I love everything about Michelle Obama. Let me just say that, flat-out. But I do have two beefs with her, one is superficial and one is for-real serious. The superficial beef is that I lovingly want her to stop trying to make bangs happen. These bangs in particular are awful and too long and stringy for her beautiful face. The other beef I have with her is that she’s too dang nice, too gracious, too hopeful that goodness will win out. Okay, so that’s not really a beef, but I would still love to see Michelle Obama get genuinely angry about this sh-t, because it’s not okay and it’s fine to actually be angry about it. Anyway, Michelle did a one-on-one conversation with Tracee Ellis Ross for the United State of Women conference in LA over the weekend. Here are some quotes from the discussion:
How did women let this sh-tshow happen: “In light of this last election, I’m concerned about us, as women, and what we think about ourselves and about each other. What is going on in our heads where we let that happen. So I do wonder what are young girls dreaming about, if we’re still there? When the most qualified person running was a woman and look what we did instead, I mean, that says something about where we are, if we as women are still suspicious of one another, if we still have this crazy, crazy bar that we don’t have for men … if we’re not comfortable with the notion that a woman could be our president, compared to what?”
Whether she will ever run for president: “That’s not the answer, either. When I hear people say, ‘You run,’ it’s part of the problem. We still didn’t get ‘Yes we can’ right. It’s not yes you can, it’s yes we can. And until we get that right, it doesn’t matter who runs. And look, I don’t think I’m any different from Hillary.”
She wishes women & girls weren’t held to different standards: “I wish that girls could fail as bad as men do, and be OK, because let me tell you, watching men fail up — it is frustrating. It’s frustrating to see a lot of men blow it and win. And we hold ourselves to these crazy, crazy standards.”
We can’t give up hope: “That’s what this is all for. Because of them we can’t give up. What choice do we have? What future am I passing on to my girls and all our kids if I wake up and I’m hopeless? There is no use in that. All we have is hope.”
She’s not wrong about it, of course. She’s not wrong about any of it. If she doesn’t want to run, so be it, and she’s right that she would be demonized and nitpicked to death like Hillary Clinton too, and she doesn’t want that for herself or for her family. But I hope other women see that those toxic, damaged men are “failing up,” and those women decide, en masse, that they’re going to run for office. I hope women decide that they can’t wait for the “perfect” conditions for them to run for office or support a female candidate or give women the same benefit of the doubt that men get automatically. We have the worst men in office and in power right now: even politically mediocre women would be better than this. Be an angry, nasty woman with a grudge! RUN FOR OFFICE.
Photos courtesy of Getty.
Me too, Michelle, me too.
Me three. I agree with all of her points here. The part about how “In light of this last election, I’m concerned about us, as women, and what we think about ourselves and about each other” stood out too. You can’t help but think something like this when watching some of the women both online and elsewhere who are so invested in caping for the Donald Trumps of the world, and the worst things they stand for. Of course there’s got to be at least some hate (or, at the bare minimum, lack of concern) for ‘The Others’, but there’s got to be some loathing and blaming of one’s own kind in there too. It’s pathetic.
You are totally right Otaku Fairy.
This self-loathing we’re culturally imbibed in results in a sometimes deeply unconscious mysoginy. I was at a workshop the other day and there is this young, lovely, professional woman who is always very kind to me. I get so suspicious! Why is she smiling? What does she want?
And then I just thought to myself: she is kind because she is your colleague (we are on the same field) and she likes what you do. Why is that a problem?? Totally crappy, mysoginistic, self-loathing stupid behaviour. Sometimes, I just get tired of trying to dust out the crappy thoughts in my head.
i miss her and her husband as potus and flotus 🙂
I adore her but her saying she’s no different from Hilary is kind of scary. Because I see them as completely different people, granted they are women, lawyers and in politics ( different capacities) but I see them as having different ideas and supportive of different policies.
I think that she meant “no different” in the sense that they are both well-off educated women with a political agenda and clear stances.
Political I don’t really think they are that different.
Hillary’s policies basically followed most of Obama’s lead. Nearly all of her platform furthered the successes of his administration or expanded on them in different ways, including better financial regulation and expansion of healthcare. I don’t know where people got this idea that Clinton’s platform is radically different from Obama’s, but I suspect it has a lot to do with the concentrated media effort of the last twenty years to paint her as a corporate shill and power-hungry war hawk, helped along by Bernie Sanders brand of myopic liberalism.
Michelle Obama means exactly what she’s saying. It wouldn’t have mattered what she ran on. They would’ve found a reason to rip her apart the same way they did Hillary and the same way they would have any other woman who ran, maybe more so because she’s a black woman. People who want to pretend misogyny, insidious or outright, wasn’t a huge part of what contributed to the outcome of the 2016 election are kidding themselves.
Likely the reason they were trying to paint Hillary as having a different platform than Obama during the election is because despite all the good things he did right, there’s a lot of things not going well in the country that he either didn’t fix or was blamed for whether or not it was beyond his means to accomplish. Basically the current administration and it’s party is blamed for everything by the opposing party during an election. Therefore extending the disapproval to the democratic nominee under the claim that her administration will be the same as Obama’s. So Hillary had the difficult job of being the Democratic nominee while distinguishing herself as different (better) than Obama. Thus is the way of election party politics when you’re the incumbent party. But yes, Hillary’s platform was the same as Obama’s. Or rather, Obama’s policies was a continuation of the Clinton’s and neo-liberal’s.
