Is Obama post-masculine?

A reader asks:

Have you read this article by Michael Knox Beran in City Journal about Obama as metrosexual/mommy in drag?

LA replies:

This business about Obama being “post-masculine” or “metro-sexual,” which we’ve seen before and now in Beran’s article, I think this is yet another example of conservatives getting carried away with their animus against Obama and saying anything about him that will hurt him. Obama seems like a sexually normal man, not any less masculine than anyone else. If anything, his strikingly tall, thin figure, deep voice, and incisive cadences make him seem masculine, not post-masculine.

- end of initial entry -

Bill Carpenter writes:

I agree with your reaction to the post-masculine concept. It is the mirror-image of the hysterical leftist analyses on Salon.com of Sarah Palin as a whip-cracking S&M dominatrix—just as aspects of the Palin enthusiasm mirrored the adoration of Obama. As excellent as Gov. Palin is, there was more than a hint of Obama-envy in the gushings of her supporters.

D. writes:

The answer to that question is to look at his wife with her broad shoulders and same height as him. She’s a hulking presence, not feminine

I would also add that lets match Obama&Michelle against:

McCain and Cindy McCain
Todd & Sarah Palin
Joe Biden & his wife

Definitely Obama’s marriage is the most metro-sexual and gayish marriage. I would also add that Obama’s speech cadences are somewhat gay. He has a deep voice? This can be learned and a speech coach will help you. Plus smoking cigarettes lowers the voice

LA replies:

I’ve talked about his wife’s mannish and truculent qualities, at length. But when you see them together, they evidently have a happy, normal marriage. In fact they set a far better example of marriage than the McCains, whose marriage began as an adulterous affair.

I really think that people on our side go overboard on this type of thing. There are so many legitimate reasons to oppose Obama. Do you really have to attack his sexuality as well, with no evidence for the charge? It’s low. This mean-spiritedness goes so far that you can’t even acknowledge that Obama has a naturally deep voice. That also has to be portrayed as part of his fake persona.

Bill Carpenter writes:

That people on our side go overboard on this sort of thing is evidence of another victory of the left. Before the left made Freud one of their demigods and vulgarized sexuality, decent people did not speculate in public about intimate matters. Now sexuality is on everyone’s lips. The left has done very well on that front in the attack on the West.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 24, 2008 10:23 PM | Send