Michelle Obama

When Ragen Chastain learned that Michelle Obama was appearing on The Biggest Loser to promote the show's contestants as role models, she felt she had to do something. " I e-mailed my friend Darryl Roberts, filmmaker of America the Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments. We wrote a well-researched article pointing out the problems with Mrs. Obama endorsing the contestants as role models," she says on her blog, Dances With Fat. She continues:

It wasn’t meant for this blog, but it’s now been turned down by three major media outlets. Not because they disagreed with us, in fact all three said that they agreed with the article. It was denied in all three cases because the White House wouldn’t like it, they were worried about damaging their working relationship with the White House, and it it made the First Lady look bad and out of touch.

• This week's homework: check out an excerpt from Professor Melissa Harris-Perry's Sister Citizen on Michelle Obama and the gendered and racialized conceptions of her role as first lady. Extra credit for tying it in to current political discussion!
• Margaret Cho defends any "strong language" she might use on Twitter.
• Peep the new anti-rape culture campaign that focuses squarely on men preventing rape.
• Check out this piece on women leaders in the civil rights movement and see if the museum exhibition is coming to your town.
• Residents of Minnesota state district 61B, say hello to Susan Allen, the first openly gay American Indian woman elected to any state legislature.
• Where's the news coverage of the New Year's Florida abortion clinic firebombing?

Tell us your thoughts or what you're reading in the comments down below!

The most boring exhibit I ever saw in any of the Washington, DC Smithsonian museums was, without a doubt, the gowns of the First Ladies. Oh, how I could not have cared less. But my mother preened over them like she'd just found some rare bird egg sitting under her window. Helen Taft? Grace Coolidge? Elizabeth Monroe? I didn't care about their dresses, and I certainly didn't know who they were as women. On top of that, weren't First Ladies just... housewives in a really nice house?

The leaders of the [women's suffrage] movement trembled on seeing a tall, gaunt black woman in a gray dress and white turban, surmounted with an uncouth sunbonnet, march deliberately into the church, walk with the air of a queen up the aisle, and take her seat upon the pulpit steps. A buzz of disapprobation was heard all over the house, and there fell on the listening ear, 'An abolition affair!" "Woman's rights and niggers!""I told you so!" "Go it, darkey!" . . Again and again, timorous and trembling ones came to me and said, with earnestness, "Don't let her speak, Mrs. Gage, it will ruin us. Every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed up with abolition and niggers, and we shall be utterly denounced." My only answer was, "We shall see when the time comes."
--First-wave feminist Frances Gage, reflecting on the occasion of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech

During the '08 campaign season, I cringed at comments made about former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s “hotness” and at the idea of the porno “Nailin’ Sarah Palin”--even though Palin's politics, her demeanor, and pretty much everything about her, made me throw up in my mouth a little. And to be sure, if Palin had become vice president, continued objectification of her and ongoing commentary about her of sexual nature would have bugged me to no end--even as I packed up and headed to Canada. And yet...

I think President Barack Obama is smokin' hot.