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I dunno, Dahlia, why wouldn't American women want Michelle Obama's life? Sure, it's more superego than ego at the moment, and yes she has subordinated her professional ambitions to her husband's. But she has plenty of power, she gets to talk policy as well as fluff, and she can dine out on these White House moments for all the rest of her life. I mean, how much do you really chafe at being in the helpmeet role when your husband is the president, and you helped make him (see soaring Michelle approval ratings)? It's like complaining about being co-pilot on the spaceship to Mars. This is a once-in-a-lifetime team journey if ever there was one.
And when the Obamas are sprung from the cage of the White House—because over the next four years or eight, it will surely come to feel like the bars are tightening around both of them—Michelle Obama seems bound to chart her own professional course again. She'll have another chance to model for the rest of us, by showing us how to move purposefully from one phase of life to the next and make different choices, with different emphases on self v. family, at different times. (In contrast to my own motto: Try to do too much. None of it well.) What I admire about Michelle's marriage, Jess, is that I really think her husband will want her to take the lead next, and will be ready to move to a new city for her as she has moved to D.C. for him. The Clintons come to mind here, but they're like the too-large-for-life version of what I'm thinking of: The wife runs for president to satisfy her own ambition; the former president husband joins her campaign—and sabotages her. The post White House Obamas promise to be more low-key. More chill. No movie stars, but I'll take that fantasy.
Photograph of Michelle and Barack Obama by Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images.
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Via Fark—a 1933 "Test for Husbands" (in two parts) that offers points and demerits for various behaviors. How would your husband shape up?
Reads the newspaper at the table: 1 demerit
Reads newspaper, books, or magazines aloud to wife: 1 point
Talks of the efficiency of his stenographer or other women: 1 demerit
Gives wife real movie kisses, not dutiful "pecks" on the cheek: 1 point
Points off, too, for being too much of a bookworm, kissing your wife right after she's applied her makeup, and writing on the tablecloth. Luckily, a husband can win a whole 20 points—the most awarded in the entire quiz!—for being "ardent, considerate, and sensitive in relations" ... Does that mean what I think it means? Who knew married couples in the '30s were all about bumping connubial uglies?
Minneapolis journalist and veteran blogger James Lileks apparently found this retro gem in the offices of the Star Tribune; a test for wives and parents is promised in coming days.
Of course, the real question is: How would Obama fare on this point system?
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On the subject of "cougar dreams" and older women pairing off with younger men, the concept did not originate with Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. Although the term "cougar" seemed to spring into the lexicon about 10 years after I could have qualified, I remember fondly a brief romance with a recent college grad of 23 who courted me when I was 29. Problem was, I couldn't stop humming Maggie May by (then still boyish) Rod Stewart and wondering when my boyfriend would need to be "back at school." As attractive as young gentlemen can be, it's nicer to be "honored" by men who are entirely grown up.
More importantly, sweet Samantha, you need not fear vanishing as you mature. In our youth, it is easy to be noticed but throughout life, the only people who really see us are the ones who love us. In your short 2 decades + change you have already accumulated quite a collection of admirers. To them and the many more you'll have, you'll always be three dimensional.
Personally, at your age, I looked forward to my post-youngster days when I'd have substance and could enjoy the fruits of my new ability to labor. My husband and I are almost exactly the same age. Now that we are indisputably un-young, I realize I may have been a bit too enthusiastic about my romantic plan of how he would "grow old along with me." Notwithstanding glowing affirmation that the best was yet to be, my life partner and husband of a quarter century, now as handsome as a grey wolf, has had to accommodate my weakening vision, failing hearing, and other reminders of organic wear. The good news is, to him, I am never, ever, invisible.
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Jessica, the most striking thing to me about Amanda’s great post on the widely-envied Obama marriage was that I read it immediately before reading Naomi Wolf’s quirky piece in Harper's Bazaar that Willa mentions about women who ostensibly covet Angelina Jolie’s entire life. I confess that while I have glanced longingly at the Obama’s marriage—the date nights; the obvious, palpable affection; the perpetual-motion-mother-in-law—it never once occurred to me to lust after Jolie’s domestic arrangement. The kids! The saintliness! The Brad! (the Brad!!) It all looks to be so completely revolutionary but also so weirdly exhausting and unreal—even with one’s own pilot’s license.
