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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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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 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.
