Mz

A well-educated, dyed-in-the-wool Southerner told me the feminist Mz was born of Southern manners. They smooshed Miss and Mrs. together to have a form of address in a Southern drawl that didn't invade your privacy and ask you to disclose private information about your marital status and feminists who recognized that this is a question of women's rights stole the idea without crediting The South.

Yet another reason to hate feminism. These people are morons.

If the above story is correct, then the origin of Mz is a culture of extreme diplomacy developing a polite form of address which allows someone to place a variation of Miss or Mrs. in front of your name as respectful formal address without rudely asking your marital status which is private information. 

And it means something different when you assert your title is Mz. because you know your marital status and which form of address -- single or married -- applies to you.

If someone says "Their SO (significant other)" they are saying the same thing. They are saying "They are living together or dating and I infer they are bumping uglies, but I don't actually know them that well and I don't know if they are married." 

So if it's corporate policy to use S.O. on various forms, it's inclusive and trying to be equally respectful to, say, gay people who historically lived together but didn't have a right to marry until relatively recently.

But if you describe someone as "My SO." it probably means "We aren't married." It's usually not a secret if someone is married or not because marriage is a legal contract that has social and legal significance beyond "We hang together and bump uglies."

It's typically a matter of public record because there are many, many legal differences between just living with someone and being married to them, including the detail that in a criminal case spousal privilege may apply.

And if someone claims to have an open relationship and can sleep around without their partner caring, you should care deeply whether or not they are married to that partner because open relationship or not, you fundamentally have different and lesser rights than their spouse. 

If you imagine this is an important relationship because sexual intimacy is a big deal and they are married to someone else, you are the dish on the side and should not assume that they will take financial responsibility for any of the consequences of the relationship impacting your life or even acknowledge that they are the father of any resulting children. 

The vast majority of sex workers the world over are female and the vast majority of their clients are male. You are delusional if you think men think sex is a big damn deal.

Women see it that way because women get pregnant which is a significant, life-altering consequence regardless of the cultural context but also women get inculcated with the idea that sex is precious and something you should only do if you really love someone because most women make most of their money on their back and call it marriage.

Women get enormous social pressure from birth to try to arrange their entire life such that it advertises "Sex with me is a scarce commodity of high value and if you get with me, you can assume I don't have an STD and feel confident the children I bear are your children."

Perhaps not uncoincidentally, it's similar to the completely artificially high prices of diamond jewelry which get used as engagement rings and wedding rings. If you aren't obscenely wealthy and only own one diamond, it's probably your wedding ring.

This is at its absolute worst among White women because people tend to marry the same ethnicity as themselves and White men have most of the money and women mostly don't get a piece of the pie any way other than marriage.

So for White women, convincing men "I'm not a HO." is the single most valuable thing they are likely to be able to do in life and the difference between marrying well and not marrying at all can be millions. 

So stupid twats the world over buy this bullshit and fail to notice that most men expect you to be their live-in maid, cook and prostitute for which you are allowed to buy nice clothes to look good on their arm at social events that will enhance his career and do absolutely nothing for yours 99.99 percent of the time. 

And then we wonder why so many women are hateful frigid bitches and I have absolutely no means to make my joke about "I have sex with men who have sex with me." succeed.

You are a kleenex to wipe his dick off with. Doubly so if he's married or living with some chick.

Don't flatter yourself. You probably aren't that important to him.

Anyway, I don't know what needs to happen here, but the Southern origin story for Mz. that I heard suggests Mz. originally meant "I don't know her marital status and wouldn't presume to ask such a rude question." and dumb bitches went "Oh, that is SO COOL!!! I'm stealing that!!!!"

And now it means "I'm a ball busting bitch with delusions of grandeur! Kiss my ass! Why won't you PROMOTE me???? You must just be a SEXIST PIG!!! My brain damaged story. Sticking to it!"

It's no wonder my Hacker News experience got better when I changed my handle from Mz to DoreenMichele, though Mz said nothing of the sort. 

It was supposed to be MZ -- initials from my Cyburbia handle Michele Zone because it was short and familiar since initials were commonly used on Cyburbia with very active members -- and I typoed it because I was very ill and had just tried Michele and it was not available, so I was doing that standard name habit of capitalizing only the first letter.

It was six weeks before it crossed my mind it might be misinterpreted as a feminist handle and then I was all "Oh, surely no one will care!" So I didn't bother to change it at that point. 

On a forum that was 98 percent male when I joined.

At some point, I wrote an explanation about it and linked that in my profile. And then I hit the leaderboard.

As the only woman member on the leaderboard, I began feeling a little like a blonde haired, blue eyed Kraut with a strong German accent standing at the pulpit in a Nazi uniform in a Black church. 

So then I finally changed it.

For a week or two I got comments and emails to the effect of "Bitch, you aren't fooling anyone! We know who the hell you are."

But I wasn't trying to fool anyone so that eventually died and people got over it. And I made the leaderboard a second time under a less offensive handle.

And now I have given up on Hacker News entirely, so I don't know that any of that accomplished fuck all in the grand scheme of things, a la "progress for women."

On the upside, I'm not a feminist and wasn't trying to "accomplish" something in that regard. I had goals like occupying myself after work and reading interesting articles.

Still, I can't help but feel burned by the whole thing. And it bites because I am not and never was guilty of any of the shit people assumed about me in that regard. 

Footnote 

If someone posts this somewhere for some reason, please note the correct title is Mz, not MZ. This blogger template just automatically capitalize everything in the title.