{"id":6922,"date":"2020-11-21T02:30:26","date_gmt":"2020-11-20T15:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/?post_type=articles&p=181101"},"modified":"2020-11-21T01:17:59","modified_gmt":"2020-11-21T01:17:59","slug":"barack-obama-books-women-university","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/barack-obama-books-women-university\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Barack Obama The Ultimate Softboi?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Barack
Credit: Getty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over the past few years, the term ‘soft boi’ has become a common way to describe a specific kind of man who uses music, culture and fashion to differentiate himself from the norm, usually doing so in a bid to pick up women.<\/p>\n

The Instagram @beam_me_up_softboi<\/a>, which boasts over 460k followers, has become like free therapy for the thousands of women worldwide who have been mansplained who Radiohead is via Tinder DMs or have been asked what they consider the best Tarantino film to be. But one person I didn’t expect to make a cameo on the account is former US President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

It turns out, before Obama met his wife of 18 years, Michelle, he was an OG soft boi, using literature to pick up girls at Harvard University, where he studied law. In an excerpt from his new book, A Promised Land<\/em>, the 59-year-old wrote of his \u201cstrategy for picking up girls<\/a>\u201d during his first two years of college through a performative interest in the writings of political philosophers like Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon.<\/p>\n

Obama wrote that reading the works of Marx and Herbert Marcuse gave him \u201csomething to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm.\u201d Meanwhile, Michel Foucault and Virginia Woolf helped him in his attempts to – brace yourself – pick up the \u201cethereal bisexual who wore mostly black.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Obama on his how his discovery of Marx and Foucault in college became inseparable from \u201ca strategy for picking up girls\u201d: pic.twitter.com\/SWBvlb4c7j<\/a><\/p>\n

— Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (@daniel_dsj2110) November 18, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n