There have been quite a few ongoing dialogues lately regarding feminist relationships, marriage, and name changing – and these are great (and important) conversations for us to be having.

I think that the ultimate thing to keep in mind as feminists is that feminism is about choice.  It’s about every person having the right, ability, and power to decide for themselves.  We often think of choice only in terms of reproductive health (or more specifically abortion), but choice is imperative to every aspect of feminism, including fashion, work, marriage, and yes, name changing.  But here’s the thing that’s been bothering me lately *steps up on soapbox*:

A lot of acquaintances of mine have been getting married lately.  Mostly I am aware of this via Facebook since I moved more than 1,000 miles away from my hometown.  Sometimes I get that lovey-dovey little relationship status update – Mindy Morris is married to Joe Joseph – but most of the time I find out because there is suddenly a name I don’t recognize in my feed.  Then I click on my mystery acquaintance only to discover that it was the girl that sat behind me in AP History or the woman who lived across the hall in the dorms.

Now, I recognize that if these were my close friends rather than just acquaintances I would (hopefully) be in the loop enough to know that a marriage was impending and my ladyfriend was potentially changing her name, so I suppose you could argue that it’s none of my business that people that I’m not close to are becoming unrecognizable to me by their titles. But this is only a problem when it comes to the women that I used to know.  The dudes that I knew in high school are also getting married, and I have no problem recognizing them.  They’re still Chad Chadwick and Mike Michelson or whatever.

So what’s been bugging me is that a woman who gets married and changes her name is in some ways erased from the record.  If my good friend Carly M. from college, who eschewed Facebook and never joined (to my knowledge) has married her long-term boyfriend Dan whose last name I can’t remember, I can’t look her up.  Nor could I look her up if I returned to our college town and hit the phone book.  Because Carly M. could well be Carly XYZ now, and that makes her much more difficult to find.  But if my friend Charles H. in the same town got married, he’s just as easy to find as ever.  And that freaks me out.

Just like the Miss/Mrs/Ms vs. Mr situation, women are managed by their marital status while men are men are misters, no name changes, no identification by title.  This is not equitable.  So while it remains a woman’s choice whether or not to change her name, there is something going on in the system that is not right.

What if things could be different?  I mean, why is it that a woman changes her name anyway?  To match her spouse, to be united in some way, to share a name with future offspring?  Sounds great, but why is it the woman who must change her name (lets just skip over the whole historical exchange of property thing and the fact that most men have to pay exorbitant fees to attempt to change their last names while it’s pretty much a freebie for women)?

Check this out: at that folks festival last week I met the most amazing couple.  They had just gotten married and were honeymooning at the festival.  I saw the license plate on their minivan and had to take a picture it was so awesome – “HERLAND.”  I asked why they had chosen that license plate (being an avid fan of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her Utopian story of Herland) and one of the women informed me that that was their last name, and that they had chosen it themselves.  They had combined their two last names to create a new one and both had their names changed.  Which is not only an awesome way to thumb your nose at a system that says married women must change their names in a state that will refuse to acknowledge this couples (same sex) marriage, but is really a much more beautiful tradition in my opinion.  This name belongs to both of them and will carry so much meaning when it is passed on.

I stumbled across this lovely website yesterday:

To be fair, there are also husband, pet, and (my favorite) kid varieties to choose from.  But this one really made my day:

Make your own damn sandwich, bucko, and while you’re at it why don’t you kick your shoes off and try conceiving a child.

The kid and pet photos are fairly hilarious in their exasperation.  The husband and wife ones are just stereotypical, aggressive, and depressing.

I love short hair.  I love it.  The longest my hair ever grew was halfway to my elbows in the 8th grade.  Then I chopped it all off Sarah McLachlan style and never looked back.  (Unnecessarily self-disclosure: I am currently rocking the faux-hawk/pompadour and loving it.)

But where are all the other short haired ladies?  I just finished watching Roswell (old school adolescent-based dramas available on Netflix instant make my life… lazier) and was seriously bummed when Maria’s funky short do turned into the perfect long golden curls of tv-land.  Ana on The O.C. had the cute little pixie thing goin’, but then she got the axe because Summer was just that much “cuter” or something.  And I can’t even think of any other examples from current tv shows in which a short haired lady isn’t somebody’s soccer mom.  Hell, even the soccer moms have long hair.

Emma Watson says no.  And I say rock on.

Yes, our dear Hermione Granger has gone pixie on us, and she looks gorgeous.  Here’s what she has to say:

“I’ve wanted to do this since I was about 16, so as soon as I had the chance I was like, ‘Right. This is it.’ Oh my God, it was the most liberating thing! The stylist just grabbed the back of my hair and took a whole ponytail of hair out. It felt amazing. I love it.”

