The latest trend among the anencephalics who populate the MAGA-sphere is to brand Michelle Obama a man. One meme I saw the other day made specific reference to her “dick.”
So, I nosed around a bit and discovered there’s a type of sociological cancer called misogynoir, a mash up of misogyny and racism. By golly, we’re such a creative species, aren’t we?
Moya Bailey coined the term nearly two decades ago and I thank all my lucky stars that I hadn’t heard of it until just now. For the last ten years, my faith and hope in the human race has been bottoming out anyway, without me knowing about it.
Moya Bailey
Better I should concentrate on who Moya Bailey is. She’s a professor in the Communications Studies Department at Northwestern University. Acc’d’g to her school bio, “she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine.” And if you think, as many MAGA-ists do that such academic inquiry is silly or useless, consider the media landscape of, say, a quarter of a century ago. Back then, I noticed that whenever the big corporate media outlets ran breathless stories about young women and girls who’d been kidnapped or killed (long a staple of news coverage, guaranteed to rivet viewers, readers, and clickers) the victim, invariably, turned out to be young, pretty, innocent-looking, and blonde. Nobody else…, well, mattered.
If a victim happened to be fat, homely or, god forbid, Black, her disappearance or demise wouldn’t be worth a moment of anyone’s time.
And if I, a White male, noticed that trend, you can be sure scads of Black people did, too. Thus was born Black Lives Matter.
White America, and the MAGA cesspool in particular, could never understand that daily slap in the face Black people suffered. Black people’s sisters, daughters, and friends disappeared too. Kids and twenty-somethings in Atlanta’s Vine City neighborhood, New York City’s Washington Heights, Chicago’s North Lawndale, or St. Louis’s The Ville went missing and met untimely ends too. They rarely, if ever made the front page. Their pictures rarely, if ever, were posted on CNN or Fox News. They weren’t important enough.
Black lives, “woke” folks said, matter too. Young Black women and girls were important too. That’s all they were trying to say.
Of course, even that simple sentiment was twisted, mangled, misinterpreted, and made toxic by right wing commentators, lunkheaded social media influencers, and the eventual goddamned President of the United States.
So, yeah, delving into how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in the media, the pursuit Moya Bailey has dedicated her professional life to, is as important as all hell, no matter what the late Charlie Kirk or Joseph Goebbels mimic Stephen Miller have to say.
Bailey first used the term misogynoir back in 2008 while writing her dissertation at Emory University. “It is a portmanteau of misogyny and noir–referring both to the French word for the color black as well as the film genre noir, because one of the ways that I see misogynoir showing up is often in media,” Bailey told Northwestern magazine in 2023. That year, Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionaries. Here’s M-W’s online definition:
Bailey has written the book, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021) and co-authored #Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020). While an undergrad at Spelman College hoping to become a physician, she “fell in love with Women’s Studies” and turned to that academic discipline instead. In 2004, she and other women at Spelman staged the “Nelly Protest,” objecting to the rap star’s and other hip-hop artists’ hateful, dismissive representations of women in their lyrics and videos. (And, by the way, whenever I’m in the car and I hear gangsta rap and other such macho-porn booming and blaring from a nearby vehicle, the driver and other occupants invariably turn out to be White boys. You’re welcome to make your own conclusion about that.)
On a very cool note, Moya Bailey serves as the “digital alchemist” for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, Butler was a Hugo and Nebula award-winning author. Butler, who died in 2006, was a member of a still all-too-rare demographic: she was a Black woman science fiction novelist. She also was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship prize, in 1995.
There. Phew! After having my soul tainted by learning about accusations that Michelle Obama has a dick and the malignancy that is misogynoir, I feel refreshed by having discovered Moya Bailey. And, as an added bonus, I got to think about the imaginative and fabulously accomplished Octavia Butler.
Maybe humanity isn’t so rotten after all.