Michelle Obama: "The Shards That Cut Me The Deepest Were The Ones That Intended To Cut."

Michelle Obama: "The shards that cut me the deepest were the ones that intended to cut."

Our FLOTUS Forever sat for a conversation in Denver yesterday to a crowd of mostly women and discussed many of the things she advocated for as First Lady, including nutrition and education for girls, but she also touched on the racism she experienced.

WFCO President and CEO Lauren Casteel commented that Obama broke a glass ceiling by becoming the first black first lady. She then asked which of the falling glass shards cut the deepest.

“The shards that cut me the deepest were the ones that intended to cut,” she said, referencing being called an ape and people talking about her bottom. “Knowing that after eight years of working really hard for this country, there are still people who won’t see me for what I am because of my skin color.”

She said she can’t pretend like it doesn’t hurt because that lets those who do the hurting off the hook.

“Women, we endure those cuts in so many ways that we don’t even notice we’re cut,” she said. “We are living with small tiny cuts, and we are bleeding every single day. And we’re still getting up.”

But Obama said women should own their scars. Referring to failure, she said those wounds hurt deeply but they heal with time. If women own their scars, they can encourage younger girls who are getting their first cuts.

(cont. Denver Post) 

I like this.

I understand putting on a brave face for bullies.  Don’t give them the power or satisfaction of letting them know they’ve hurt you.  It’s why we teach kids “Sticks & stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”  The theory is if you ignore them, they’ll leave you alone.  The bully wants to hurt you.  Their goal is to affect you and watch you react.  If you don’t give them that reaction, then they haven’t achieved their goal and they lose interest.  Maybe they realize bullying is a waste of their time and they find something else to do.

But that doesn’t mean words don’t hurt unless you allow them to.  That’s the RuPaul School of Don’t Be So Sensitive that I’ve never subscribed to, and I think what Michelle Obama said is important because it’s not really a conversation we usually have with our kids.  Somewhere along the line, bullies stopped needed a reaction.  They troll because it makes them feel good about themselves.  They feel better about their shortcomings by putting someone else down.  They try to make others feel small so they can feel bigger.  It doesn’t matter if the subject reacts or not – they’ve gotten what they wanted from just having an audience to yell at, part of which will support them and part of which will react based on the general impropriety of the trolling.

Michelle Obama is coming at this admitting that she was hurt.  That hurt didn’t stop her from working toward her goals and it didn’t make her into a horrible person, but it’s okay to acknowledge that hurt.  Other girls who are hurt by words can then look at this powerful woman and say She was affected so it’s okay that I am too, but it didn’t define her, and it doesn’t define me.

It’s a fine line to walk between acknowledging your pain and wallowing in it, but obviously Michelle Obama is the best example.  She’s probably taken more fire than any other woman on the planet and look at her, still gracious, still positive, and still inspiring others while not ignoring the negativity that was thrown her way.  Now, I’m not saying I wouldn’t love a good ol’ nasty tell-all where she gives the business to all her haters, but she’s not wired that way, and we’re still so blessed to have her.

This is a revelation. I’m a woman who very rarely gets compliments (or harassment) from random guys, or from obviously sexually/romantically-interested women. But since I grew up knowing I don’t have much control over whether or not I’m objectified, and knowing being seen for my body goes along with not being seen as equal or powerful, I’m super sensitive about feeling like I’m being objectified, including sometimes snapping at my male partner for crossing a line. I never thought that I might just have more experience receiving and giving body compliments.

But it’s true, I get plenty of validation about my body from female friends and random women on my outfits, hair, etc. I never thought about how lonely it must feel to never have that from my friends. If I tally them up, I probably have dozens of hours and hundreds of phrases’ worth of practice in giving compliments that feel nice to other women and getting compliments that feel nice to me. If I’d never had that, how would I express myself when I found someone attractive? How would I ask for attention to my own appearance, taste in clothes, body?

(note: I have no romantic or sexualized experience myself, so I admit *some* of these points rely entirely on secondhand stuff and media)

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

We talk about women of color or women who are disabled being sexualized, but we don’t talk about how all straight men are desexualized and denied the ability to be sexualized object.

was cruisin my tl & this is so fucking important

I guess I had so completely absorbed the prevailing wisdom that I expected people in bankruptcy to look scruffy or shifty or generally disreputable. But what struck me was that they looked so normal.

