Opinion

The Right to Bare Arms

Why is Washington debating Michelle Obama's buff biceps?

By Vanessa Richmond, 11 Mar 2009, TheTyee.ca

Michelle Obama

First Lady's style: cut from a new cloth?

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This is the third week of Armgate, or Sleevegate. It could also be called Bicep Bruhaha. To some, Michelle Obama is going out on a limb, is armed and dangerous, and out to start her own arms race. Her pipes have even spurred workout regimes ("Can We Get Michelle's Arms? Yes We Can!")

The people are up in arms! (Sorry, can't stop.)

It's not exactly a slow news cycle right now, but the bicep topic has taken up a disproportionate share of minutes and column inches among the chattering classes and their auxiliary chattering commenters, especially the politicos, and the lion's share of photo gallery real estate, like here, here, here, here and here. In The Daily Beast, one Washington journalist said, "Simply everyone is talking about it (or them) everywhere I go."

The reaction to Obama's biceps and triceps isn't as extreme as that reserved for queen of steel biceps, Madonna, but it's more prominent, pointed and political.

Doesn't anyone notice the tweed?

Here's a summary, in case you've been doing more important things like reading about the world financial crisis, or about the fact that she's redefining the role of first lady, taking a more active role than any in recent memory by working in soup kitchens, visiting schools and meeting with, you know, citizens.

So far, as first lady, Michelle Obama has worn many sweater sets, grey suits, and even some tweed. She's also worn strapless or one-shoulder gowns to the Inaugural Ball and several other evening events, and met with positive reaction. But she wore a sleeveless Narcisco Rodriguez dress to the President's Address, appeared on the cover of Vogue in a sleeveless crimson Jason Wu sheath dress, then the cover of People in a lacy pink Tracy Reese mini dress. Then appeared in her official portrait in a sleeveless, black Michael Kors dress. Apparently, that's too many shoulder barings, especially for daytime events in the Washington winter.

As Sandra McElwaine pointed out, she's not the first first lady to bare arms: "Frances Folsom Cleveland infuriated the Women's Christian Temperance Union when she wore gowns that bared her shoulders. They petitioned her to stop because it was 'an evil influence on other young American girls.'"

But Maureen Dowd added protein powder to the workout when she quoted David Brooks, a fellow NYT columnist, as saying "She's made her point," he said. "Now she should put away Thunder and Lightning."

The question is why her arm muscles have people's tongue muscles moving.

Washington wonks prefer frumps

Dowd writes, "Let's face it: The only bracing symbol of American strength right now is the image of Michelle Obama's sculpted biceps. Her husband urges bold action, but it is Michelle who looks as though she could easily wind up and punch out Rush Limbaugh, Bernie Madoff and all the corporate creeps who ripped off America."

The subtext? Some people are intimidated by a first lady who symbolizes strength, instead of support.

In a taxi, Brooks argued to Dowd that "Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements… Washington is sensually avoidant. The wonks here like brains. She should not be known for her physical presence, for one body part."

Sure, I want big brains from Washington and Ottawa. But why brains or brawn, but not both? That ironically contradicts every piece of scientifically based information I've read about the benefits of a healthy body. But I notice this isn't the first time that mysticism has trumped science among the right wing.

And as one friend said, "The whole sensual avoidance thing really worked for the Catholic Church."

Arms imply vanity, power, confidence

Bonnie Fuller, an ex-fashion magazine editor, thinks that Brooks and many of his muscle-a-feared Republican cohorts are resorting to verbal bicep jabs because they have nothing else to say as a party right now, are afraid of the strength of the Obama era, and unable to make actual bicep jabs ("I bet he's got jiggly girly-man arms," she jokes).

In the New Yorker's Style issue (with three illustrations of a sleeved Obama on the cover) Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion reporter Robin Givhan argues that the problem isn't that Obama's biceps aren't particularly remarkable for their quality or size, but for what they represent. "They are not outlandishly sinewy Madonnaesque limbs. Obama's athletic arms are achievable -- in between the kids' soccer practice, the executive suite, and the grocery store. Those arms represent personal time. They are evidence of a forty-five-year-old woman's refusal to give up every free moment in service to husband, kids, and all the nagging distractions that could have filled her days and left her tuning in to Oprah, trying to figure out how she'd lost herself along the way. The arms imply vanity and power: two things that make many women uncomfortable and yet are fundamental to self-confidence.

