Michelle Obama, The New American Woman

Michelle Obama was the New American Woman, the New American beauty. The world needed another kind of star to gaze upon. She gives women and girls a daily reprieve from the narrow and damaging images of beauty, body acceptance and behavior, and makes being a woman of dignity cool.

Through her example, wild intellectual success looks attainable. She makes ample hips, full lips and rich brown skin an asset, not a fetish. Simply put, this First Lady makes us proud to be an American woman in all its glorious complexity.

And today, on her 50^th birthday, after 5 years of her presence busting up tired notions of racism and sexism, she presents the possibility to disrupt another “ism”- ageism. The image of Michelle Obama at 50 is blooming with energy, sexiness and “nextness." She gives the impression that her fiercest moves are still ahead. Her girls, Malia and Sasha, are growing with the quickness like stunning sunflowers and her husband is in his last term, so that Mom-In-Chief position will soon be in transition. Her life after 50 looks promising, exciting even.

Fifty is typically the decade when many women begin the sad slide into the physical fade and decay. The time they’re supposed to hide and lie because much of the world seems to want them to just hush up. Women at 50 remind the world that people age. Women at 50 are a nuisance to the tense notions of beauty, which have only recently recognized they make it to 40.

Woman at 50 are supposed to forget they were ever hot. Women at 50 make insecure 50-year-old men more insecure by association. Women at 50 are often isolated, quarantined from the youthful supple ones as if you could catch crows feet, love handles or under arm wings. Yet, Michelle Obamas’ 50-year-old arms are a metaphor, proof women can remain strong, significant, chic and sexual if we so choose.

I, too, was born in 1964 and will step into the dangerous decade in a few months and I, too, choose not to fade or apologize for surviving my youth with style. My plan is to stay fresh to death ‘till the day I rest, jack.
The most revolutionary thing Michelle Obama has ever said, in the midst of her many early criticisms was; “I own my own happiness.”
So Happy 50^th birthday, Madame First Lady. You earned it and yes, you own it.