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Barack Obama Wants More Women Elected 'Because Men Seem to Be Having Some Problems These Days'


While the current president spent his weekend badmouthing the FBI on Twitter, his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, was in Paris speaking about the great need for more women in elected office.

As the AFP reported (via Huffington Post), Obama made an appearance at this weekend’s Les Napoleons summit—a communications event that gathers leaders in business, media, and academia—and made very clear that he hopes more women take on leadership roles “because men seem to be having some problems these days.”

Without naming anyone in particular, the former president was clearly alluding to the staggering number of powerful men—and not just in politics, across entertainment, news media, and the art and culinary worlds as well—who have been accused of sexual harassment and misconduct since The New York Times first broke their bombshell Harvey Weinstein exposé.

“Not to generalize but women seem to have a better capacity than men do, partly because of their socialization,” Obama continued.

And really, it should come as no surprise that Obama thinks the future is female. After all, he’s the same president who proudly wrote about his commitment to feminism in a Glamour essay last year.

As the panel continued, Obama made sure to get in another thinly-veiled critique of a man in power—Donald Trump.

Without naming him directly, Obama chided the “temporary absence of American leadership” when it comes to climate change and the current administration’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. Though the U.S. may be the only country that opposes the accord, Obama assured the audience that plenty of measures are being taken by state and local governments, as well as corporations, to combat the issue.



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Post-Weinstein, These Are the Powerful Men Facing Sexual Harassment Allegations


After The New York Times published an explosive report detailing decades of sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, dozens of women came forward with their own accusations against the Hollywood mogul. Within a week, Weinstein had been fired from his company and expelled from the Motion Picture Academy.

Now, in a post-Weinstein world, legions of women have felt empowered to speak out and share their own #MeToo stories—both on social media and in major news outlets. Weinstein sparked an avalanche of accusations against high-profile men in media, politics, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, all with varying degrees of repercussions. Sexual harassment in the workplace is certainly nothing new, but it’s safe to say the issue is now, rightfully, taking center stage.

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the high-profile men who have accused of sexual harassment and/or assault since Weinstein, which we’ll keep updating as new allegations surface.

Note: This list centers on high-profile men who have experienced a mainstream, public fall-out following the accusations.

Khaliha Hawkins and Abby Gardner contributed to this report



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Michelle Obama Says Men Can't Be Bystanders When It Comes to Sexual Misconduct


We can always trust former First Lady Michelle Obama to speak up about important issues facing women—and to share some sound wisdom while doing so. She’s spoken out about the ways parents can better raise children so that when the kids reach adulthood, the men don’t feel so problematically entitled and the women feel more empowered. She’s enlightened us about the racism she faced during husband Barack Obama’s eight years as president. She has even pointed out the ridiculous double standard between her fashion choices and her Barack’s, pointing out that what she wore got scrutinized while her husband could wear the same tux to every single event.

This week, she spoke out about the issue that’s been in the news every single day lately: sexual misconduct. Michelle gave a speech in Hartford, Connecticut on Thursday where she addressed the slew of allegations that have made their way into the news recently. “I can’t tell you how sick it makes me, the more I see the uncovering of the truth that all us women know has been out there, that there is an ugliness there,” she told the crowd.

She went on to explain that in order for women to gain the strength to speak up for themselves, it’s going to take a lot of work. But it’s not all on women, either—men need to act as our allies: “I’m talking to the men out there, who cannot be innocent bystanders and complacent … watching this happen,” she said.

Michelle spoke of state of anxiety women constantly live in, too. “We live in a world … where young girls are literally in danger of some kind of mess, whether it’s what a man says to us, or how he looks at us, or an opportunity that is taken from us, or somebody who’s got our foot on our necks,” she said. “It is such a sad, common existence for women and girls in this country.”

As eloquently as you’d expect, Michelle also addressed the little ways that we can help make the word a better, more fair place for everyone. As it turns out, her golden rules aren’t terribly hard to follow: “Focus on what you can control. Be a good person every day. Vote. Read. Treat one another kindly. Follow the law. Don’t tweet nasty stuff.”

