Feminism and Irreverence

I have posed this question before, but SERIOUSLY

Why is FEMINISM such a dirty word to some women?

Ugh. I am so tired of hearing women get all angsty and defensive, holding up their hands saying "I'm not a feminist!" or "I don't consider myself a feminist!" blah blah blah. Let me make this as simple as possible: Is it your dream to be submissive to men for the rest of your life? Yes? Ok, then you're probably not a feminist. Everyone else probably should identify as one. I'm not telling you to do anything radical, I'm just telling you to stick up for yourself, and to not let ANYONE convince you that you are inferior or unworthy because of your gender.

What spurned this? Comments on a wedding blog. Ugh. They get hecka ugly, but this is one of the reasons why women should not be afraid to identify as a feminist and fight back a little bit. All this because this poor bride decided to "break with tradition." Oh GAWD forbid. (And just to clarify, this feminist will be walked down the aisle by her dad, then married by a female minister - which one of my friends said was "just wrong - women shouldn't be ministers." Think I need to have the feminist talk with her?)

Now the irreverence.
So Jam and I are a biracial couple, he's black, I'm white. There it is, PC terminology aside (though you can call my caucasian, if you must lol). We joke about race A LOT. Lately I've wondered if it's too much? At what point do you cross the line and make people uncomfortable? Or should we joke about because it does make people uncomfortable and it's a good way to get these conversations out on the table? Eh. I dunno. We've been joking a lot about potential future children. Let me tell you, it gets old pretty fast when you have people who are practically strangers telling you that your children would be beautiful because they will be "mixed" or my FAV "mulatto." I'm like "wait, mulatto....um do we still use that word or did it kind of go out of style with the END OF SEGREGATION?" I could be wrong, hell, "negro" showed up on the census (still confused about THAT) so maybe mulatto is all good for all I know. But yeah, people tell us we'll have cute kids. Um ok, why would you say that. Maybe they just don't know what else to say? I mean I think Jam and I are decent looking people, you know, average, and hopefully we'd have decent looking kids, but you never know when those genes could combine and make something a little freaky, because we've ALL seen kids of all shapes, sizes and colors who come out looking fetal or like little old men. It happens. I don't think our mixed race-ed-ness will help that.

I do joke about "hybrid vigor" though, being the science nerd that I am. For those of you not as embarrassingly nerdy as I hybrid vigor is basically defined as:

Hybrid Vigor or Heterosis: An increase in the performance of hybrids over that of purebreds

I was explaining this to a girl at the platelet clinic. I said that while maybe our kids wouldn't necessarily be "beautiful" they would have certain qualities that might give them the most infinitesimal genetic edge over their peers (this is a joke, ok, before anyone really science-y tells me this is impossible). When she asked what hybrid vigor was, I told her, and she still looked puzzled, and I said "you know, it's why all those little mutt dogs live FORever without any health problems while sometimes you get a purebred puppy with two heads or five limbs!!" She looked at me horrified. "You are comparing your future children to mixed-breed dogs?" she exclaimed. Yikes. When she put it that way, it sounded pretty bad. I told Jam and he gave his usual response "Oh. My. Goodness." followed by laughter. But did I cross the line? Should I not say these things. Granted if someone said this to me, I might punch them in the nose - but do I get to say it because I'm living it? Hmmm. I think because I'm me, and I love to get laughs out of people, and at times, shock them, I'll stick with it. There are lines I won't cross, and I think it's good that they're in place (won't say the n-word, don't really joke about slavery,etc) and I can stick with my brand of comedy right now - cause at the end of the day you kind of just have to laugh at the situation, and some people are far too serious...