Barack Obama, softboi

An excerpt from Obama’s new memoir, “A Promised Land”, details the former President’s questionable “strategy for picking up girls” during his college years.

Photo by Matt A.J. on Flickr

Barack Obama has a book out. While political analysts will no doubt find much of historical relevance to pore over in its 768 pages, the 45th U.S. president has inadvertently tapped into two modern social phenomena. Barack Obama is a softboi, and he knows it.

The zeitgeistic Instagram account @beam_me_up_softboi picked up on this in a post featuring an excerpt from the book. Obama, referring to his early twenties, writes:

“Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognise the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm; Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; Foucault and Woolf for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black. As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.”

People in the comments section of the post fled to claim themselves as the “ethereal bisexual” - “Tag yourself, I’m the long-legged socialist.”

“Sounds like predatory behaviour,” Twitter user Comrade Birb commented. “Lying about one’s real interest in a subject as a ruse to persuading women to sleep with him. Just be honest about your intent, accept the possibility of rejection, be ready to move on. Taking pleasure in ‘tricking’ women into sex is creepy shit.”

Quick primer if you are wondering why the 45th President of the United States is being referred to as a softboi. For the uninitiated, even if you have not heard of the term, you will know who a softboi is. You can extrapolate the guy from about five things - Rex Orange County, Wes Anderson, cigarettes, glamourising poor mental health and essay-long DMs full of yearning. Some think softbois are harmless and that it is good that guys are in touch with their feelings. Others think that softbois are narcissistic, patronising and manipulate girls by using their poor mental health as a leverage against rejection.

So the Obama dilemma is the quintessential softboi debate - is the behaviour wrong or not? Those who believe that it is wrong would say that it is because it’s creepy. This type of behaviour is a form of coercion, constructing an illusion of yourself while your real intent is just to sleep with someone. It is also crass to use the emancipatory ideas of Marx and Foucault as a flirting device - it just shows your privilege that you can use these ideas as a tool for getting laid.

Hold up, says the other side. This is a classic pick-up strategy of trying to impress people, of trying to create some common ground. Doing something you are not that interested in to impress a crush in adolescence is a tale as old as time. And besides, he became friends with them afterwards!

You do not need to hear or care which side of the fence I sit on in this debate. What is more intriguing is the moral judgement Obama passes on himself decades on.

“It’s embarrassing,” he says, right from the top. Before he has even explained what he did, he has preempted your reaction with his own moral verdict. The criticism you can make of him is rendered just that bit less potent now. He himself has recognised his error. He can be absolved.

Or can he? Obama’s preemptive self-justification is a perfect example of a second phenomenon currently penetrating young modern life. The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman calls it “the reflexivity trap.” The idea is that by professing awareness of your fault, you are absolved of the fault - as Waldman says, “lip service equals resistance.”

We have all heard it. The classic version of it is an “oh, what am I like?” My friend likes to laugh “I’m awful when I’m drunk!” When I told him about the reflexivity trap, he said, “good point, if you take the ‘aha’ out of it, it sounds awful,” then turned to me, stone-faced and sunken-eyed and said “I am a terrible person when I am drunk.” It was funny, but said with a less jovial tone, the joking self-criticism was oddly macabre. (Disclaimer: He is not a Terrible Person when he is drunk. He just will not respect that they are your cigarettes). 

The reflexivity trap can only become so widespread in a society where self-awareness is the highest virtue. Of course, self-awareness is beneficial on many counts, like acknowledging your own mental health. But it is also a product of a culture that prioritises “the self.” The $4.5 trillion-yielding self-care industry is a good example, with its associated celebration of the individual. Mental health is a personal issue - it is to do with you, your neurochemical imbalances and your life - and nothing to do with the socioeconomic and political world. The late theorist Mark Fisher called this “the privatisation of stress.” Our culture promotes self-awareness as a sufficient answer to all of life’s problems.

Self-awareness as sufficient has also penetrated the books world and politics. Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility: Why it’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism” was the highest-selling title in the U.S. following George Floyd’s murder. Only a society high on navel-gazing thinks that the best response to racism is buying a book by a white author, on being white, addressed to white people. The priority is looking at the self, not around you (thankfully, in the UK the black author Reni Eddo-Lodge’s “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race” outsold DiAngelo).

The novel of our generation, Sally Rooney’s “Normal People,” depicts affluent young people using Marxism as a social identity. Connell apologises for being late to coffee because of a protest about “the household tax or something.” “May the revolution be swift and brutal,” replies Marianne. The characters assert that “the whole idea of meritocracy or whatever, it’s evil” while on holiday in Italy. Connell recommends “The Communist Manifesto” to Marianne. The characters, obviously, take no interest in changing the world, only in expressing half-developed opinions on how to do so. But that is fine. The ethics of today are not in doing something right, but expressing awareness that you might, as a collective, be doing something wrong. 

Barack Obama, then, is found guilty of the reflexivity trap and of being a softboi. Back he goes to “Das Kapital” and Bon Iver. What are we to make of him? If we apply the ethics of self-awareness - nothing. He has passed with flying colours. Obama, of course, is an amusing, urbane and elegant writer. The passage on flirting is an amusing vignette into the young life of the former President. It just so happens that, despite being set in the 1980s, it could not be a better example of the social dilemmas undercutting modern life.

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