The political is the personal

But I think it all comes down to what Desiree Rogers, the White House's social secretary said in a recent interview. According to Rogers, the first lady's view on all of this is simple: "If I want to wear no sleeves to hear my husband speak, that's what I'm going to do."

That attitude is the real problem. It's a shift in the way many first ladies have played their roles -- in public, anyway.

Washington is a serial TV drama, with ongoing roles. Every four or eight years, those roles are recast, and every time those subtle casting changes spark some tension in the audience. Though the actors have some differences (usually communicated in terms of their being left- or right-leaning) they have many more similarities when it comes to race, class and gender, and they tend to wear similar wardrobes that minimize any other differences (just as MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow has chosen to wear a grey suit every night to take the attention off the fact that she's actually very different from most anchors).

The race card

When the same typecast actors play the same roles the same way, audience tension is minimized. But as one friend of mine put it, "Some people are really starting to freak out because it's hitting them that she's black."

Just by getting there, as black Americans, the Obamas have arguably achieved more than most two-term presidential couples. They can relax and be themselves, which she seems to be doing, rather than pander to small c-conservative public opinion.

Michelle Obama is not typecast: she's playing a new role for her. She's also reinventing the role itself. Not just because of her achievements, nor her color, nor her wardrobe, but because of a combination of all three, and because of what she's communicating with that wardrobe.

"Jackie Kennedy was stylish, but most other first ladies have had fairly fuddy-duddy, uptight wardrobes," says Kerry Weinrauch, a local TV, feature film, and music video stylist and costume designer.

"You can change somebody with their clothes, you could turn Michelle Obama into what people expect a first lady to be." But Weinrach says Obama is instead communicating that she is her own person, approaching her role as first lady in a different way from those before her, and doesn't see a need to dress like anyone other than herself.

"Anyway, you don't want the clothes to wear the person, you want the person to wear the clothes. That's ultimately the only way it can work." With her bare biceps, Michelle Obama is carving out a new style and role for first ladies and for women generally. It's making some people, possibly those wearing tight fitting suits, very uncomfortable. But it suits her, and many other women, very well.

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Tyee contributing editor Vanessa Richmond writes the Schlock and Awe column about popular culture and the media.

15 Comments:

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  • jodietonita

    2 years ago

    more fab analysis

    on Michele's arms over at the Kitchen Table. http://princetonprofs.blogspot.com/2009/03/michelle-obamas-arms.html

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    2 years ago

    What big teeth you have . . .

    We have here what happens when Vanessa writes about a woman whose self-assertiveness, whose refusal to cow-tow to others' expectations, she respects, and NOT what happens when she writes about someone whose similar efforts to do the same, she evidently doesn't. Michelle has well-toned muscles and her own style-sense, and "your" problem with it, "your" hate-on for her, shows only "your" insecurities, lack of style, and obvious need to keep women and black people in check. Gwyneth has writing-gumption and her own quirky-style, and "your" problem with it shows "you've" got taste (are not tone-deaf), and that "you" can see the signs that meme the end of all good things. (Vanessa's last article, on Gwyneth's Goop: http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2009/03/04/Goop/)

    David Brooks is the one who is really taking the heat on this one. Do you know who he is, Tyee readers? Yes, he is a Republican. But don't you be thinking Rush Limbaugh, or the like. In fact, it'd be better if searched across the aisle, for in demeanor, mannerisms, he's much closer to your average genteel-democrat than he is to any Republican I can think of--he's unusually sensitive, effete, for even a Washington (brain-oriented, style-oriented) Republican. To get a good sense of him, it might in fact be best if you imagined him the sensitive English lit/composition professor, who when he listens to you, reads your work, does so with tender respect, a willingness to learn (from you), with an inkling to gently show yourself to yourself and suggest a better way, you might consider taking.

    Yes, he showed no such with Michelle, but because she affectively overwhelmed him. But we might find that the Obamas come to encourage this reaction not just from Republicans (who, I actually think, will not so long from now stop fretting over being courted, acknowledge their true desires, and join the Obamas in their steel and track, tanking of America)--but from sensitives, the genteel, who are mostly to be found amongst the left. (I am thinking now of the elegant [but not captured] progressive, Geraldine Ferrara, and her horror at the flaggrantness of Obama operatives as they tried to destroy her reputation in a single minded effort to 'surrect their King.)

