I can grunt and spit with the best of 'em, but why would I want to?

My “knight in shining armor” column may have given some of my admittedly hypothetical readers the idea I’m the kind of helpless girl who’s afraid to break a nail and needs a heroic man to sweep her off her feet.

This is only partly true. I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I’ve spent years perfecting my image as the tough-as-nails, independent Soldier woman. It’s not quite perfect yet (babies are my weakness – my krypton if you will. Every time I see one of those my Soldier-façade melts and I become a little marshmallow. Stupid babies!)

Women in the Army are usually one of two types. Some are shamelessly promiscuous, and will even go as far as getting pregnant to get out of deployments. These women give the rest of us a really bad name and force us to perpetuate our own stereotype – that is we feel we have to prove ourselves so the men around us will respect us.

Some of us take this to extremes. I try to contain my battle-of-the-sexes related angst to mild offense when some burly dude tries to shove me out of the way just as I’m about to lift a table or a box or something. I admit I resent the implication that I can’t lift more than a paperweight (being female and all).

But I knew a girl in Georgia who got offended when men opened the door for her. She said it was disrespectful and implied she didn’t know how to open a door herself. She insisted women shouldn’t be treated with special respect. Personally, I think she just liked to argue about stuff.

I always contended that while men should not treat us as objects or weaklings, it’s nice to be treated with some respect. When a man opens the door for me or lets me have his seat, that’s not sexism. It just means he was raised right.

Feminists, as they are defined today, are dangerously insane. They’re motto, basically, is “I’ll prove I’m equal to men by becoming one.” Where’s the sense in that?

What intellectually superior champion of the female cause thought of that? “I’ll prove to you that your gender is not better than my gender by trying to make my gender just like yours … oh wait …”

That’s as brilliant as saying that dressing exactly the way men want us to dress to fulfill their adolescent fantasies is about “empowerment” and “celebrating our bodies.”

I celebrate the beauty of my body by protecting it from men who would use it and toss it aside (this is not to imply that I can be easily “tossed” anywhere, at least not right now. Maybe if I just ate a few less chips, as my last idiotic romantic interest told me. He also told someone else he was going to marry me and buy me a treadmill. Don’t get me started, I could go on all day.)

Feminism, likewise, should be about celebrating the differences between women and men. We should celebrate our femininity, not try to suppress it.