Friday, January 31, 2014
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Women's News: Cameron Diaz Talks The Media's Contempt For Single Women, Totally Nails It
Single women everywhere, lend us your ears. We've found a new spokeswoman: Cameron Diaz
In the February issue of Self, the 41-year-old actress and newly-minted author calls out "chauvinism and misogyny" in the media, particularly the way that single women are often portrayed as victims of their inability to "hold on" to men. Diaz told Self's Erin Bried:
If a relationship fails, it’s because the woman couldn’t hold on to her man, not that the man cheated. It’s terrifying for a woman to get out of a relationship, because it’s always going to be her fault.I get that a lot, being a single woman. The reports are always saying that I’m "acting inappropriately" toward men. I don’t at all harp on that s—, but I clock it. I notice it. And then I let it go because there is nothing I can do about it.
Diaz points out a frustrating truth about mainstream media's depiction of single women: the assumption that no woman chooses to be on her own. Sadly, single women's stigmatized status is nothing new. As Diaz notes, the suggestion is often that single women have made their bed when they can't (or -- dare we say -- choose not to) "hold on" to men, which somehow gives dudes permission to let their eyes wander.
Honestly, we're sure Cameron Diaz has a gorgeous bed that she is happy to sleep in, single or otherwise.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Friday, January 24, 2014
Women's News: 6 reasons female nudity can be powerful
A reporter's question about Lena Dunham's nudity pointed to a bigger issue: Naked women can threaten the status quo
Lena Dunham on stage during the panel discussion for "Girls" at the HBO portion of the 2014 Winter Television Critics Association tour.(Credit: AP/Richard Shotwell)
Last week, in the midst of what appears to be infinite fascination about Lena Dunham’s nudity, I saw a fundraiser for the documentary “Free the Nipple“ and also, by coincidence, talked to Facebook spokespeople about that company’s ban on visible female nipples. Like the reporter who recently asked Dunham why her “Girls” character was “often naked at random times for no reason,” many people seem confounded by expressions of female nudity that are not sexual – because isn’t titillation the whole point of women’s nakedness? The real question about female nudity isn’t why anyone would want to show or see women’s breasts if they’re not titillating. The real question is about who has the right to say what they’re for, where and when they can be seen and by whom. That’s about power.
While it’s irksome that the reporter questioning Dunham had to ask at all, it’s an important question. It revealed how little he, and so many others, has thought about a topic that affects all the women he’s ever known.
Why is exposing the world to non-sexualized female nudity important?
1. Women too often are made to embody male power, honor and shame. It’s not good for us. Our bodies, and the bodies of people who are gender fluid and non-binary conforming, are sites of moral judgment in ways most men’s are not, especially in public and in protest. Some of us experience our bodies, in particular our nudity, as objects of repression, oppression and powerlessness. Representing them as no one’s but our own, counter to prevailing representations, is important.
2. Female public nudity is usually treated as a moral offense, a cause for concern and discussion, but it’s rarely allowed to be a source of non-sexual female power. Male nudity is an entirely different thing. When your average (straight) man is seen nude or semi-nude, it’s often considered humorous, as in frat boys streaking. Or it’s a sign of virility and athleticism. When it’s not, for example, the jarring images of the torture of Iraqi men in Abu Ghraib, men – vulnerable, humiliated and in pain – are feminized by their nakedness.
3. Female nudity is not just about sexualization, it’s about maintaining social hierarchies, like those of race and class. Non-idealized female bodies used autonomously undermine a continuous narrative about body-based sex and race differences. When our cultural production is singularly focused on hyper-gendered, racialized and sexualized representations of nudity, it is easier to maintain racist and sexist ideas – and nude female bodies outside socially approved, sexualized contexts challenge those.
The cultural regulation of female nudity and portrayals of sexuality is also a powerful way in which women’s bodies are used to pit us against one another and to reinforce hierarchies among men. Dark bodies, especially women’s, have always been available for public consumption: sale, rape, breeding, medical experimentation and more and the staying power of racist and sexist mythologies about white women and black men, rape and sex, are evident every day. When women take ownership of the circumstances of their own nudity, they can defy others’ attempts to place them within these hierarchies. Dunham’s casual yet implicitly confrontational nudity in some ways refuses to cater to the myth of the vulnerable, pure, white woman that serves as a racist backdrop to portrayals of black women as inferior. But very few black women have the ability to challenge dominant representations of their bodies and roles in the way that Dunham does, however, and that, too, is a function of our hierarchies.
