A Stroll Down WTF Lane

What the everloving fuck is this article doing in The Nation? "The Editors" claim it's the inaugural entry in "Carnal Knowledge, a regular feature devoted to the subject of sex," but it reads more like an excuse to engage in a fun little bit of misogyny, with a generous side order of racism.

The piece begins with the line: "In politics as in pop, legions of little girls jumping out of their panties can't be wrong. That's the vital lesson so far of Election '08." And it doesn't get any better from there.

I watched a throng of them in November 2006, teenagers in their short skirts and breathlessness, jumping and jittering, hands to cheeks, screaming for Barack Obama.

…By '07 even the boys were Obama Girls, and their parents were borne along on the energy, feeling young and hip and a little damp in the drawers themselves.

Seriously? I mean, seriously? Does The Nation really not have any editors who see a problem with suggesting that men who are passionate about another man are behaving like panty-wetting girls?

If politically he now appears to be not substantively different from any other neoliberal, as a sex symbol he is the new man. New, most plainly, because in his mingled blood those born since 1980 or so can see their future lovers and children, if they don't already see themselves.

Mingled blood?! Again, I'm wondering who the hell is editing this shit that they don't know that "race mingling" is a politically and culturally supercharged term that makes the use of a phrase like "mingled blood" here decidedly inappropriate. It conjures "race mingling" even further, as it's immediately followed by a reference to Obama's parents and the "historically combustible idea of a black man and a white woman in bed together."

The point being made here—of which these phrases are used in support—is that interracial relationships aren't remotely as scandalous, and bi- or multiracial people not remotely as uncommon, among much of the younger generation as they were among earlier generations, which is true (although, as yesterday's QotD thread pointedly and poignantly illustrates, pretending that the whole thing is done and dusted, or anywhere close, is a wee bit premature). But what's weird is that this point is being made in furtherance of the larger one—that Obama is a "new" kind of sex symbol, in that he's a biracial black man who appeals to both "white and black" girls. (Sorry, brown girls—you don't exist.)

So the argument is that younger people don't find interracial lovin' all that notable, which makes their (in part) interracial crushes on Obama notable, so notable that he's a new kind of sex symbol altogether, but evidently only to old fogies who find all that race mingling really, really notable, because the kids these days don't find it notable and therefore don't recognize he's a new kind of sex symbol. Or something.

I give up.

The rest of the piece is peppered with clauses that just make my teeth positively grind—descriptions of JFK "[taking a woman] against the wall" and of Cindy McCain as John McCain's "zombified former drug addict wife"—leaving me wondering why on earth this was published at all, no less as a tone-setter for a new series.

A series I'll be sure to avoid.

[H/T to Shaker Brenda.]