WE WERE arguing about the f- word. My friend Jason told me not to use it. He said it turns people off and gets in the way of everything I'm trying to accomplish.
Many friends cringe at the label.
In the history of feminism, so far as we know, no one ever burned a bra. In 1968 in Atlantic City, during a demonstration against the Miss America Pageant, women threw bras and curlers into a garbage can. These weren't burned, but some news accounts described a fire, perhaps because reporters made an association with draft-card burning in protests against the Vietnam War. It's no coincidence that our most enduring image of feminism is a caricature of something that didn't happen. But the Ugly Feminist eclipses our real history.