My first super-short haircut was amazing.  But I didn’t feel like that at the time.  I wanted short hair, I got short hair, I proceeded to wear a bandanna Bret Michael’s style all summer long until I came to terms with the haircut that made thin, flat-chested me “look like a boy.”  Except I didn’t look like a boy, I still looked like me.  Who ever decided that short hair was “masculine” anyway?  It’s hair.  I still have moments when I worry that short hair makes me look “old” or “mannish” or whatever tropes the beauty industry tells me I need to cower in fear of.  But most of the time I feel cool, I’m happy that I spend less than 5 minutes on my hair out of the shower, and I look hot.

Angelina Jolie and her little rockstar Shiloh know where it’s at, too:

“I have a very strong-willed four-year-old girl who tells me what she wants to wear and I let her be who she is. I think people think kids should be a certain way, but I feel they should wear what they feel like wearing and they should express themselves. Shiloh cried one night and said, ‘Please cut my hair off. I don’t want to have long hair.’ I’m not going to leave it long just because somebody thinks I should.”

This is a cross post from a good friend of mine.  It originally appeared at team berlin.  If you are interested in guest or cross posting at feministhemes.com, send a line with your idea to ms.wizzle@feministhemes.com.

Inception was not that good of a movie.  It wasn’t that BAD of a movie either.  Leonardo DiCaprio did a mediocre job with a mediocre movie.  There were two female parts in the entire movie, one of which was an antagonist.  Maybe three if you count the not-so-pretty lady at the bar who steals the wallet, but then turns back into a man immediately afterward.

This was a heist movie.  Yes, the heists may have taken place inside of dreams, but let’s dissect the elements of the movie.  First, it starts out with a theft in process.  Then, the person who was being robbed offers the thief a job…something that’s seemingly impossible.  Then a chunk of the movie is used up setting up a team, including the ever popular outlier that doesn’t really belong.  I will summarize Dane Cook’s description of this.  “The guy that is a last minute replacement and somebody vouches for him.”  Of course, they need to find the guy who they need to pull out of retirement for “one last job.”  Now the movie is done assembling the team, and they begin doing their training, plotting, planning, and preparing.  Is it important?  Yeah.  Does the movie spend too much time on it?  Yes.  If it is necessary to set up some background information on characters, it may be useful to actually spend time on it.  While it is nice to allow the audience to have their own imagination on what has gone on in the past with these characters and their interactions with each other, it is unnecessary if we don’t pay attention to any of the characters or if their roles are overshadowed greatly.  In this case, there’s no point in telling any story on any of the other characters because DiCaprio’s character is the only one who has even the slightest growth during the entire movie, and the only one that has closure at the end.  The actual heist was good.  It had multiple levels with different times going.  It would’ve been interesting for them to show the watches working at different speeds (see: beginning of the movie) just for reference sake or for a cheap gimmick.  A quick note on when they did this at the beginning of the movie: they showed the watch and time difference before explaining it.  That’s fine and dandy.  Then they explained it and never showed it again.  Though they did make it rather obvious that time was moving at different speeds on different levels, so that’s fine.

Was there character development?  A bit, I suppose.  DiCaprio’s character is haunted by his dead wife…and in the end he gets over it.  Otherwise, the other characters are hardly in the movie with active parts to really even tell if they have character developments or not. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post in a series on feminism and relationships at small strokes.  If you’d like to submit a guest post for this series, see the guidelines here and submit your post to samsanator(at)gmail(dot)com.

Last week my partner and I went out to dinner to celebrate the six-year anniversary of our first date.  I wore grey jeans and a black, short-sleeved blouse with my short dark hair up in a pompadour.  He wore khaki shorts and a long sleeved pale-blue dress shirt.  And after we finished eating, our waiter asked us if we wanted two checks or one.  And I loved it.

Seated at the next table was a proudly married couple.  She was dressed in platform wedge sandals, a pastel skirt past the knee, and a pale pink shirt.  He was dressed in frat-boy plaid shorts and a navy blue polo.  They held hands over the table, shiny wedding rings sparkling, and asked for an alcohol-free wine list.  Ahh… I thought to myself, we are so different here.

You see, we are both midwestern transplants out here in Utah, and we don’t really blend in with the majority culture out here.  I mention this because I think it’s relevant to the way that I am comfortable “displaying” my relationship in public.  Which is to say, I’m not.

Along with “feminist,” one of the most important pieces of my identity is “ally.”  And this means that I try to examine my apparent heterosexual privilege as much as possible.  It wasn’t easy moving across the country with my partner and trying to find a place to live as an unmarried couple here, but it was a lot easier than it would have been if we weren’t One Man and One Woman.  I am privileged by the fact that the person that I fell in love with portrays the opposite gender to the word, and so we look like people expect us to look.  We could hold hands in public, we could snuggle at the movies, we could kiss outside the restaurant and most people wouldn’t comment. But I spend a lot of time wondering how different that would be if I happened to be partnered with a woman.  I don’t think that it’s okay that I would suddenly have to consider my own safety and the safety of my partner just to express affection outside our home (which here, I would).  So I don’t engage with that privilege in public. Maybe if I lived someplace where that didn’t feel like an in-your-face flaunt of hetero privilege things would be different.  Maybe not.