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The Problem With Men, Michelle Obama Says, Is We've Made Them 'Entitled'


On Wednesday Former First Lady Michelle Obama took to the stage at the inaugural Obama Summit alongside poet Elizabeth Alexander for a wide-ranging discussion on topics like Twitter, raising children and the crucial importance of self-care. But perhaps her most pointed and valuable advice was for men in America and their grave need to get a better group of friends.

“Y’all need to get you some friends,” Obama said to uproarious laughter and applause from the crowd.

Female friends, Obama said, “straighten each other out on some things … Y’all need to go talk to each other about your stuff because there’s so much of it. It’s so messy. Talk about why y’all the way you are.”

From there, Obama explained that all the issues that come with male adulthood stem from the way society raises its boys.

“The problem in the world today is we love our boys and we raise our girls. We raise them to be strong and sometimes we take care not to hurt men. And I think we pay for that a little bit,” she said. “And that’s a we thing because we’re raising them.”

Obama then posed the question asking whether or not we are coddling young men too much “so they feel entitled and a little self-righteous sometimes? But that’s kind of on us too as women and mothers as we nurture men and we push girls to be perfect.”

In her discussion with Alexander Obama added that young girls must be taught from a very young age to stand up for themselves and practice that skill for a lifetime.

“If we don’t ask them to speak up at an early age that doesn’t just happen,” she said. “It takes practice to have a voice… to say ‘no, don’t touch me.'”

As a mother to two young women Obama explained that she is focusing on ensuring her daughters are “sturdy and able to exist” in this world because, as she said, “it is a world that is dangerous for women.”

In addition to her highly useful advice about raising strong girls, Obama also gave a quick lesson to a few unnamed world leaders on how to effectively use social media for god.

“When you have a voice you can’t just use it any kind of way … You don’t just say what’s on your mind. You don’t tweet every thought,” Obama said, again eliciting a huge laugh from the crowd. “Your first initial thoughts are not worthy of the light of day,” she added. But to ensure the audience that she wasn’t talking about Tweeter-in-Chief Donald Trump Obama coyly added, “And I’m not talking about anybody in particular, I’m talking about us all because everybody does that.”

And we’d be apt to believe she wasn’t calling out Trump until she threw out this fairly obvious shade saying that when sending tweets “You need to think and spell it right and have good grammar, too.”

Watch her entire speech below.

[embedded content]



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I’m Ready to Say, 'Me Too.' Now Men Need to Say, 'I’m Sorry'


I was sexually assaulted in college.

While that’s a horrific sentence to type, it’s not an uncommon one: more than 17.7 million American women could write some version of it if they really wanted to. And many are, thanks to the #MeToo movement that’s happening across social media. Women around the world are coming together, using their voices to shine a spotlight on just how common it is for someone to experience some level of sexual harassment or assault.

But I’ve mostly stayed in the shadows. I’ve typed up my own post and deleted it nearly 50 times over the past two days. I shared it with my mother. My best friend. A fellow sexual assault survivor. But I couldn’t bring myself to join the masses and share the personal details of what had happened to me so publicly. At first, I thought it was out of fear—I’m a part of the 90 percent of college-campus assault victims who did not report, and one of many survivors who likely would have gone their entire lives without admitting what happened. Thinking about that night, when a guy I liked forced me to perform sexual acts against my consent, brings up emotions I’d rather keep buried; memories I’ve worked nearly a decade to try and forget.

Then I realized that, while this movement has been extremely powerful—strong enough to make me want to share my story for the first time—I wasn’t holding back because of some insurmountable fear of judgment or embarrassment. I was silent because the voice I wanted to see most on my feed was not my own. It was a man’s. Every man, in fact.

Don’t get me wrong—the posts that women are sharing are empowering, and they’ve made me feel safe, in a weird way. I no longer feel isolated, or like I will be judged for what happened to me so many years ago. I don’t wonder if my friends will be able to understand what I went through—I know they will, because in some way, it’s likely happened to them, too.

