I obviously need to pay more attention to pop culture.

Or, you know, not.

So tell me. Are you surprised? Because a shocking number of people are.

Those people missed the point of feminism. And they're doing exactly what they shouldn't be doing: gendering activities. Those aren't the activities of a woman; they're the activities of someone who likes to see things come alive under his or her hands, who likes to put raw materials together and create something new, who likes to have an impact on her environment. That person could be male, female, transgendered, or neuter.

The reason those particular types of activities were under attack by righteous feminists was not because they were fundamentally demeaning or pointless activities. Far from it; there's a lot of honor in being a creator, a craftsperson. The problem comes in when they were the only activities available to women. And yes, it is pretty demeaning to be scrubbing floors and cooking meals for your husband while he trots around under the impression that what you do is easy, and nothing compared to the work he does. Especially when the whole world seems to feel that way. But women have more choices than that, now. Sure, not everyone gets that. A lot of women still think they're destined for a life of childbearing and housekeeping. But if an educated, informed woman makes a choice to follow a certain lifestyle, who are we to judge?

By saying that anything is women's work is to perpetuate the very gender roles that feminism is attempting to combat. To dismiss any activity as demeaning when it is an informed and conscious choice of the participant is narrow-minded and simply incorrect.

I choose to decorate my home. I choose to bake. I choose to cook meals for my boyfriend (although to be perfectly honest, we usually cook together). If I chose to stay at home and have babies, or I chose to be tied up and whipped every night, or I chose to forfeit a family in favor of a high-paying career, and I have a fairly good idea of the consequences of my choices, and I made those choices myself with no coercion, then no one has any right to judge them.

I am a feminist, and so is my boyfriend. I do not hate men. I do not think that men are worthless or that women are better.

Feminism is not about hating men; it is about recognizing invisible societal systems of privilege and breaking them down. Yes, white men are privileged in our society. No, that does not make them the enemy. The ones who are truly the enemy are those who consciously support that kind of social hierarchy. Yes, many men perpetuate gender hierarchy without realizing it, and it's fairly easy to write those men off as assholes. But the important thing to remember is that many of them simply don't realize that their behavior is unacceptable. They've been taught their whole lives that men and women have a certain kind of relationship, and worse than that, they've been taught that people that oppose that system are "man-hating lesbians," or possibly "pussy-whipped girly men." Ideally, we need to revamp the whole system so men like those are raised in an environment that encourages them to see women as equals, but until we have a world like that, we need to accept that that notion is simply foreign to some people. Yes, those men need to be educated about the truth surrounding systems of privilege; yes, until they're helping us, those individuals are actually hurting us. But that doesn't mean that the entire male gender must automatically be castigated for those men who don't understand the need to rebel, and it doesn't mean that a man can't, halfway through life, gain an understanding of the worth of feminism and become a warrior for feminism instead of against it.

Most intelligent third-wave feminists can grasp that distinction. We don't see men as the enemy, but rather as a much-needed ally in the fight for equality; a group that can conceivably come to understand the need for what we're doing and help us in our work. Yeah, some of us fall into the trap of clumping all men together as pervy jackasses who aren't good for anything but staring at our boobs, but that's just because so many men act that way, thinking that it's totally appropriate. I'm not saying it's okay for us to make such generalizations, but it must be understood why we do it. Not all of us are lucky enough to be acquainted with a number of intelligent, feminist men who understand that women aren't just boobs, a vagina, and a tendency toward hysteria.

Just as feminists shouldn't be writing off men as worthless, nor should anyone else be writing off feminists as man-h