Add to those two pieces of my identity “independent.” I am one person.  I am one whole person.  My partner loves that whole person that I am.  He’s his own person, too.  We’re committed to each other (three years long distance followed by three years living together and we’re still doing fine, thank you), but we’re not married.  We don’t need to be in order for our relationship to be meaningful, in order for our promises of fidelity to be taken seriously, in order for our friends and family to recognize our commitment.  I don’t wear a wedding ring, engagement ring, or promise ring and neither does he.  For me, this is about the fact that my relationship status isn’t the business of, well, anybody.  It’s not something I need or want people to know just by looking at me.

So when the waiter asked if we wanted separate checks, I felt a little proud in addition to greatly amused.  We gave the impression of two independent people out to dinner to enjoy one another’s company and some good food.  We weren’t one couple, we were two people.

Oh, and if you’re curious, my partner paid for dinner since I bought the tickets to the play we went to later.

A couple of weeks ago I set out to find an air-conditioned escape from my 90 degree house (hooray for no a/c in the desert!), and lo-and-behold, I ended up at that frigid complex known as “the movie theater.” I faced the daunting decision of choosing a movie I knew little to nothing about in order to eat junk food and not turn into a puddle of sweat on my carpet.  It came down to “Despicable Me” versus “Inception,” and once I took a look at each of the trailers it was clear: Ellen Page for the win.

So there we were: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tommy from 3rd Rock, Juno, and me.  And it was cool, and it was action-y, and it was not overtly disturbing or offensive.  So I walked out cool, happy, and jonesing for an Ellen Page marathon.  This probably doesn’t bode well for the impression that Inception itself made on me, eh?

Read the rest of this entry »

“I feel like I have a responsibility to my community and other young girls to help redefine what it looks like to be a woman. I don’t believe in men’s wear or women’s wear, I just like what I like. And I think we should just be respected for being an individual…. I’ve been in Vogue, now, and different publications, which is cool, because I think that it just shows a different perspective of how women can dress.”

- Janelle Monae

If you haven’t checked Janelle Monae out yet, I recommend that you start here.  Quote from i09.

This is a cross post from a good friend of mine.  It originally appeared at team berlin.  If you are interested in guest or cross posting at feministhemes.com, send a line with your idea to ms.wizzle@feministhemes.com.

In response to Vatican says women priests a ‘crime against faith’ [telegraph]:

Yep.  It’s definitely one of those times when I remember why so many people hate the Catholic faith.  Mostly because they’re full of dicks, both literally with all their penii flying all over the place and metaphorically in the sense that they’re quite mean.

REALLY?!  Worse than pedophilia?  REALLY?!  Honestly?  Who came up with an idea like that?  Only the Catholics could come up with a concept that is so obviously opposed to the teachings of Christ, and yet have such “reverence” for the Virgin Mary.  Yes, they have their insane reverence for a character in the Bible that hardly does anything at all, except for what they view as her womanly duty of giving birth.  Yet, they never look at the fact that there were female judges that led the Jewish people through battles and back into moral integrity.

What terrible hypocrisy.  How can we possibly allow such hate and sinfulness from a church?  I don’t care what we want to say as far as equality goes.  I don’t care when we want to say as far as women being ordained as priests.  If the Cathies just said, “No.  Not our style,” that would be okay.  That’s their thing, they’re sexist, and they like it.  I’ve long since accepted that.  But I cannot stand by when somebody who identifies as Christian is saying that ordaining women as priests is WORSE than pedophilia!

It isn’t as if the Catholic church has belittled pedophilia enough already.  No, they seem to do plenty of that.  No really, Catholic church, take as long as you need to prosecute or punish the pedophilic priests.  We’re not in a rush to get any sort of justice or closure on these.  8 years?  No, go ahead and take longer.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Children should be allowed to express themselves in whatever way they wish without anybody judging them because it is an important part of their growth… Society always has something to learn when it comes to the way we judge each other, label each other. We have far to go…  I think she [her daughter Shiloh] is fascinating, the choices she is making. And I would never be the kind of parent to force somebody to be something they are not. I think that is just bad parenting.”

- Angelina Jolie

From ET via Jezebel.

Yesterday I stumbled upon this short over at Sociological Images:

Girls suck at video games / Les filles sont nulles aux jeux vidéo from Stéphanie Mercier on Vimeo.

What do you think?