Maybe that’s why Wolf focuses her attention on how women envy Jolie’s life, but not her marriage. In fact Brad Pitt is kind of hot-trophy-boy in Wolf’s telling; a man Jolie “took for her own pleasure ... as the most desired of the tribe.” What does it say about how conflicted American women must be if we covet Jolie’s life but crave the Obama marriage? Is there something so transgressive about Joilie’s marriage—to use Wolf’s word—that it doesn’t seem appealing to us at all? We may want Jolie's have-it-all life, but we want it with a backyard swingset and grilled cheese every Monday.
Perhaps the real truth is that nobody thinks Jolie’s "ego ideal" of a life, could possibly be united with that of, say, the male ego-ideal that is Barack Obama? It's why Michelle Obama, who's given up so much to become first lady, may not herself be anyone's ego-ideal right now. Which is another way of saying, we may covet Michelle Obama’s marriage but do American women want her life??
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In this month’s Harper’s Bazaar, Naomi Wolf has penned an absurd, overwrought, swooning love letter to Angelina Jolie, the woman who, in Wolf’s analysis, most fully embodies “having it all.” It’s just about impossible to read this piece and simultaneously remember that Wolf is a serious feminist and thinker. She has bent her erudition to the plainly ridiculous, plainly thankless task of explaining that, because Angelina Jolie is a symbol of both goodness and sexiness, she is a better, more complete woman than Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Taylor. Apparently, if Mother Teresa had made time to screw hotties between her busy orphan-caring schedule she would be as awesome, important, admirable and transcendent as Jolie. Seriously, this article is hilarious.
Wolf’s not the first writer to postulate that Angelina Jolie is the world’s most superior female. (For those of you who watch Battlestar Galactica, at least we can be certain she's the world’s most likely cylon). Back in 2007 Esquire ran a cover story on Jolie that drooled, “One could make the argument that she is the most famous woman in the world. Why not, then, just go ahead and make the argument that she is the best woman in the world, in terms of her generosity, her dedication, and her courage?” Rather than respond, “Uhm, Why Not? Are you kidding?!” Wolf has opted to further Esquire’s cause. Jolie is, in Wolf’s estimation, the “’Ego ideal’ for women—a kind of dream figure that allows women to access, through fantasies of their own, possibilities for their own heightened empowerment and liberation.” And here I thought she was just a pretty cool, pretty thoughtful movie star. My mistake.
What is it about Jolie in particular that inspires this sort of heightened drivel? In the presence of a celebrity who is not a totally useless, self-involved sack of shit must magazines start spewing the most deranged hyperbole? Why must Jolie be “the best,” instead of just what she is, a famous person who is aware of the larger, deeply troubled world?
Just for fun, I want to leave you with the paragraph that made me cough up my orange juice:
Then there is the plane. Women are so used to being dependent on others (certainly on men) for where they go, metaphorically, and how they get there. Flying a private plane is the classic metaphor for choosing your own direction; usually, that is a guy thing to do, yet there was Jolie, with her aviator glasses on, taking flying lessons so she could blow the mind of her four-year-old son. That is the ultimate in single-mom chic: Even before she had reconstructed a nuclear (or postnuclear) family with a dad at the head of it, she was reframing single motherhood from a state of lack or insufficiency to a glamorous, unfettered lifestyle choice. Paradoxically, having done so, she makes the choice of a man to help her raise her kids seem like one option among many for a self-directed woman rather than either a completion of a woman or a capitulation.
Did you get that single moms? If you want to be the "height of single mom chic"—And who doesn't!— time to start coughing up the cash for private flying lessons and babysitters. The most superfantastical woman in the universe flies planes and, if we're serious about being women, and serious about being feminists, we all must try to be more like her.
