My best friend has long been quick to scold me, in the motherly-yet-not-annoying way that only she can, not to use the word “douchebag” as an insult. Granted, it’s not something I say all the time. But admittedly, it’s a word that slips out sometimes to describe people (usually guys, if I’m being honest) who do something shitty to me or to one of my friends. “Ugh!” says my dear friend, who is normally not a language-policing type. “Don’t use a word that’s related to a woman’s anatomy as an insult.”
I’ll be honest: It’s a word we’re not shy about using on Feministing. A quick search of the archives shows we’ve applied the term “douchebag” to people who ...

Does is matter if women identify as feminist or is just important that they live feminist values?
It’s a question that has haunted the movement for ages. It came up quite a bit for me when I was teaching gender studies at Hunter College. I could see that I was reaching the young women in men in my class–that they were moved to think about race and sex as constructs, sexism in the workplace, rape, sexuality as a spectrum not a binary (in other words, they were really “getting it”)–but few of them left my class wearing the feminist label proudly on their sleeves. Did I fail? Or was it enough that they were thinking and acting like feminists?