    If you have a hankering for the gym/an athletic nation, populist pop-culture, seeing preppy better than-thous wallow (and maybe worse than wallow: _Salon's_ article on this topic was, "Put away the guns, Michelle [you're scaring David Brooks!]"), you'll never tire of what Obamanation offers. But if like David you prefer quiet talks, an easeful atmosphere, letting your "opponent" have her/his say, and aren't averse to reading some Mrs. Dalloway (when you've got a hankering for the fin-de-siecle), don't let populist elation quiet your disquiet. Like Brooks, at the very least, say something--if not revered, you might at least be remembered for having done so before the advance of "Thunder" and "Lightning" pounded you into pulp.

  • Jeffrey J.

    2 years ago

    Hit the Nail on the Head

    Ms. Richmond hits the nail squarely on the head. This is indeed about not conforming to very narrow societal expectations. So not only have the Obama's assumed residency of the White House, but they have the courage to continue being different (themselves). What a huge breath of fresh air. Just what the Beltway is desperately in need of.

    The cloying social controls that have previously dictated social behaviour in Washington are long beyond their 'past due' date. North Americans everywhere will be welcoming this new era (dare I say...with open arms...). Great discussion of a topic that normally doesn't get proper analysis!

  • freebear

    2 years ago

    So its not about managing world's most powerful country?

    I don't care if she dressed like Hulk Hogan!

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    2 years ago

    Changing the title

    Please note, I'm changing my article's title. It's now: If you be gentle, fret, fret, the coming of the might!

  • nightbloom

    2 years ago

    I suspect the fussy and

    I suspect the fussy and overly-particular flap concerning Michelle's bare arms (driven mostly by media personalities of the feminine persuasion, not coincidentally) is a sublimated expression of another, less mentionable, kind of disapproval.

    Michelle has catapulted over her more pale (and more kosher) sisters in the social hierarchy of the Northeastern Establishment. I don't think for a moment that this is about her arms, and I think these are only the first klucks and pecks in what will be a long passive-aggressive guerrilla hissy-&-tizzy by a segment of people who know how to be racist, classist and bitchy without ever *looking* like they're racist, classist and bitchy.

  • redheadwalking

    2 years ago

    Now if only she would also

    Now if only she would also sport armpit hair...

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    2 years ago

    @nightbloom

    Not just those in the NE Establishment, but all whiteys who object to the Obamas are going to get tagged and dismissed as racists. A couple writers at Salon Magazine are trying to draw attention to how Obama may prove a real DISAPPOINTMENT to progressives, and an ENCOURAGEMENT to the establishment oriented. They're doing heroic work, for not too long from now, I expect that no other kind of dissent will effect a quicker "invite" to the camps. It is with Obama that the 60s progressive victory in the culture-war, finally ends. It'll be effectively rebranded "white" progressivevism, re-evaluated as having primarily served the established over the downtrodden, and will wilt while intolerant militarism rises. And all this can happen before the eyes of many of the left, and yet they'll keep on cheering: those with no real self-esteem need the jolt to self-assessment being part of Obama's camp provides, and cannot bear the weight of disapproving eyes from those newly entrenched as the leaders of the new New Left.

    Shouldn't be needed, but I'm Green, socialist, and a Nader supporter.

  • G West

    2 years ago

    Patrick

    David Brooks a 'Democrat'?

    Not even close - he's not a Limbaugh/Gingrich joke of a Republican but he's no Democrat and his attack on Michelle Obama was just lame (and unfunny) - as Maureen Dowd, who makes the point so much better than Vanessa does, clearly demonstrated.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    2 years ago

    @G West

    G West, I said he's Republican, but also that if you haven't seen him, you'll imagine him best if you picture him as a genteel, soft mannered, democrat. I think this is right. Mark Shields (a democrat--and one of the greatest!) at the Newshour, has said much the same.