4. Female public nakedness as protest or social commentary is not new and is critical, expressive and censored speech. Lady Godiva is far from the only woman to use her nudity to achieve political ends. Barbara Sutton’s excellent recounting of her experiences with naked protests in Brazil is chock-full of historical and analytical insights. Women have regularly used their nakedness to protest corruption and exploitation that go along with colonialism. It’s among the most important reasons why Femen’s (topless) neocolonial narrative is offensive. Prior to Tunisia’s Amina Sboui’s topless protest (after which she was arrested, subjected to a virginity test and fled), Egyptian activist Aalia Magda (also in exile) posted pictures of herself naked to protest Shariah law and censorship. Last January, hundreds of women in the Niger Delta marched half-naked in protests against Shell Oil Company practices in their community. This was a repeat of earlier and similar protests. These were peaceful, unlike last month’s in Argentina when an estimated 7,000 women stormed a cathedral defended by 1,500 rosary-bearing Catholic men. They fought, spat, yelled, spray-painted people and were accused, without a shred of irony, of gender-based violence against Catholic men. Many of these women were topless.
Nudity is also an enduring and essential part of the social critique of women artists. The works of Lorna Simpson, Judy Chicago, Ana Medieta, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Hanna Wilke and so many others speak to identity, race, sex and class, using women’s naked bodies to do it. When newspapers, movie theaters, cable and TV news, online media and social media refuse to show female nudity as part of female-directed political protest or artistic statement they deny them equal freedom of expression. When they do this while proliferating grossly objectifying alternatives, they silence them doubly.
5. It’s not just that women have the right not to be sex objects, but also that we have the right to dismantle a discriminatory canon. In her 1977 essay “What’s Wrong With Images of Women?” art historian Griselda Pollock described a global, commercial, patriarchal visual culture that uses women’s bodies symbolically and makes it impossible for us to use our own bodies effectively in challenging that culture. It’s a symptom of women’s position in the world that the efficacy of using our nudity to protest is tenuous. Again, take Femen. Set aside their execution and bizarre provenance and focus on two things: a) their use of naked female bodies to express aggression and rage, and b) the fact that they appear to meet the requirements of Western, increasingly global, ideals of beauty. They are thin, young, tall, topless and almost all white. In Louise Pennington’s words, they pass the patriarchal fuckability test. And so media eat them up. The same media that every day make choices about what not to show: models protesting racism in their industry; angry, anti-Catholic feminist crowds; peaceful, determined, old Nigerian women. That’s not Femen’s fault. They certainly aren’t the ones making media decisions about what makes the news. Did they use this bias? Should women? Femen is exactly why many feminists doubt that female nudity can ever be an effective tool of activism. However, each controversy that erupts allows us to think about how our own bodies and their “place” are used to undermine our intent and desires.
6. Self-defined public female nudity is a challenge to capitalism and its uses of women as products, props, assets and distributable resources. Nothing on Earth is used to drive sales and profits and display male wealth and status like women’s, often naked and semi-naked, bodies. If you are thinking women make choices and are complicit, show contempt for other women because they are women — well, of course some of them do. That is a defining feature of misogyny. Until we have equal access to resources, and are not subject to constant predation, this is a no-brainer. In the meantime, when women refuse to sexualize themselves and use their bodies to challenge powerful interests that profit from that sexualization, the words we should use aren’t “lewd” and “obscene”; they’re “threatening” and “destabilizing.”
Women who use public nudity for social commentary, art and protest are myth-busting along many dimensions: active, not passive; strong not vulnerable; together, not isolated; public, not private; and, usually, angry, not alluring. The morality offense is misogyny, not nudity.
In the U.S., there is nothing unique about reporter Tim Molloy’s question about Lena Dunham’s nudity. Social media company policies, like many city statutes and public ordinances, mirror mainstream norms that clearly privilege heterosexuality, conflate women’s bodies with indecency and sex (a bad thing), and insist that those bodies (and sex) be held in reserve, distributed and consumed according to patriarchal rules. These rules, and the puritanical obsessions that drive them, are why we have billion-dollar “good girls gone wild” industries and an Internet fueled by gonzo porn, both carefully packaged pseudo-transgressions have little to do with women’s autonomy and do nothing to undermine a well-entrenched, misogynistic status quo.
