Over at The Root, Byron Hurt has a candid piece about how watching the fraught interaction between his parents as a kid helped plant the seeds for his adult embrace of feminism: Feminist writings about patriarchy, racism, capitalism and structural sexism resonated with me because I had witnessed firsthand the kind of male dominance they challenged. I saw it as a child in my home and perpetuated it as an adult. Their analysis of male culture and male behavior helped me put my father’s patriarchy into a much larger social context, and also helped me understand myself better. You’ll have to forgive me for how jumbled/discursive/TMI this is going to read, but this has agitated a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking about and was frankly saving for a much neater Mother’s Day post. My own, very flawed feminism is also rooted in my childhood, albeit in circumstances very different from Hurt’s. His father’s presence was inescapable. Mine was imperceptible. [...]