The other night, after I got home from work, Mr. Prairie and I watched “Making Over America With Trinny and Susannah.” There are no words for how much I love them. Trinny and Susannah are bold and funny and are apparently bringing their brand of makeover to the U.S. While I often feel that “makeover” shows are all about sucking every ounce of individuality out of people and making them adhere to a socially acceptable, conventional beauty, I don’t get that from T & S.

But I digress. In this special, they were making over a very cute mom/waitress from New Jersey. Off the clock, the New Jersey mom, Denise wore baggy boring clothes. She wanted something different for herself, but like all moms, put herself dead-last on her list of priorities. Denise didn’t think of herself as pretty, she referred to herself as “plain.” And she had body issues as a result of the changes that come along with having two children.

While listening to Denise disparage some body part or the other, Mr. Prairie exclaimed, “What is wrong with her?!” Then he looked at me and said, “You know, I blame Hugh Hefner. Because of him, men think they should have some perfect, airbrushed girl that doesn’t even exist in real life! And women wear themselves out trying to be like that!”

My jaw dropped, in a good way. “You get it! You actually get it!” Then I said, “You know what this makes you, don’t you? A feminist!” He laughed, because he’s been one all along.

The next night we watched another show, this one about a wedding. The bride’s father talked about the ceremony representing the passing of his authority over his daughter to her new husband, who then has authority over her. Hubby asked me, “What did I just hear?”

I answered, “You just heard a wedding being described as a transfer of property between the father of the bride and the new husband. And the property is the bride.”

He said, “That’s twisted.”

It would never have occurred to Mr. Prairie to ask my dad for permission to marry me, because I was a grown woman. We told my folks, together, that we were getting married. It never even entered our minds that my father had authority over me as an adult and that the non-existent authority could be transferred to someone else. I told the pastor that I wouldn’t promise to obey anybody and he’d better leave it out of the vows or there would be a very awkward silence in the ceremony. And I told him to leave that submission crap out, too. Marriage should be a partnership of equals who love each other, not a master-and-servant arrangement.

So I asked Hubby, “You weren’t laboring under the mistaken idea that you have any authority over me, were you?” He started laughing and said, “Are you kidding me?”

You see, he believes that marriage is a partnership of equals, too. Because he’s been a feminist all along!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.