betty Friedan "dismissed" McGinley as "one of the housewife writers." I mean, as Ginia Bellafante points out in her own piece, her entire career and aesthetic was about being a housewife, so you can see why that was a completely unmerited attack!

This piece is really miraculous, in that any given line has the capacity to inspire epileptic rage fits, as in, "Having married happily at 33, she loved domesticity the way a woman can only when it has come late to find her," which manages to imply within a mere 22 words that (a) "domesticity," meaning marriage and babies, is the only thing that can make a woman complete and happy, (b) women who don't have it are failures, and women who get it should be simperingly grateful, (c) THIRTY-FUCKING-THREE is late to find it, or, I'm sorry, to be found by it, since we obviously don't have any choice in the matter and can only hope to be chosen by that one very special boy, who can evaluate and reject women as if we were avocados he were squeezing for ripeness in the fucking supermarket, for he is Man, Master of All Things. Jesus, and they wonder why we drink. However, I would rather skip right over most of the piece, and deliver to you its creamy, poisonous center, which goes like this:

“A liberal arts education is not a tool like a hoe . . . or an electric mixer,” McGinley wrote, dismayed at a world she thought was conspiring to make women feel as though any acquired erudition would be wasted in a life of riffling through recipe cards. “It is a true and precious stone which can glow as wholesomely on a kitchen table as when it is put on exhibition in a jeweler’s window or bartered for bread and butter.” She went on to dismiss the already benighted suggestion that Bryn Mawr was a threat to what ought to get done in a kitchen. “Surely the ability to enjoy Heine’s exquisite melancholy in the original German,” she wrote, “will not cripple a girl’s talent for making chocolate brownies.”

McGinley’s point, an eternally divisive one, was clear: a woman who enjoyed herself as a wife and mother should not submit to imposed ambitions.

Fair enough! If you have absolutely no goals in life other than to get married and have babies, no-one should force you to discover a cure for cancer, or to make any use whatsoever of your education. However, if you do have other goals, a life spent doing nothing but making chocolate brownies would be pretty goddamn tragic. That, one suspects - and hears, from women who survived the era - was the more common scenario. And, hey, good news for ladies whose brains are capable of comprehending something other than the fine points of selecting lawn furniture: it turns out that having ambition does not automatically make you barren or unlovable! You can, in fact, have a career, a marriage, and a baby, or a career and marriage with no baby, or a baby and career with no marriage, or whatever else your heart desires. It's just strange that the women who tell us otherwise, the women who insist and insist and insist that being a wife and mother to the exclusion of all other things is an honorable and beautiful route that is not in any way limiting or likely to drive you out of your mind - women like Phyllis Schlafly, Phyllis McGinley, Caitlyn Flanagan, and the woman who seems to just love them all, or at least to be unable to frame an incisive and well-merited critique of their message, TV critic Ginia Bellafante - are only able to reach us with this message because they have, well, jobs.

--- AND NOW, THE SECRET PRIZE ---

I know, right? This post was freaking huge! I've decided that whenever I write a bonkers nutso long-winded thing like this, I should reward people who make it all the way through, as with the Cracker Jack prizes which are maybe the only reason on Earth to eat Cracker Jack, which is sticky and gross. Therefore, I present to you: women's education in the McGinley Age. Strangely, none of them seems to be studying Heine!

Busted, Part 2: The Real Goal of Political Change

Is shopping! At least, that's what Bust tells me today, in their think piece on the Great Obama Dress Scandal of '08:

The modified version of the Narcisco Rodriguez’s dress was showing off her confidence in not being pigeonholed into wearing those lame-ass, boring suit-dresses. We still have ways to go, but I think it’s awesome that powerful women are getting closer to be being on the same playing field as men, but why do they have to dress like them too? We all know that Michelle is incredibly intelligent, successful and naturally gorgeous. She was also the breadwinner of her family! So, peeps needs to chill out on that one outfit and think more about what a bonus she is going to be to the White House. Does every first lady have to be compared to Jackie O’s immaculate style? Don’t forget that Jackie’s era was one of the best decades in fashion.

Oh, Bust: this is so totally not the same type of coverage that I could get from any commercial women's rag on the market. No: pretty dresses are subversive! And so is speaking about a female political figure in a way that is almost entirely focused on her wardrobe, apparently! Wave your feminist flag high, sisters - and put a Louis Vuitton logo on there too, while you're at it.

Seriously, though, why do we have to dress like men, whose clothing is usually well-made, comfortable, durable, and apt to stay in fashion for more than a few months at a time? Why can't we just wear custom-made designer dresses all the time to signify our total fabulousness? Remember when Simone de Beauvoir analyzed women's subjugation in terms of its economic cost, pointing out that a relatively enormous portion of the average female secretary's salary went to clothes, makeup, accessories, and various cosmetic treatments such as hair styling, manicures, and pedicures, without which she would not be considered "fit" to be seen in an office, thereby diminishing her already tiny income and demonstrating that gender roles and capitalism were both involved in keeping women in a socially vulnerable and marginalized position? That was so totally lame. Simone de Beauvoir wasn't even hot, so how could you take her seriously? To the ladies of Bust - I, with my dirty jeans, button-up shirt, and messy hair, salute you, for showing us how real gender equality can be achieved.

You know, for an actual analysis of why Dressgate was regressive, fucktarded, and lame, you could go to Womanist Musings. Of course, Womanist Musings has neither the market share nor the revenue of Bust, but you shouldn't take that to mean that feminism and capitalism are at odds or anything. They are totally not, as Bust demonstrates every day. Now go buy yourself something pretty, cupcake.