I salute you (can we salute?) for an hour of fun and laughter. Hopefully it will take me days to read through all the responses. Good thing I was reading without drinking or liquid would be up my nose as well.

These are great times and you all are great company.

Namaste (yoga speak for “The light in me bows to the light in you.” or “You all totally rock!!!”)

I certainly believe in equal marriage rights for everyone, and would have been perfectly willing to abstain from marriage myself until it was available to all, but the person I wanted to share my life with (and the father of my daughter) happened to come from another country. Knowing that we would have had no option as a same-sex couple made me all the more adamant that everyone should have the right to marry… however, I do not agree that I am *oppressing*I queer women by keeping my family together the only way I legally can… and, quite frankly, I am not willing to spend the rest of my life in a long-distance relationship to avoid offending you (would you do the same for me? I didn’t think so.)

Does that make more sense? Sorry if my choice of words made you uncomfortable.

As much as I feel like I’ve been open to being in a relationship, I haven’t tried online dating. I’ve been a bleacher fan for a long time, since I feel like, to whatever limited extent we can influence over whether or not we find someone, meeting people and putting yourself out there (while being confident that you are happy with yourself so that you don’t come off as overly desperate) is the best way of increasing your changes.

Also, that point about how your friend telling her friends about her feelings changed the way she thought about them in her own mind was interesting. That’s a great point. I haven’t really told my friends my feelings about it, and it’s a little complicated, but it sounds like something I might want ot work up to trying.

Oh, and on the whole “can men be feminists” issue, I have to say that I think that they can be. Of course men are going to have a harder time relating to some of the experiences of women, but if they’re guided by a strong sense of the equality of opportunity and choices for women, I think they can come to appreciate it as much as anyone else.

Also, think about it–limiting feminism to people who understand the female perspective is problematic, because even the experiences of women are so different (even within the context of the way women view society). Joining together to agitate for justice in any social movement requires that people be able to try to abstract from other people’s experiences, and try to understand how those experiences have affected the people who had them. Anyway, sorry about the rambling.

But also, one more thing–what about the intersexed? If being a feminist is dependent on one’s being a woman, how does that jibe with the fact that gender is a spectrum? I wouldn’t be comfortable drawing lines in the sand saying “These people have a gender identity (either in their own eyes or society’s) that’s consistent with the being a woman, so they’re ok”.

Anyway, I realize that it’s a complicated issue, but those concerns I have make me uneasy to exclude those who aren’t women from identifying as feminists.

I think if men can’t be feminists, then no one can. I’ve always thought that the whole point of feminism is that people should not be limited, or judged, or forced to embrace or eschew any sort of behavior based on their gender.

I’ve been a feminist for 35 years; been married for 16; been boycrazy not ever.

Ditto.

Yeah I got no problem with this.

This particular comment was so fucking weird that I thought maybe there was an explanation (“sorry, I was super-drunk and I thought I was being funny when I now see I was being a complete asshole,” or whatever). But the comment history makes me disinclined to care.