The people appearing before that judge came in all colors, sizes, and ages. A number of men wore ill-fitting suits, two or three of them with bolero ties, and nearly everyone dressed up for the day. They looked like they were on their way to church. An older couple held onto each other as they walked carefully down the aisle and found a seat. A young mother gently jiggled her keys for the baby in her lap. Everyone was quiet, speaking in hushed tones or not at all. Lawyers – at least I thought they were lawyers – seemed to herd people from one place to another.

I didn’t stay long. I felt as if I knew everyone in that courtroom, and I wanted out of there. It was like staring at a car crash, a car crash involving people you knew.

Later, our data would confirm what I had seen in San Antonio that day. The people seeking the judge’s decree were once solidly middle-class. They had gone to college, found good jobs, gotten married, and bought homes. Now they were flat busted, standing in front of that judge and all the world, ready to give up nearly everything they owned just to get some relief from the bill collectors.

As the data continued to come in, the story got scarier. San Antonio was no exception: all around the country, the overwhelming majority of people filing for bankruptcy were regular families who had hit hard times. Over time we learned that nearly 90 percent were declaring bankruptcy for one of three reasons: a job loss, a medical problem, or a family breakup (typically divorce, sometimes the death of a husband or wife). By the time these families arrived in the bankruptcy court, they had pretty much run out of options. Dad had lost his job or Mom had gotten cancer, and they had been battling for financial survival for a year or longer. They had no savings, no pension plan, and no homes or cars that weren’t already smothered by mortgages. Many owed at least a full year’s income in credit card debt alone. They owed so much that even if they never bought another thing – even if Dad got his job back tomorrow and Mom had a miraculous recovery – the mountain of debt would keep growing on its own, fueled by penalties and compounding interest rates that doubled their debts every few years. By the time they came before a bankruptcy judge, they were so deep in debt that being flat broke – owning nothing, but free from debt – looked like a huge step up and worth a deep personal embarrassment.

Worse yet, the number of bankrupt families was climbing. In the early 1980s, when my partners and I first started collecting data, the number of families annually filing for bankruptcy topped a quarter of a million. True, a recession had hobbled the nation’s economy and squeezed a lot of families, but as the 1980s wore on and the economy recovered, the number of bankruptcies unexpectedly doubled. Suddenly, there was a lot of talk about how Americans had lost their sense of right and wrong, how people were buying piles of stuff they didn’t actually need and then running away when the bills came due. Banks complained loudly about unpaid credit card bills. The word deadbeat got tossed around a lot. It seemed that people filing for bankruptcy weren’t just financial failures – they had also committed an unforgivable sin.

Part of me still wanted to buy the deadbeat story because it was so comforting. But somewhere along the way, while collecting all those bits of data, I came to know who these people were.

In one of our studies, we asked people to explain in their own words why they filed for bankruptcy. I figured that most of them would probably tell stories that made them look good or that relieved them of guilt.

I still remember sitting down with the first stack of questionnaires. As I started reading, I’m sure I wore my most jaded, squinty-eyed expression.

The comments hit me like a physical blow. They were filled with self-loathing. One man had written just three words to explain why he was in bankruptcy:

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

When writing about their lives, people blamed themselves for taking out a mortgage they didn’t understand. They blamed themselves for their failure to realize their jobs weren’t secure. They blamed themselves for their misplaced trust in no-good husbands and cheating wives. It was blindingly obvious to me that most people saw bankruptcy as a profound personal failure, a sign that they were losers through and through.

Some of the stories were detailed and sad, describing the death of a child or what it meant to be laid off after thirty-three years with the same company. Others stripped a world of pain down to the bare facts:

Wife died of cancer. Left $65,000 in medical bills after insurance. Lack of full-time work – worked five part-time jobs to meet rent, utilities, phone, food, and insurance.

They thought they were safe – safe in their jobs and their lives and their love – but they weren’t.

I ran my fingers over one of the papers, thinking about a woman who had tried to explain how her life had become such a disaster. A turn here, a turn there, and her life might have been very different.

Divorce, an unhappy second marriage, a serious illness, no job. A turn here, a turn there, and my life might have been very different, too.

– A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren, pg. 34 - pg. 36

(Bolding mine)

The homeowner said the buck shows up everyday, so they gave him a bed, too.