Love at this convention

Let's keep it real. That pound was a little bit fruity.

I was watching cable news at my parents' house just now, and apparently all they have to talk about was Barack Obama giving his wife a pound after he clinched the nomination the other day. I was only there for about a half an hour, and there were two different segments on it.

They had these broads on there talking about how giving your wife a dap is the hip new version of giving your wife a peck on the cheek, and how this was such a sweet, intimate gesture between the two of them. As if to suggest that that's what hot in the streets - giving your wife a pound. No Boutros.

Meanwhile, I've never even heard of a man giving his wife a pound. Granted I don't have any wife of my own to give a pound one way or another, but I figure I've been around my share of married black people over the years. Pretty much everyone in my family is black other than my cousin Andrew's kids, and I've never seen a black man give his wife a pound.

Then there's the issue of the pound being some sort of intimate gesture between a man and a woman. I'm not sure if I like that, if only because now I'm gonna feel weird the next time I wanna give a guy a pound. Nullus. But also because I'm not really sure how a man stands to benefit, on a personal level, by giving a woman a pound.

(Note: Obviously, I'm gonna be trying to give dap to every woman I come across for the next month or so, just for my own personal amusement. And I bet, with this shit being all over the news the way it is, a lot of white broads are gonna be itching for a black dude to give them a pound, just to see what it's like. The key is, how do you go from giving a broad a pound to... you know, giving a broad a pound!)

I can see why these broads on TV would try to suggest that a dap is anything more than just a dap. A lot of them are probably hard up for some schlong, despite having that TV money. So any kind of attention from a man is gonna appeal to them. Plus, since a dap is an exchange usually shared between guys, it makes them feel as if they're guys. And you know all women want to be men these days.

But if you're actually a guy, I'm at a loss for why giving a woman a dap would be preferable to almost anything else you could do with a woman. As a general rule of thumb, I'd say the only way an exchange between a man and a woman can be worth your while, is if you can at least get a grief-on out of it; and the only way I can imagine getting a rise out of giving a broad a pound is if she had ridonkulously large cans, and I happened to be staring at them while giving her a pound.

Which is not to say that Obama shouldn't have done what he did. I'm just saying.

As stage managed as these elections are, you have to think this pound shit was discussed before Obama took to the stage in St. Paul the other day. With as much shit as he went through with Jeremiah Wright and that church he used to belong to, it's not like he was about to pull just any ol' shit with his wife, right there on stage in front of millions of people.

The grown and sexy among us will recall that being outwardly hetero with your wife on stage has been an issue in these elections going back at least as far as 2000, if not more so. Who can forget when Al Gore all but unzipped his wife's skirt and starting fucking her right there on the stage at the Democratic National Convention back in 2000?

Obviously, he did that shit on purpose, in order to prove to the world that he wasn't teh ghey. There had been some concerns about his manliness that year, what with him going around lying about how that movie Love Story was based on his relationship with Tipper (the fuck?), and him somehow managing to get sonned intellectually in a debate by a guy who can't even read.

He had to do something.

With Obama, I'm assuming it's the opposite. He was gonna have to do something, because his wife was up there on stage with him, and you can't just have your wife on stage without insinuating that the two of you have sex. The PDA has become part of this bullshit pageant we call an election cycle, right up there with having your picture taken next to some military equipment.

The concern, I imagine, is that they didn't want Obama to pull anything too frisky. This is the first presidential election where a black man could actually win, and there's still a lot of white people in this country who don't know a whole lot about black people. They figure that since we're black, we fuck constantly. (If only that were true!) The last thing Obama wanted to do was play right into that by slipping his wife some tongue on stage. He could've thrown the election right there, on some Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake shit.

As much as we've been hearing about the dap, you can imagine the level of outrage we'd be experiencing if Obama had flexed his inner Mr. Marcus. A few white people in the audience probably would have fainted. Old white women would be going on TV talking about how Obama just lost a vote - like the old bat in this Cipha Sounds video - though you know a lot of them would just be saying that to save face. They don't want anybody to think they're turned on by shit like that, but they are. I'm sure getting to be that old without having a man actually hit the bottom changes your whole perspective on shit.

Nullus, just in case.

On the other hand, there may have been some concern that Obama wouldn't come off as manly to be Commander in Chief, a la Al Gore in 2000, but I doubt Obama's handlers considered that as much of an issue. Like I said, I thought that pound Obama gave his wife looked a little bit limpwristed, but who gives a shit what I think? White people, who must have never seen a pound before to witness the media coverage of this shit, can't tell the difference. And I'm at a loss for what Obama would have to do at this point to get out of the black community's good graces. He could probably reenact the R. Kelly sex tape live on stage at the Apollo Theater, piss scene and all, and I'm sure the thought would be, "Well, maybe that's what he needed to do to win the election."