    God speed to Michelle. I like her, and am rooting for her and her husband. But THERE IS RIGHTNESS in David's wariness of her "guns," and WRONGNESS in many people's praise/defense of them. Some sense of why the latter might be the case, is in how it (i.e., people's praise/defense of them) moved nightbloom to mock and set up for vitriole, "hissy" and "tizzy," North East' pussies. A nation in step will march right over their tender little feelings, and perhaps of others similarly in possession of a more--to use nightbloom's terms--"feminine persuasion." I'll leave it to your imagination to picture who they might possibly be. But if you hear of anyone described so they seem anything other than manly and spartan, know that they too might be being shaped so they seem unworthy of sympathy, and hope that they deserve no more than that.

  • nightbloom

    2 years ago

    Patrick, I think you're

    Patrick, I think you're attaching a different connotation to what I wrote.

    Nevertheless, the same media personalities "of the female persuasion" who knocked the spunky but 'lower class' Palin were the very same ones who went on about Michelle's "need" for a "make-over" as soon as her husband won the nomination. If you look back, they've always pilloried First Ladies and prospective First Ladies in this way, until they get the same same hair, same figure and the same couture. It's kinda wierd, actually. Michelle's fabulous arms are a rare instance of a pre-emptive strike by a newcomer that ups the ante on the Northeastern cliquey claquety-claque.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    2 years ago

    Nightbloom

    The history of such goes a long way back (my first sense of it in American history is when the men-of-letters first greeted the ascent of the first non-gentry President, General Andrew Jackson), and there is an awful lot that isn't good about it. There is a lot there that is just about class, and I understand when people then go out of their way to defend the up-and-comer from snide, belittling comments, as you have done. Still, sometimes, and maybe all the time, the resistance isn't fairly dismissed as just about keeping "proper" heirarchies in place: newcomers often get in when the country is more in the mood for a no-nonsense, general's leadership. It happened with Jackson, it happened with Reagan. Important to note, too: it can also happen when the country is finally on to something truly good: witness Jimmy Carter.

    Like you, I find Michelle radiant and beautiful. She has her own style, and isn't being asked to "adjust" it, as Hillary Clinton regrettably had to do to settle down public anxieties, and likely wouldn't do so, anyway. But my sense of pretty much all who are spending lots of time toning their muscles these days, is that their ultimate fitness is not co-sympathetic to those whose leisured take on life has earned them muscles, somewhat less taut. Michelle is ready for a fight, and like Batman, she will be stunningly smart in motion. But I want to hear from the David Brooks of the world too, but since they do kind of suffer from anasthenia, they can be shut-down if conversations speak too much of thunder and lightning.

    I am sorry if I misrepresented/misunderstood you, nightbloom. I certainly suggested you were worry-worthy, which wasn't all that nice, and given your respectful response, more than likely, unfair. I aim to slow down and attend to you with consideration and imagination, in future. This may be obvious, but I do have sympathies for the gentry crowd that--Edith Wharton-like--is so often the subject both of our scorn and admiration. In some, I have found their soft manners TRULY all about well-attendence, mutual respect. And I speak now on their behalf, because they're worthy, and sure to be in need it.

  • G West

    2 years ago

    Patrick

    It's just a nonsense debate over nothing - a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing and David Brooks makes himself look foolish even involving himself in the brouhaha about a first lady's arms.

    Mo Dowd's funnier than Vanessa and Vanessa is simply riding her coat tails.

    None of this matters and it's more important to remember where David Brooks cut his journalistic teeth - the fact he and Mark Shields talk on PBS is as irrelevant as CNBC's market advice.

    All this, and the media clutching at straws for survival, are things of the past.

    What's coming next? Who knows?

    We can't discern the shape of the landscape until the earthquake is over.

    Nice to see you and nightbloom getting to know each other though.

    Humour, especially the black sort, is a dime a dozen in a 'depression'.

  • Fii

    2 years ago

    Re: fab analysis

    Interesting blog. I read the article by Maureen Dowd, too, and I find it to be very admiring of Ms Obama. I don't quite understand why the writer of the blog, Ms Harris-Lacewell, tries to make it into a White woman vs Black woman thing. Dowd doesn't "put the words in Brooks' mouth"- they were his words! Her own opinion of Ms Obama appears to be very postitive.

  • Dessident

    2 years ago

    Bravo!

    Good for the first lady! What a breath of fresh air she is, instead of all the mannequins in Washington. She has her own mind, heart, and soul; you can tell.

    So, to her detractors I'll say, STFU... Watch, listen, and learn. Welcome to a true woman's nature, power, and style.

    And, thanks Vanessa for the great article!

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