I do -- kind of

Even Leora Tanenbaum, who wrote the excellent "reclaim the shame" book "Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation," gets into the guilt trip when she blurbs for Geller's book: "I am, as they say, happily married -- but after reading this excellent exposé of the marriage mystique, I can't say I'm proud of my status." (You'd think that Tannenbaum would feel that writing a defense of promiscuous women gives her the option to "choose" to be married, but that would, of course, imply that you trust women to make their own choices.)

So why do it? In many ways, straight married women who identify themselves as feminists seem to share Geller's definition of marriage as an inherently sexist, exclusionary, state-sanctioned union, sealed with consumer goods and rewarded with health insurance, joint tax returns and happy relatives. But rather than refuse to marry, they go ahead and do the deed, then proceed to explore their motives and those of their partners, profess their guilt and general embarrassment and then put themselves through all manner of verbal and ideological contortions to explain how their marriage is different.

"Can I feel complete in a relationship with a man and still be a feminist?" asks Nancy Kruse in an article titled "If Gloria Can Do It ..." published in Salon. Kruse goes on to pose a litany of rhetorical questions, as if her personal feelings about her marriage mean nothing until they are compared with a master checklist of qualities that constitute Total Feminist Marriage: "What does it mean that Andy takes care of the garbage and the finances and I take care of the laundry and the social engagements?" "Am I still a feminist if I beg him to fuck me?" If "I comply with his wishes to get me on hands and knees in bed?" "Why was Steinem's marriage so freeing to me and many women I know?" (Kruse's answer: "We sighed with relief, thinking, 'She did it; now our relationships with men are OK.'")

Like Steinem, these women feel the need to defend their decision to marry by proving their husband's feminist credentials, often in flimsy ways. Kruse points out that her husband was raised by women (!) and his sister is a lesbian "as I like to playfully tout at parties when extolling Andy's feminist credentials." Kate Epstein, whose essay "A Marriage of My Own" appears in "Young Wives' Tales," describes asking her husband if he was a feminist before she agrees to marry him. "Well," he replies, "if feminism means supporting the equality of women, then I am definitely a feminist." Gushes Epstein: "I adored him for the entire conversation. If he were just saying what I wanted him to hear, he wouldn't have paused."

The man parrots back a cliché from Women's Studies 101 and he gets credit for a pause?

It's not that creating gender equality doesn't matter; it does. It's not that one can't take a historically messed-up institution, play with it and rearrange it as one sees fit -- if one couldn't, we'd still have serfs and lords. But it seems timid and small to be so embarrassed by one's choice that one has to talk about it endlessly, find ways to justify oneself to other women and be content with such minor pseudo-philosophical Band-Aids. (Another example from "Young Wives' Tales" includes Leslie Miller, who decides she's not a traditional wife if she chooses to call herself a "wyfe," as in Wyfe of Bath.)

Is marriage a relic of a patriarchal past that should be retired shamefully to the dresser like a used garter belt? Or is it an open institution that can be played with, screwed around with and reassembled at will?

It's unlikely that we will see any agreement soon.

Consider this: Amy Richards, the coauthor of "Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future" -- a book that strove to answer the question "What Do Third Wave Women Want?" -- enthusiastically blurbed the book jacket for "Young Wives' Tales," writing that the stories "prove that sweet fairy-tale weddings and seaside spiritual rituals are choices young women and men make today because of our feminism, rather than in spite of it."

Her coauthor, Jennifer Baumgardner, wrote a blurb for "Here Comes the Bride."

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