The only thing I’ll say for the first part, where you said feminists hardly ever mention the accomplishments of men–if that’s true, I would say it’s because the rest of the world is already doing that well enough, so feminists might choose to spend their time/energy on recognizing women instead, who historically would have less chance of being recognized for their accomplishments (and I’d like to add in present day as well, but again, I don’t know if I can strongly assert that here without hard evidence). If you’re interested enough, I wrote briefly on this seeming “double standard” in my “Feminist Catch-22″ post (http://mandingueira.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/why-write-about-female-mestres-the-feminist-catch-22/ —you can skip the first two paragraphs if you decide to read it).

I agree that “for gender equality” doesn’t necessarily equal “feminist” as things are now, and believe you’re right about what it would mean to state that. What I was trying to say was that for me, “feminist” means or should mean “women’s equality”, nothing more than that, and I certainly wasn’t trying to restrict the definition of “for gender equality” to the grounds of “feminist”. (And I do realize the conversation I excerpted suggests otherwise, but I will get to that.)

The thing is, every part of what you just said, from feminism being misandry to not wanting to be classified as a feminist to doing your own thinking, is what I was saying feminism has become, to the world. It’s the perfect example of why the whole point of my post was to raise the idea of separating the word “feminism” from its original movement, because maybe it really has become everything you just described, which wasn’t the point of it originally.

That is why I used the conversation excerpt as an example, because if you take “feminist” without ANY of the modern day connotations it has, and just look at its *original* meaning (or dictionary meaning, in fact), it did mean purely “for women’s equality”. I was trying to emphasize the idea that feminism should be so stripped down to meaning only that and nothing more, that the terms could be interchangeable. Or not interchangeable, because you’re right, “feminism” would still be a more limited word/idea than “gender equality”, since it would mean only women’s equality (even though equality inherently means it goes both ways, so the disjoint there is interesting). Then, “feminism” would actually be more than a redundancy, it would be redundant and signify less, which again as I mentioned is what we (okay, I) want, because that would mean gender (so both men’s and women’s) equality was truly, completely, in reality (societally, economically, politically) a given.

Personally I believe in gender equality but I refuse to be classified as a Feminist because I’m a man and not a woman. And I do not believe one statement about equality is a determining definition for something that is solely a product of my own personal choices.

You may say Feminism is about gender equality, but I’ve seen nothing like equality in its practice. And before it is assumed that as a man, I’m anti-woman, I’m proud to know many, many diverse women, whose friendships I feel priviliged to have. Moreso because they accept me without the labels and political agendas usually associated with feminist ideology. In fact they would disagree with being labeled feminist, not out of fear or shame, but out of pride. They would say, “no I’m not a damn feminist because I know how to do my own thinking.”