The Crabby Feminist.

So got to work today and wore my engagement ring. I usually don’t have it on when I am there because I have to wear plastic gloves a lot and I’m always worried the ring will rip the gloves. Anyway, for the first time my coworker saw that I was engaged and asked when we are getting married. I told her not until N. is done with school next year at the earliest and then she asked what my name would be when we got married.

When N. and I do get married, he is taking my last name instead of me taking his. When I told her this (and after having it happen so many times I don’t know why I am still surprised) she looked at me like I was nuts and was like "why?" Ugh! What the hell do you mean, why? Because. Because we want to do it that way. That is the only reason, there’s no back story, there isn’t any big reason we just decided that when we get married he’d become Mr. J instead of me becoming Mrs. N. Why the hell SHOULDN’T we do it that way? Granted, to be fair, there have been a lot of people that were like, oh that’s cool and stuff like that but even that reaction makes it seem like it is something really out of the ordinary, which I don’t think that it is.

N. was actually the one that first suggested that he take my name after we had a discussion about how my mom kept her maiden name when she got married, and how my step-mom kept her last name when she married my dad. N. asked what I wanted to do and I said I’d never thought about that much but that I didn’t want to do the hyphenated keep both names things. After that he was like well I’ll just change my name then. So that’s what we are doing, you would think though, by people’s reactions, that it was the craziest, most unheard of thing to ever happen. I mean, come on, its 2010 guys. There was even one person who said that N. "wasn’t a real man" if he took my name. WTF?

So anyway, that happened right before she left and then I spent the night stewing about the situation. I also saw a bunch of commercials that annoyed me by being super sexist, though I am sure I was a little more sensitive to it than usual because of the whole name discussion. One was for this sheer cover makeup. It was a lady talking to an audience, and it was like this.

Lady: "Ladies, what is the most important day in a woman’s life?"
Audience enthusiastically answers: "YOUR WEDDING!".
Lady: "And what will you being worrying about most on that day?"
Audience: "HOW WE LOOK!"
Lady "Exactly! And with new sheer cover you can make sure that you blah, blah, blah."
Barf.

Seriously? I mean, are you eff-ing kidding me? I love N. more than anything else in the world but I don’t eff-ing tell me that the most important day in a woman’s (and apparently this applies to ALL women) life is her wedding. I am not saying that it isn’t an important day, but I am pretty sure that when I am celebrating finding the love of my life with my family and friends my inner monologue won’t be "Good God, do my pores look too big? Can they see that zit on my chin?"

Add to that, a bunch more commercials about makeup work out plans, diets, diet pills, and tummy slimming underwear and I finally just turned off the TV and read.

I am glad that I was born in this time period instead of earlier, but man, there is still a lot of sexism out there. For example, when I posted on facebook that I was about to graduate from college one or two people were like, "yay, congrats." When I posted that I got engaged, it was like a flood of congratulations. I mean, I am glad that my friends were happy for me, I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, but based on how much attention one got versus the other it was pretty clear what was more exciting. That kind of bugged me, but don’t think I am saying that I like my college degree better than N. Obviously I am head over heels in love with him and my degree and me are barely even speaking at this point because it hasn’t done sh*t for me in terms of finding a job. My point just is that based on people’s reactions, it was clearly a bigger achievement for me to get a husband than it was for me to get a degree.

But I am probably overreacting, you know how women can get so emotional over things….