Last night my friend had a birthday party, and my boyfriend and I attended. He started talking to some of our friends about a letter that he wrote to the editor of the school paper after it had a headline stating that "Cocks bring Vols to their knees" was bad on two counts. 1) we won the game. 2) equating sexual acts with demonstration of power is really not classy and the editor should be mature enough to realize that. He was then asked "wait, your a feminist, aren't you." He stated, "Yes I am." None of that beating around the bush of claiming but also attempting to educate that feminists are about equality, not non-shaving, army boot wearing, men haters. Just "Yes I am."
My friend turns to me and says "Don't you ever date guys with balls?"
I tell her that I find the fact that he views me as a partner, and believes in sexual empowerment to be extremely sexy.
(He offers to show her his balls if she doesn't believe him.)
I think that what he said, while it should be 'expected', in this situation was openly shown hostility, and instead he didn't hide behind privilege. It was rather 'ballsy'.
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Arg! I hit something that submitted this too quickly, I *thought* I needed to fix that last paragraph. It should read:
I think that what he said, while it should be 'expected', in this situation *WHERE THERE* was openly shown hostility, instead of hiding behind privilege, was rather 'ballsy'.
Still not great structure, but it makes him *not* the hostile one.
Gexx
I love this story. Kudos to him for being awesome.
Very cool. Your boyfriend sounds awesome. My boyfriend is only out to me, his rhet teacher, and his rhet teacher's assistant. I don't know if he'll ever say anything about being a feminist in front of our friends.
Oh well, at least he still speaks to his friends from a feminist perspective, he even argued against men naturally being attracted to breasts to them, without me there.
Sound like a great guy! He's certainly 'ballsy' in my book!
Any man who admits to being a feminist is brave. I don't like the term "ballsy."
I think we often underestimate just how much social pressure men are under to maintain the image of masculinity. Just a small step outside the gender role and there are serious social consequences. To defend women outside of a paternalistic "I'll beat the shit out of any man who hurts a woman blah blah blah" is emasculating by most men's standards and that's incredibly sad. Your friend is an idiot, it takes a hell of a lot more courage to stand up against sexism and break gender roles than it does to simply maintain the status quo. I've been lucky enough to find a man that is an "out" feminist (or rather, we've been lucky to find each other) and I really can't imagine being in a relationship with someone who didn't share such a basic philosophy with me. Congrats to both of you.
I do understand why everyone likes this commercial, but the first time I saw it I immediately had the reaction of questioning if it's really a good thing to encourage little girls (and now there is one with a little boy) to take pictures and send them to people over the internet? I mean, I understand the bedroom furniture pictures are of a fish or something, but I still don't think it's necessarily a good thing to enable such young children to do things they might not be able to understand the consequences of.