I’ve been letting this response simmer for a while and giving it some thought… See, just as often as I may not “let” my wife put earrings on my daughter, she may not “let” me stay out in the sun with my daughter. Just as often my daughter may not “let” us have a full night’s rest. When you let something be, you don’t assume authority over it, you just don’t interfere in its business.

But on the whole, I do agree that language, in general, is misogynistic. It’s been built of years of patriarchal thinking and will take more than just one generation to completely undo. But it’s not just about changing the words we use, but also about how we think about those words.

So, though it may not be understood here in this sense by all readers, this let is used to mean “ not obstruct” and not “allow, permit.” So that when I say I “didn’t let” I mean I obstructed her in doing so. I raised my concern to her, we had a discourse about why or why not to do it, which I call fight (not just pointing fingers and shouting at each other, which we have been guilty of doing in other situations, but not this one).

It’s not that any of our bodies is a silly little thing, but putting modifications on it is. If any of us wants to get a piercing, it’s no big deal, both my wife and I have and have had piercings. While neither of us has tattoos or gauges or the like, if we change our mind about either of those things down the line, it’s really not a big deal to us.

These silly little things, like how we choose to dress, whether we use body modifications, how we organize our shared spaces are important little things. You can bet that if I keep kicking the same little rock that you use to hold the door to our room open day after day, I’m gonna complain about it.

These are, for the most part, issues with my writing (hopefully) and not my ideas. I’m not the best writer. I’d be really interested in seeing how you’ve been able to avoid patriarchal language, it’s a constant effort for me, and writing articles like this is one of the best ways to help me clear, at least in my own thinking.