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So I finally saw Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience this weekend. Set in late 2008, as the gilded age gives way to financial collapse, it is story of an escort (played by porn star Sasha Grey) trying to take her business to the next level, and finding, instead, that she is not as in control of her life as she thinks. The film is shot in high-def video; this, in addition to Grey's affectless performance has the effect of making everything seem distanced. One presumes this is Soderbergh's point: The Girlfriend Experience is a film about the deeply transactional nature of our lives, about how commodified even intimacy has become in the 21st Century.
This critique is complicated by Soderbergh's use of Sasha Grey—and Grey's own choice to make the film. Some critics have lambasted her acting for its lack of versatility. But the little fillip of "authenticity" adds another level of canniness to the movie—even as, ironically, it also reads like a cynical marketing ploy—a clever way of capitalizing on the audience's curiosity about the "reigning princess" of adult films, as Grey has been called. Because Grey isn't just any porn star. She is a hard-core porn actress known for her willingness to do extreme scenes. She sees her extremity as helping to liberate female sexuality, and she told Rolling Stone early this year that she is a "pervert." She takes an intellectual approach to her work. She often talks about the fact that as she began to explore her sexuality with her boyfriend, trying out S&M, she made a rule: Anything he did to her she got to do to him. Transactional equality, if you will. Her MySpace page says she likes Yeats, Baudrillard, and Nietzsche. Early on in her porn career, she wrote a mission statement: "Most of the XXX I see is boring, and does not arouse me physically or visually. I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfills everyone's fantasies." Making a Soderbergh film that intellectualizes questions of transaction is just the natural next step in Grey's extremely thought-through career.
Paradoxically, of course, the Soderbergh film ultimately depicts its confident escort star getting her come-uppance. By the end, it turns out she's not so in control after all. (This might seem to contradict Grey's message, but presumably that doesn't bother her much, given the quote she brandishes at the top of her MySpace page: "Be just, and if you can't be just, be arbirtrary.") Grey interests me, because she is trying to challenge old paradigms, but at the same time, her persona is clearly a clever marketing tactic. I wonder what my fellow XXFactor writers (and readers) thought of the film and of Grey. Can Sasha Grey really liberate herself—and other women—through porn? (You can reach me at morourkexx@gmail.com.)
Photograph of Sasha Grey by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival.
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In a brief essay in Salon, cultural critic Amanda Fortini remarks on the trend of Obama marriage idealization. "Not since JFK was in the White House has there been a political marriage Americans have envied to this extent, a first family they might actually like to emulate," Fortini writes. But I have no desire to mimic the Obama union, even though it does seem "intimidatingly functional."
Fortini makes an excellent point about the Obama marriage that I haven't seen made before—that their "perfect" union is the product of overt effort:
Perhaps more relevantly, never before have we seen a White House marriage so thoroughly imbued by our therapy-saturated culture. Who’s to say whether the Obamas have ever seen a shrink or read "Getting the Love You Want." Like everyone else in America, though, they have spent the past two decades steeped in self-help concepts and ideas—like, well, that of date night, or the idea that one must consciously “make time” for one’s spouse. Indeed, while they appear to love and admire each other, their marriage does not seem accidental or organic.
Of course, I find it remarkable that the Obamas make time for each other, and I am well aware that any sucessful long-term relationship requires effort. But, I'm also aware that Michelle and Barack probably see each other for an hour a day, and that's a generous estimate. Would you really want to be in a relationship where "date night" only happened every six months and involved bulletproof vests? Actually, I find them to be a very poor marriage utopia: Who wants to daydream about hard work and therapy-speak? In a way, I find actor couples a more satisfying fantasy—they have excessive amounts of leisure time and passion to spare.
Fortini also makes the point that no marriage is a paragon of virtue, "Then again, we can also look back at the supposedly halcyon exhibit of the Kennedys and realize that any marriage, no matter how dazzling, is always more complicated than it appears." While I absolutely do not believe that Obama is screwing everything that moves a la JFK, anyone can see that much of the Obamas' public facade is just that—a construct. It all comes down to the difference between admiration and envy: I admire the Obama's happy marriage. I don't envy it.
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