We all know that the prohibitions on women’s nipples have nothing to do with women’s nipples, but everything to do with control. The threat that female toplessness and self-articulated nudity poses is culturally defined and can be culturally redefined. So, as a society, we might want to rethink that Photoshop blurring tool.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Women's News: Dove 'Real Beauty' Campaign Turns 10: How A Brand Tried To Change The Conversation About Female Beauty
One of the biggest conceptual ad campaigns of the decade grew out of a photography exhibit in a retail building in Toronto.
"Beyond Compare: Women Photographers On Real Beauty," a show organized by Dove and Ogilvy & Mather, featured work from 67 female photographers including Annie Leibovitz, Tierney Gearon and Peggy Sirota. And it marked the beginning of Dove's quest to understand how women thought about beauty -- a conversation that would eventually become the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty.
Ten years after the exhibition opened, the Campaign For Real Beauty is one of modern marketing's most talked-about success stories. The campaign has expanded from billboards to television ads and online videos: The 2006 video, "Evolution," went viral before "viral" was even a thing. (After all, YouTube had only launched the year before.) And Dove's 2013 spot "Real Beauty Sketches," which shows women describing their appearances to a forensic sketch artist, became the most-watched video ad of all time.
How did a brand associated with a plain white bar of soap get men and women worldwide to think about the narrow definitions of female beauty? And does the fact that this message comes from a brand owned by Unilever -- the company behind the very sexily marketed Axe -- make it less authentic or important?
THE START OF SOMETHING
In the early 2000s, Dove executives began looking for a way to revive a brand that was being overshadowed by other companies. Their PR agency, Edelman, conducted a study of more than 3,000 women in 10 countries in order to learn about women's priorities and interests. When it reported that only 2 percent of the women interviewed considered themselves beautiful, the executives at Dove saw an opportunity. As they moved beyond the bar of soap and introduced other products such as shampoo and body wash, could they also start a conversation about beauty? Would a campaign that tapped into what women were thinking and feeling help Dove become more relevant -- and more profitable?
Dove's first steps in the Campaign For Real Beauty included "Tick Box" billboards, which debuted in Canada and spread across the United States and United Kingdom. The outdoor billboards featured images of women with two tick-box options next to them such as "fat or fit?" and "grey or gorgeous?"
Passersby could text their vote to a listed number, and the percentages appeared next to the image on the billboard. The campaign led 1.5 million visitors to the Campaign for Real Beauty website, alerting Dove that it was on the right track -- this was a topic women wanted to talk about.
AUTHENTICITY QUESTIONED
Dove's critics were quick to point out that the brand's owner, Unilever, was the parent company of Slimfast, Axe and Fair & Lovely skin-whitening cream. How could a message about "real beauty" coming from a corporation that sells diet products and advertises men's body spray with sexist tropes about women possibly be authentic?
According to Jean Kilbourne, creator of the "Killing Us Softly"documentary series which explores how women are portrayed in advertising, these objections are important -- but the anger toward Dove is misdirected.
"I think that's a good reason to go after Unilever, or to go after Axe," she told The Huffington Post. "But I actually don't think the people at Dove have much control over that."
A second criticism sometimes leveled at Dove is that its cosmetic products feed into women's insecurities.
"For the most part, I think that Dove's products are innocuous," Kilbourne told HuffPost. "It's soap and body wash. I do have an issue with products like cellulite-firming cream [which Dove sells] -- it's just one more way to create anxiety for women. But it's not like they're selling feminine hygiene sprays."
Jennifer Pozner, executive director of Women In Media & News and author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, believes that Dove's message is at odds with its products, and that the company is capitalizing on women's poor body images.
"[These products] could not possibly exist if women actually as a demographic believed the principles at the campaign's core," Pozner told HuffPost. "Cellulite cream would not exist if women believed they were beautiful and enough as it is."
Pozner also expressed surprise that Dove has not affected change within its parent company:
If the stated goal of the Dove Real Beauty Campaign is for girls and women to understand that their power and their beauty does not come from a tube or an airbrush or a cream, but rather from their own personalities and power, then the company would not sell certain products that they sell, and their parent company would not run some of the most misogynistic ad campaigns in the past ten years.
While Dove does not release sales figures, executives at Unilever suggest that the campaign has boosted sales.
"We believe that conversation leads to brand love, and brand love leads to brand loyalty," Jennifer Bremner, brand director of skin cleansing at Unilever, said in an interview with HuffPost. "That's obviously a positive for us not just in the power of the brand, but also ultimately in sales."