But those posts only go so far. Because, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, 99 percent of sex offenders in single-victim incidents are male. And they don’t fit a certain “profile” that’s easy to avoid, because they don’t all look like some creepy older man who gives off a weird vibe you’ve been taught to stay away from. These harassers are, quite often, our friends. And some of them actively title themselves as “progressive,” “feminist,” and “woke.”

Yet, they’ve still done this abusive, manipulative, demeaning shit to women.

Some men are starting to speak up—sharing supportive updates, saying they’re proud of women for their bravery and proclaiming they’ll step in the next time they see harassment happening. But the thing is, those aren’t the men I really want to hear from. Or maybe they are, but they’re just not admitting it.

I want to hear from the men who are committing the harassment. The man who said, “Hey baby, how you doing” as I walked out of my office last night. Or the guys who whistled and honked the car horn while I hiked through Santorini this summer. And the dude who rubbed my back while reaching for a drink at the bar last week.

Those men are the ones who need to speak up—who need to own up to the people they harmed. Maybe they didn’t even realize they were doing something offensive, instead believing themselves to simply be flirtatious or funny. It doesn’t matter. I still want to hear them apologize. (And don’t make it a huge performance. This isn’t about your feelings.)Doing so starts to take the blame away from the victims, and instead places it squarely on the shoulders of those who are committing these acts. And it shows that things might finally—finally—be ready to change.

If men were to post that kind of status—an #IHave status where they apologize for being someone’s #MeToo, actually mean it, and take active steps toward never being that person again—then I think that’s the first step to forgiveness that a lot of women need. It begins to blur the line of an “us versus them” mentality, and instead presents an opportunity for change. It opens up an avenue for honest dialogue about what men can be doing differently to make sure they aren’t perpetuating the problem.

But don’t be mistaken: Actually admitting and apologizing for your wrongdoing is not a way to shine the spotlight on yourself, opening you up to applause or an expectation of thanks. I can’t speak for all women, but if I were to see that status, yes, I would thank you. But it would be for recognizing that this is a battle that you, as a man, need to wage, and for the acknowledgment that action should not be dependent on the survivors. I would not thank you for having enough human decency to own up to your shameful, demeaning mistakes. You shouldn’t need thanks to do that.

So, I hope more men will, well, man up and admit to what they’ve done. Doing so just might create waves that steer us toward a place where women don’t experience sexual harassment or assault on a daily basis. Because, ideally, we’ll one day live in a society where sexual assault isn’t the rule, but the exception.



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Study Insists That Men Have Just As Much Work-Life Stress as Women, and I'm Not Here For It


Motherhood isn’t about finding a way to fit everything in or, god forbid, have it all. You learn that pretty quickly—say, two to three weeks into this mess. Trying to do it, you discover, will only lead to a cascade of tears in a restaurant bathroom where you’re shoving toilet paper into your bra to keep milk from leaking out onto the only “business-y” top you own that gracefully covers the band of tissue pregnancy left behind on your pelvis. Instead, you become a professional triage consultant, sorting through must-do’s and should-do’s and it-would-be-nice-ifs, and then cramming errands and activities into the brief flashes of “free time” that pop up between washing the last bottle and making the next one. This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, but mothers are almost certainly the most stressed out demographic in this country.

A recently released study claims that isn’t true. Dads, it argues, feel this stress just as much as moms. Allegedly, dads have long kept quiet for fear of stigmatization, among other things. After examining a compilation of 350 studies completed over the past three decades, the research team “found very little evidence of differences between women and men as far as the level of work-family conflict they report,” according to a report from Science Daily.

“The way this issue is presented in the media frames the way we think about it,” lead researcher Dr. Kristen Shockley explained, “and it creates a perpetual cycle. Women hear that other women are struggling with this issue, so they expect they will experience greater work-family conflict. There also is some socialization for it being OK for women to talk more about it than men.” In other words, Shockley is claiming that women know it’s acceptable to admit to feeling stress about their work-life “balance”; that openness then creates the perception that such stress is rampant, thus beginning a diabolical feedback loop. I.e. We’re doing this to ourselves.

