On feminist/feminism

[dragonimp]

Okay, I've run into this opinion a number of times now, and it bugs me. It is:

A man can't be a feminist. He can be a feminist ally, but not a feminist.

I guess the semantics are really important to some people, but I never thought it was a gendered term. This is the dictionary.com definition of feminist:

1. advocating social, political, legal, and economic rights for women equal to those of men.

2. an advocate of such rights.

And for feminism:

1. the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.
2. ( sometimes initial capital letter ) an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women.
3. feminine character.

Nothing in that says you can't have a Y chromosome.

I'm sure there's a lot of men who don't "get it", but I'd say they're not truly feminists. For the ones who do get it - why kick them out of the club, as it were? Why reduce them to the secondary status of "ally"?

I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on this.