I ran into an interesting phenomenon with my group of friends. These people are primarily male, the ratio is three men to every two women. While I do not tend to be an entertainer like my husband, I am not a wallflower either. I’ve known these people for almost four years now, so I figured that they knew where I stood on things, generally.

As I have had so many ‘great ideas’ that withered and died immediately after conception, I’ve been thrilled with the response to this site and community. Naturally, I started talking to the group about it. Most of them said some version of “huh...that’s cool” and then the conversation moved on.

That was the initial evening of sharing the Feminist Housewives. The ones following, there was a dramatic increase in anti-feminist jokes - much like the Slashdot effect. When I didn’t bite, they just escalated from anti-feminist to anti-women. I learned long ago that the best way to discourage a bully is to ignore him, so that’s what I did. I basically just sat there in awe. These men that I had considered progressive, especially about gender issues, suddenly seemed uncomfortable, even threatened by me.

The only thing that had changed was that I had now officially labeled myself a feminist. For those few days, nothing else seemed to matter. I didn’t spontaneously start “ball breaking” or “man hating” but I might as well have, because that’s what feminism meant to them. Even though they had known me for years. That’s what I suddenly was.

As an example, I’ll share a little dialogue with you. We were discussing online handles and the uniqueness, or lack thereof, of everyone’s chosen monikers. A few of them said that theirs had never been used by someone else and I chimed in that mine seemed fairly rare as well, at various mom communities, geek communities, and feminist communities. Most of them nodded approvingly until one said “What, feminazi wasn’t taken?” They all cracked up. When I started to say, “Well, my handle is...” I was hit by comebacks like “Can’t you take a joke?”

Things have since calmed down on the labeling front, but I think the intital reaction is very telling of the weighted nature of the term feminism. We’ve actually had some great discussion about what feminism means to me and what feminism means to them.

Come tell us what feminism means to you!