BRINGING "REAL WOMEN" INTO THE PICTURE
A few months after "Tick Box," Dove launched a billboard campaign that featured groups of "real," diverse women in their underwear. One of the women featured on the original billboards was Gina Crisanti, who was approached by a talent scout while taking out the trash at her job at a café. According to Crisanti, she wanted to join the campaign to help other women feel empowered and confident in their bodies.
"I grew up not being happy with my body shape and size at all," Crisanti told NBC News in 2005. "I hated being curvy. I hated having big breasts. And I hated having curly hair. In my 20s, I realized all those [ideas] were simply self-destructive. Once I started to develop an alternative definition of beauty, all of it started to fall into place."
According to Kilbourne, who has studied advertising since the '70s, Dove was -- and still is -- one of the only mainstream advertisers talking about how we define female beauty.
"There are so few commercials that in any way are different, that challenge the stereotypical images," she told HuffPost.
Some other brands have followed suit, capitalizing on the association of their products with a message of female empowerment. Commercials like Pantene's "Labels Against Women" draw on themes similar to the Campaign for Real Beauty's, like the snap judgments people make based on a woman's looks -- and why that shouldn't matter.
MOVING BEYOND "REBRANDING"
Knowing that the campaign would be criticized as a shallow marketing ploy, the team behind the Campaign for Real Beauty concluded that simply talking about these issues wasn't enough.
"[We were thinking], we have to walk the talk," Sharon MacLeod, vice president of Unilever North America Personal Care, told HuffPost. "We can't just be getting people stirred up; awareness and conversation isn't enough. We actually have to do something to change what's happening."
And so Dove created a fund in 2004 to partner with organizations like theGirl Scouts, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Girls Inc. to organize activities including discussions about online bullying and photography projects capturing the beauty girls see in the world around them.
"A product-based affair was never going to [affect change]," Janet Kestin, former creative director of Ogilvy & Mather Toronto who worked on "Evolution," told HuffPost. "The goal is to alleviate pressure on the next generation."
The team at Dove Canada created a series of short films to raise awareness about the fund and the larger campaign. Former creative leader at Ogilvy & Mather Nancy Volk and Kestin worked with producers Tim Piper and Yael Staav to create "Daughters," a series of interviews with mothers and their daughters; "Onslaught," a look at how the beauty industry targets young girls; and "Evolution," showing how makeup and digital alterations can make an average woman look like a supermodel, which quickly blew up on YouTube. (The video currently has 16.9 million views.)
Dove still feels like it has a role to play in ongoing discussions about beauty and body image. "We're going to try to change a generation," MacLeod told HuffPost. "You have to wait until they grow up to see what happens."
Dove plans to continue making videos like 2013's "Real Beauty Sketches."Currently, Dove Canada is working on a social media campaign,#DovePositiveChange, which posts encouraging responses to women tweeting self-deprecating remarks about themselves. And Dove's latest short film, "Selfie," was released on Jan. 20.
THE DOWNSIDE TO "REAL BEAUTY"
But is Dove's idea of change what we should be focusing on?
Not everyone agrees with the importance the campaign places on physical beauty. In an April 2013 piece for The Cut, Ann Friedmanwrote:
These ads still uphold the notion that, when it comes to evaluating ourselves and other women, beauty is paramount. The goal shouldn’t be to get women to focus on how we are all gorgeous in our own way. It should be to get women to do for ourselves what we wish the broader culture would do: judge each other based on intelligence and wit and ethical sensibility, not just our faces and bodies.
Pozner acknowledges that the beauty message is problematic, but deems it necessary. "Until we get to a point in the culture where the dominant messages about girls and women are not focused on their physical bodies, then we do need to actually reaffirm a broader and more innate, internal definition of what beauty is," she told HuffPost.
Both critics and champions of the campaign have also pointed out that just because women are redefining beauty, doesn't mean they are actually feeling differently about themselves. Some see this as a call to change the conversation entirely, as Friedman suggests, others as evidence that Dove's message about beauty is important and necessary. An estimated 80 percent of American women feel dissatisfied with their bodies, and 81 percent of 10-year-old girls are afraid of becoming "fat." Can a series of ad campaigns really change institutionalized body hatred?
The Dove team feels strongly that the campaign will be around for a long time to come.
"The conversation is as relevant and fresh today as it was 10 years ago," MacLeod said. "I believe we'll be doing [this campaign] 10 years from now."