Nope. Their ideas are pretty close. Hillary had an amazing campaign website with detailed policies and no one read them.
i read them! and ugh, i can’t even… i would send people linked to clips, soundbites, quotes, briefs, full policy documents and they would still spew bullcrap… then i would point out to them that most politicians do what they say when they are running for office and they still would not believe clinton (negative bias) and not believe trump (positive bias). when i saw that i was like, well damn, ain’t that the definition of prejudice? ugh america.
Michelle becoming president after Trump would make him so angry. Not only dares she be black, but she is a woman too. He would lose his mind.
I want to see this!
Michelle is too good for the US.
“How did women let this sh-tshow happen”
Look at the demographic breakdown of the votes by gender for the 2016 election, and then look at the demographics for the Alabama special election. I would bet my nail polish collection (and I love them dearly) that the same breakdown will happen again in various 2018 midterm elections, and dare I say it in 2020 too. Unless the intersectionality problem actually starts getting looked at hardcore the actions of a few will collectively drag all women down.
As for women getting the chance to fail up too, I think that’ll only happen if men stopped getting passes for everyyyyyythingggg with the whole “boys will be boys” schtick. It’s very easy to surpass expectations if they’re low to begin with and for men in general across all fields they’re very low. That requires a cultural mindset enforced by institutional power, and I can only hope that’s changing for the better slowly but surely as the years go by.
MO looks fabulous!
Miss her so much (sob).
I love MO too, but I would point out that she uses “girls” and “men” in the same sentence. How about “girls” and “boys” or “women” and “men”. That’s all Michelle, keep on doing what you do.
I’m sure she gets angry, really, really angry, but she’s too smart to ever show that. She knows how it would be received.
I’m grateful to her that she continues to be publicly optimistic and hopeful, and still engaged in issues. I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit for wanting to step off the public stage, but she’s still out there working to improve things.
Agree with everything you said.
And this isn’t directed to you, lucy2, but I’m struggling to figure out the real narrative — is it that women didn’t vote for Hillary because we’re still suspicious of each other? Or did the Russians help tip the election in Trump’s favor? I feel like there are too many factors in play to isolate any one as the major issue.
I think there was a lot of terrible, complicated aspects to that whole mess. Russia definitely had an impact, but there is ingrained misogyny in a LOT of women, and I can believe a good number of Dump’s votes came from that.
Not to mention our antiquated electoral college system – Hillary got nearly 3 million more votes than he did but still lost because of that nonsense. But it never should have been that close.
I think it’ll ultimately be revealed that the end game was Putin and co. seeing the divisions between all sorts of groups in the US and playing on that destabilization to bring about more unstableness, so that they could realize their own goals without US interference.
“is it that women didn’t vote for Hillary because we’re still suspicious of each other? Or did the Russians help tip the election in Trump’s favor?”
I think it is both. The Russians targeted specific voters with misinformation about Hillary. Women’s suspicion of other women allowed them to believe the lies.
My only personal beef with her is that she seems to care deeply about Bush Jr. and I wish she didn’t give a single f*ck about him. I’m cool with everything else.
I would probably be Michelles hero because I have failed so many times at so many things and still standing haha…… (cries in corner)
Yes, I too am sick and tired of watching white men fail upward, and there is no better example than Donald Trump. By every metric he’s unqualified to hold any office, and has failed at practically everything he’s done. Yet, he is still the freaking POTUS. If it were a woman or person of colour, with even ONE of his 8,436 scandals, they’d be tossed aside without a second thought.
But the system is set up for people like him to succeed. They’re so blind to it that they literally cannot understand how others don’t have the same success they do, therefore it must be due to character. From their POV, they “worked hard” and “took risks” so we can too, right? Too bad the rest of us don’t have the luxury of continually landing on our feet.
Actually the biggest difference I see between Michaelle and Hilary is that Michelle is young and beautiful and Hilary is old. And there is nothing America hates more than older women who are ambitious and who don’t go away. Older women are supposed to disappear. I see it all the time in my field. Any woman over 45 is considered old fashioned, not hip and generally useless, The men their same age are considered as geniuses who are just hitting their prime. And I see both young men and young WOMEN mocking these women. Not that I’m bitter…
preach! and yes, i’m bitter! 😀
I think Michelle’s bangs are very flattering, and hope she keeps them.
I feel like when Michelle was talking about not being different from Hillary she wasn’t necessarily talking about policy (although she might, who knows, I don’t think she has said much about policies she would support so all we can do is guess she generally must be on board with what her husband did). I thought she meant that she is not some perfect paragon, she’s a person like anyone else, and if she became a candidate, the same people who came at Hillary would come at her, with similar results. And honestly, it would probably be even worse because she’s black. Even with Hillary, she was far more popular when she wasn’t running for anything than when she was because it’s the political machine that breaks her image down and makes people believe she’s this evil Lady Macbeth type who literally has people killed. After all, there are things people could probably dig up on Michelle if they tried, just like anyone – I think I remember some drama about a paper she wrote in college being racist against white people or something? (I’m not saying it was, just that it was the rumor). Stuff like that would be magnified, and since she’s a woman (and a black woman to boot) it would be as impossible for her to become president as it was for Hillary. I took Michelle’s remarks to be a general discussion of how the social climate makes human errors impossible for women but even huge missteps are not the end of the road for men, so the solution is to change the climate so that all women can succeed, not just special women who have never made any mistakes.