Yes, yes they did.

(Disclosure: I’ve written for Salon.com’s Broadsheet blog in the past.)

The author, a black woman named Erin Aubry Kaplan, begins:

…what really thrills me, what really feels liberating in a very personal way, is the official new prominence of Michelle Obama. Barack’s better half not only has stature but is statuesque. She has corruscating intelligence, beauty, style and — drumroll, please — a butt. (Yes, you read that right: I’m going to talk about the first lady’s butt.)

Objectifying the female half of the soon-to-be-most-prominent black couple in American culture so uncomfortable in a lot of ways.  I point you towards Amanda Fortini’s wonderfully thorough piece in New York magazine about female stereotypes this past election, specifically “Bitch” Clinton and “Ditz” Palin. She touches on how Michelle struggled with the “angry black woman” stereotype earlier in the campaign, before becoming an easier-to-swallow “mom-in-chief” — cute daughters and puppy in tow.  What will happen if we turn our attention to her bootylicious ass?

Yet on the other hand, I kind of get Kaplan’s point: Michelle body is unlike anything the White House has ever seen before.  I understand her joy about seeing a gorgeous woman who looks like her in the White House; I understand her pride for a successful African American women, who are so often denigrated as unwed teenage moms, video vixens, etc..  I’ve lived in (er, gentrified?)  Harlem for the past year and I once saw an older man wearing a tee shirt that said “Black Women Are Beautiful.”  That sticks in my mind because it wasn’t lecherous at all; rather, it was trying to say black women are of value.

To this end, Kaplan intellectualizes her argument, which is virgin/whore problem which traps African American women with booty into being a “dignified woman” or a “ho”:

Ever since slavery, it’s been both vilified and fetishized as the most singular of all black female features, more unsettling than dark skin and full lips, the thing that marked black women as uncouth and not quite ready for civilization (of course, it also made them mighty attractive to white men, which further stoked fears of miscegenation that lay at the heart of legal and social segregation). In modern times, the butt has demarcated class and stature among black society itself. Emphasizing it or not separates dignified black women from ho’s, party girls from professionals, hip-hop from serious. (Black women are not the only ones with protruding behinds, by the way, but they’re certainly considered its source. How many gluteally endowed nonblack women have been derided for having a black ass? Well, Hillary, for one.)

And I can’t disagree with this argument, either:

Ordinary black women have waited a long time for this. Oh, we’ve suffered. In a country simultaneously obsessed with consumer excess and weight control, we’ve been caught in the middle. Throw race into the mix, and we’ve been downright strangled. The expectations run something like this: It’s OK for black women to be heavier than most, but we still have to conform to a universal (that is, white) standard of thinness and shape. This means that, even if you’re 120 pounds, your butt better not account for more than 2 percent of that.

Nevertheless, I get the sense of anyone other than a black female who writes for Essence wrote this article,  people would freak out.  If it appeared in Maxim, we’d be disgusted.  That’s probably why it makes my white liberal stomach flipflop.  I just can’t help but wonder: does intellectualizing a woman’s body part — Chuck Klosterman’s essay about Pamela Anderson’s boobs comes to mind — make it any less offensive?

I don’t know.  But I’d be interested to read what you think in the comments section below.