Monday, January 20, 2014
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Women's News: 25 Things I Wish I Knew and Did Before 25
Sahaj Kohli
Writer, Founder of A Quarter Life Crisis Blog
There are so many "listicles" out there about what people have learned or know by a certain age. But after my birthday last week, I couldn't help but contribute to the conversation. There are (at least) 25 things I wish I took advantage of, learned, habituated to or did before turning 25... and 25 things I am going to try to accomplish after turning 25.
To Know, Understand and Live By:
1. It's OK to think you're awesome. When I hear good things being said about me or think something positive about myself, I automatically tell myself to stop being arrogant or stop being so full of myself. Wrong. It's perfectly healthy to be proud of yourself, and even think you're freakin' awesome... as long as you are honest.
2. Choose yourself. Being selfish is healthy. Say no. Stop apologizing all the time. Do what you want. Choose what's best for you. Stop caring what other people think about your decisions/your life.
3. Twenty seconds of courage is all you need when you're feeling fearful or anxious.
4. Ask for help. We weren't created to be able to do or handle everything by ourselves. Yes, we are stronger than we know and more capable than we give ourselves credit for, but there is no shame in asking a friend/loved one for help, seeing a counselor or admitting that you can't be alone through a situation/life event.
5. Stop being so jaded. It's refreshing to see my 3-year-old nephew's take on the world, the way he sees things for the first time, his trust, his love, his curiosity. It's time to stop being so jaded and disheartened by the world, people -- or your life.
6. Forgiveness and acceptance are freeing and necessary to maintain peace of mind. To forgive someone is to free yourself of the burden, pain or consequence their actions/choices caused for you. To accept someone is to understand and accept them for who they are and why they did what they did. I recently accepted someone for who they are and forgave their poor choices, and I have never felt more free of the pain I was feeling. By forgiving and accepting, I was able to remove myself from the situation and accept their perspective, choices and shortcomings as their own and unrelated to me. This helped me decide if I wanted them to still be a part of my life and if we could salvage a healthy relationship.
7. It's OK to change your mind on anything, big or small, at any time.
8. Make the time to foster your creativity, always.
9. Don't be afraid of change. Don't be afraid of what you can't control, and always be mindful of what you can -- your perspective, your reaction/response and your energy.
10. It's OK to not be friends with people anymore. People change, and as much as you want to maintain a friendship you've had for years, friendship is a two-way street. If someone isn't treating you the way you deserve/want, don't be afraid to let go. Having a lot of time invested into someone is an awful reason for keeping a toxic relationship.
11. Choose Love.
To Do:
12. Cook. As a 25-year-old adult, I should know how to combine ingredients to make a healthy and delicious meal... other than pasta.
13. Learn a second language fluently. I grew up with Punjabi and Japanese and I took five years of French, yet I still can't fluently speak a second language. I regret not taking advantage of my exposure at a younger age, but am making a vow to try even harder now.
14. Back up my phone and computer regularly. Why don't I learn my lesson every time my phone is lost or my computer crashes?
15. Treat the weekends as more than just a time to go out. There's something sacred in having 48+ hours of consecutive free time to do things you can't usually do on the weekday... things that go beyond just going out. Examples include hanging with loved ones in a non-party setting, reading, sleeping, writing, creative endeavors, catching up with long-distance family and friends, cleaning, learning a new skill and spending quality time alone.
16. Relearn history/Watch the news. I wish I paid more attention in my least favorite classes -- history. It seems that I have so much catching up to do because I can't for the life of me recall basic history facts regarding America, my religion or any other important past happenings. It's quite embarrassing, but it's true nonetheless. With this said, I'd also like to make it more of a habit to keep up with world news. Not that I'm totally ignorant, but I am definitely not as knowledgeable as I'd like to be.
17. Live abroad for at least six months. I didn't do that study abroad I wish I had, but it's not too late to pick a country and do something worthwhile with my time while living there. With this point, I'd like to add that I'd like to also travel completely solo.
18. Learn self defense. I believe that everyone should be trained in self defense, but after having my own personal, frightening experiences as a woman, I plan to take Krav Maga lessons this year.
19. Stop biting my nails. It's just a gross habit.
20. Have a savings account. Any self-sufficient adult should make an effort to drop some earnings into a separate account for emergencies and their future.
21. Appreciate and spend quality time with my parents more. I am the youngest, so even though I have gotten more one-on-one time with my parents, I feel like I'm still making up for lost time, which is hard since I'm trying to establish my own life, in another state, but still maintain a closeness with them. I want to make more effort to spend quality time with my parents, individually and together, while also learning about their past and asking them life questions I want answers to. (This point can be replicated for grandparents as well.)