“I do think it’s harming men,” she went on, “who are silently struggling and are experiencing the same amount of work-family conflict, but no one is acknowledging it.” (I read this line and then picked my jaw up off the floor and mopped where it had been, because that’s the kind of thing moms remember to do.)

Of course, it’s vital that we, as a society, consider the implications of the massively dysfunctional familial child care system we’ve created. And that doesn’t mean that we just hand women tissues as they tell their tales of woe and then wave banners demanding that men cower in a corner while we give birth in spa soaking tubs and demand paid leave until our babies are in Master’s programs. Advancing women’s causes without considering the roles men will play in that future is shortsighted. In fact, longer paternity leave has been proven to help close the gender wage gap and distribute child rearing responsibilities more equally.

But to argue that men are suffering in silence while dissolving under the same amount of anxiety as women not only misrepresents reality, it also dangerously implies that both genders need equal support in their mission to parent and work outside the home.

Earlier this year, on a trip to visit friends in California, we brought along our then-four-month-old to meet the couple, who don’t have any kids and aren’t entirely sure whether they ever will. The trip was a prime example of how equally we try to share parenting duties in our house. For the first two days I carted the baby around San Francisco, trying to cram art into her formative little brain in the hopes of making her a more cultured person, while my husband attended business meetings. Then we headed out of the city to meet our friends for a few days of relaxing in the redwoods, where my husband was planning on taking the lion’s share of responsibility for the weekend. One hour after checking in I missed a step and tore two ligaments in my ankle. I couldn’t even pick up the baby, let alone handle the (oddly physically demanding) tasks that come along with parenthood. But it wasn’t a problem at all. My husband knows all the baby’s ins and outs. He does all the routines. If I dropped dead tomorrow, he wouldn’t scratch his head and wonder where the hell I keep the baby’s pajamas.

But when our friends asked how much having her had changed our lives, my husband replied, “Really not that much!” Of course it hasn’t, I interjected in what must have appeared to be a verbal seizure, you go to work every day! Your whole identity hasn’t shifted! There isn’t still a weird band of flesh attached to your pelvis that only one work shirt covers! You don’t spend your whole day telling a tiny human what color everything is while you empty the dishwasher!

I may be extra rant-y, but I’m not alone. Study after study proves that not only do men do less, they also don’t know how to self-report about their roles in the home. This study found that women spend twice as much time on childcare in a week than their male counterparts. This one found that half of women do housework every day, while just 20% of men do the same. And this one, from the Pew Research Group, found that men drastically overestimate the amount of time they spend on chores, household affairs, and childcare. “After a birth,” The New York Times explained, “women’s total work — including paid work, housework and child care — increased 21 hours a week and men’s increased 12.5 hours. For women, but not men, child care did not substitute for any of their existing work; it was all supplemental.” In other words, we’re doing far more with far less time and the data backs us up.

Yet the biggest complaint from women when it comes to the division of work in the home isn’t that it’s merely unequal. It’s that the mental load of wondering exactly how all the tasks will get done falls inordinately on women’s shoulders. As Judith Shulevitz wrote in this spot-on piece, moms are “the designated worriers,” who “draft the to-do lists while fathers pick and choose among the items.” This clever cartoon—which was passed around among mothers this summer like cholera through Victorian London’s sewers—explains how fathers in heterosexual relationships view mothers as the managers, and asserts that “when we ask women to take on the task of organization, and at the same time to execute a large portion, in the end it represents 75% of the work.” When we see fathers plan and enact elaborate activities we consider it exceptional. When mothers do it, we consider it Tuesday.

Are men stressed about how to manage a thriving career and enriching home life? Surely. Do we need to fear that they’re bearing the same load as their female counterparts and yet no one will heed their silent cries for help? I wouldn’t add this your list of worries, moms.



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