Interesting. Curb Your Enthusiasm is definitely a 'love it or hate it' show. I love it. I never thought of Larry David as a feminist though.

The absence of being a sexist pig is evidently sufficient to count as a feminist.

Yes, but Larry is pretty much every -ist you can think of, at one time or another. I guess he's equal-opportunity, then?

I must admit I require more of people to think of them as feminist. Like standing up for women's causes, pointing out to others (uh, like Hefner, perhaps?) when they are acting sexist, and actively supporting women's career paths.

I fear Larry David,fictional or real, doesn't really fill the bill. A whole bunch of male and female MeCha bunnies and Mefites do, though.

On the one hand he's pretty traditionalist, and that includes gender roles. On the other hand he's totally for (and often one of) the people who recognize they are the losers in some kind of social/political/sexual situation and who break whatever norms they need to in order to get back on top. He's only a big authoritarian when it comes to petty things like parking etiquette. Everything else is a scam, and if you don't like it, fight it, and if you fought it, good for you, enjoy your victory. And if you just won by dumb luck and privilege, hey, enjoy that too. Easy victory is the best kind of victory! I don't know where feminism fits in there.

I saw the last Curb and thought I probably didn't want to watch any more. The actors this season have seemed pretty tired. I'm also missing Cheryl who was just so good at various reaction looks to Larry's latest stupidity.

This question of who's a feminist is interesting. I'm not that familiar with Larry David, and I'm always afraid of reading about shows that I will eventually watch, but I know a feminist who I wouldn't call an activist at all.

The feminist is my brother. He's a stay-at-home dad. He's been one since the birth of my first nephew, when he and my sister-in-law chose to divide the labor thus: she works to bring home the bacon, while my brother stays home, takes care of the kids, cooks, cleans, makes home.

You could say that he's actively supporting women's career paths, but really he's actively supporting just one woman's career path. They're building that equal world, though. Sometimes people tell him he's just exercising a privilege, or that he's just taking an easy way out, or that he can't possibly be doing what he says he does, he simply must be burdening his wife with more than her fair share of responsibility. Those quislings are wrong.

He's one of those people, like my dad -- they're masters of words who know well how little good it does to tell people things, how from certain standpoints haranguing society's deaf ears is minimally effective in comparison to simply doing the right thing -- but by living in a way that makes most sense, his family demonstrates how normal and equitable and sensible it is for the established structure to be comfortably abandoned without harm.

He also gets that it's not sensible or possible for every family to do so, and he knows that he's lucky to be in his situation. But by virtue of his being a living demonstration of how personal choices that run counter to the established hegemony don't have to be extraordinary, he and my sister-in-law show how the equitable aims of feminism can be downright normal. That's a valuable lesson to embody -- we are all free to choose what works best for us, without fuss -- and I think my brother's family is a shining example.

I should make it clear that I'm only speaking of one narrow aspect of "being a feminist," and I'm not downplaying activism, nor do I mean to imply or insist that fighting sexism in the everyday isn't extremely important, too. I just think the ideal calls for all these things to be second nature, that "being a feminist" should be as effortless as "being a human."

Yes, I am an idealist, and yes, I live more in the world of Should Be than the world of Is, but I'm a strong believer in living the dream to reach its goals.

Sorry if this is a bit of a derail, I didn't read the article (like I said before, I plan to watch CYE one day, so I don't want to know much about it). But I clearly have a lot to say on this tangential matter, so there it is.

Your brother sounds like a feminist to me, too, Hugh Janus. I fear unlike him, Larry David doesn't really live the dream. For example, hard to picture your brother as you describe him attending a Hugh Hefner soiree and chatting about smoking jacket choices with Hef. Or hiring a prostitute, whether to complete a "car pool" or for sex.