22. Make my bed every day and eat breakfast. It just feels more adult-like to make my bed in the morning and eat a healthy first meal.
23. Take care of my body. My metabolism is absolutely not what it used to be and I am feeling the repercussions of drinking too much, eating unhealthy foods and/or not getting any exercise more than I used to. Along these lines, I'd like to add being more in tune with what my body is trying to tell me and going to the doctor if I feel like something is off.
24. Have better posture.
25. Stop being addicted to technology. I want to stop checking my phone, emails and Facebook first thing in the morning/last thing at night, as well as throughout the day as much as I do.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to promote wishful thinking -- "I wanted to have this or that, or be X kind of person by 25″ -- because it's too depressing and eliminates the excitement of all the things you couldn't predict that have happened. I just am more aware of all the things I haven't taken advantage of yet and plan to incorporate into my life now that I'm 25.
This post originally appeared on A Quarter Life Crisis Blog
Follow Sahaj Kohli on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sahajkohli
Friday, January 17, 2014
Inspirational Women's News: Michelle Obama's 19 Best Hugs Make Us Feel All Warm And Cuddly On Her 50th Birthday
The Huffington Post | By Alanna Vagianos
Michelle Obama is a notorious hugger.
Standing at almost 6-feet tall, the First Lady definitely knows how to give a heartfelt embrace -- and make everyone fall a little bit in love with her. Once the source of a minor international scandal, M'Obama has been hugging her way into the hearts of millions for the past decade -- including ours.
To celebrate Michelle Obama's 50th birthday, we've rounded up some of our favorite FLOTUS hugs from throughout the past few years. Here are her 19 best:
1 Getty Images
FLOTUS got to hug Beyonce at Barack's 2013 inauguration. Enough said.2 AFP/Getty Images
Of course, we can't forget the "hug shared around the world" after President Obama won the 2012 presidential election.3 AFP/Getty Images
Here Michelle bends down to embrace not one but three children during a visit to Mexico City in 2010. No small feat for a woman nearly 6-feet tall.4 Getty Images
She hugged every single U.S. Olympic basketball player after they beat France in the 2012 Olympics. Now there's a good incentive to win.5 Getty Images
As she pays her respects at a cemetery this past Memorial Day, Michelle shows she always knows what to do when words just aren't enough.6 Getty Images
This little girl might be the luckiest kid in the world after receiving a bear hug from Michelle in 2009 at a White House event honoring African American History Month. If there was a hug-off competition, FLOTUS would totally be a world champion.7 MCT via Getty Images
During a pre-game event at the 2012 CIAA Basketball Tournament in North Carolina, the tables turn and Michelle is engulfed by a group of Lady Golden Bulls basketball players.8 AFP/Getty Images
She even traveled all the way to Johannesburg, South Africa in 2011 to hug a few lucky children.9 Getty Images
She always gives those eyes-closed, everything-else-melts-away hugs. We are very jealous of dance legend Judith Jamison as she steals one of those world-stopping hugs from the first lady.10 The Washington Post/Getty Images
What's the best way to celebrate the holidays? Hugs on hugs on hugs from FLOTUS.11 AFP/Getty Images
She doesn't discriminate against furriness.12 Getty Images
She always seems to fit multiple children in her incredibly hug-ready arms. Here Michelle embraces two students after planting the White House Kitchen Garden in April of 2013.13 Getty Images
Hawa Abdallah Mohammed has the right idea here as she snuggles into Michelle's welcoming arms and seems to never want to leave, as Hillary Clinton looks on with glee. We're with you Ms. Mohammed.14 Bloomberg via Getty Images
The hug fest continues in North Carolina at the 2012 Democratic National Convention where Michelle pulls military mother Elaine Brye in for a long embrace.15 Roll Call/Getty Images
Michelle Obama must have the Mary Poppins bag of arms -- an endless wingspan that manages to hug everyone at once.16 Getty Images
Michelle and her daughter, Sasha, take a day off to sight-see while in Germany this past June. Nothing like a hug from mom-in-chief before a girl's day out.17 Alex Wong via Getty Images
Take a cue from the famously fit First Lady: Kid hugs are a great way to work squats into your exercise routine.18 Associated Press
Anyone else super jealous that they didn't get a hug from the first lady on their college graduation day? We are.19 Getty Images for USTA
Michelle and professional tennis player Serena Williams share a hug during the 2011 U.S. Open. Here are two ladies we would love to hang out with.
Happy birthday, M'Obama! If you ever need a hug, you know where to find us.
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