While I don't watch many teen-oriented shows (with the exception of Gossip Girl, My Super Sweet 16 and America's Next Top Model), I can't remember the last time a teenage TV character proclaimed to be a feminist — and wasn't making a joke. In fact, when Tracie made a list of self-professed feminist TV characters, half of them originated a decade or more ago.

While the character of Kat is based on the "shrew" by William Shakespeare, on this show she is a fully modern young woman dealing with modern problems. For instance: Last week's episode, directed by Gil Junger (who directed the 1999 film starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger.) Kat's plot revolves around her newly engaged teacher, who seems more interested in a sparkly rock than grading papers fairly.

The assignment was to write about "the day that changed your life." Kat wrote about reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, "the dawn" of her "feminist awakening." What she didn't read? Her friend Mandella's paper about the county fair. Still, when Kat finds out that everyone in class received As, she complains. Also, she calls her teacher out for being "so not a feminist."

What happens when she complains is that everyone still gets As, but Kat gets a B-. She confronts her teacher about this new, lower grade; but her teacher explains that Kat's paper on finding feminism received a low grade because it was "predictable" and "preachy."

After a talk with her father, Kat realizes that she is indeed self-centered; she hadn't even read her friend Mandella's paper about the county fair, assuming it wasn't as interesting or important as her feminist manifesto. Turns out that Mandella's paper was about the humiliation of being an overweight person not allowed to ride the fairground rides and turning to fatty foods at the fair as a coping mechanism. Kat apologizes to her friend.

Also, she writes a new paper. About her dad buying her tampons.

The week before last, Kat's plot had a feminist bent as well:

Kat's sister Bianca called Kat out on being a "stop global warming activist" while driving a gas-guzzling, air-polluting clunker.

Kat decided to convert her "Chernobyl-mobile" to bio-diesel using some instructions she found online, adding that doing so would "dispel the myth" that women can't fix cars.

The guys in the garage (including Patrick Verona) gave Kat a hard time. They had a bet going that she wouldn't be able to finish converting her engine; but when one guy said, "Isn't anyone going to bet on the girl?" Kat said, "I'll bet on myself." She had confidence she could pull it off. But by the end of the day, everyone was going home and she hadn't made any progress. The guys urged her to quit, and Kat was clearly at the end of her rope.

In the middle of the night, Kat was still trying to fix her car. Her OB/GYN dad came to visit; she pouted that she wasn't a "damsel in distress." Yet he made it clear that her problem with the car stemmed not from being female but from being stubborn and not asking for help when she clearly needed it. (Kat and her dad finished the engine conversion and the next day in the garage, the guys had to pay up when she started the car with her new bio-diesel system, which they assumed she'd installed herself.)

This summer show will, most likely, be ending in a few weeks, but here's to hoping that it — and its message, a strong one for teenage girls — returns.

10 Things I Hate About You airs tonight at 8pm on ABC Family

10 Things I Hate About You [ABC Family]

Earlier: 10 Things I Hate About You: Teenage Feminism, But No Heath Ledger
20 Feminist TV Characters

The women included in the list — Joan Didion, Martha Gellhorn, Susan Orlean and Simone de Beauvoir among them — are certainly impressive, but Esquire does not include any female writers from the past decade, and the representative passages they chose from these literary lionesses are pretty insulting to women as a whole.

For instance, here's the passage Esquire chose to emphasize from a January, 1950 essay called "About Shorty":

I have always thought there is a secret basis of pity in the friendship of most women, and that is a crumbling rock to build on.

That's it. Just that sentence. Of the 20 or so books and countless articles Gellhorn published throughout her storied career, Esquire has decided that this vaguely sexist commentary on female friendships was meant to be called out, without context whatsoever. There is not even a hint to the subject matter of "About Shorty."

And here's what they chose to emphasize from Simone de Beauvoir's contribution to Esquire:

Brigitte Bardot is the most perfect specimen of these ambiguous nymphs. Seen from behind, her slender, muscular, dancer's body is almost androgynous. Femininity triumphs in her delightful bosom. The long voluptuous tresses of Mélisande flow down to her shoulders, but her hair-do is that of a negligent waif. The line of her lips forms a childish pout, and at the same time those lips are very kissable. She goes about barefooted, she turns up her nose at elegant clothes, jewels, girdles, perfumes, make-up, at all artifice. Yet her walk is lascivious and a saint would sell his soul to the devil merely to watch her dance.

I give up.

Seventy-Five Years Of Storied History About Women Writing [Esquire]

Earlier: 75 Books Every Woman Should Read

Beauvoir had a famously open relationship with Sartre, but, as Lisa Appignanesi pointed out in the Guardian, Sartre was the one who insisted on sleeping with other people, and Beauvoir was the one who went along with it. According to Appignanesi, "In this lifelong relationship of supposed equals, he, it turned out, was far more equal than she was. It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own. Between the lines of her fiction and what are in effect six volumes of autobiography, it is also evident that De Beauvoir suffered deeply from jealousy."

Sylvia Plath famously killed herself after fellow poet, husband Ted Hughes, left her for another woman. Plath had a history of mental illness and one prior suicide attempt, but her obsession with Ted and his betrayal arguably hastened her demise. Although she pursued her own career with vibrant ambition, she still typed his manuscripts for him.

Rebecca West was a 20-year-old, up and coming critic and journalist when she met H.G. Wells. They began a passionate love affair that would last a decade. What's the problem with that? Wells already had a wife, and several children. When West became pregnant out of wedlock with Wells' baby (a big deal when it happened in 1913), she decided to keep the child. According to the book, after she told Wells she would bear their child, An Affair To Remember: The Greatest Love Stories of All Time, "Most of the adjustments were made by Rebecca. She moved from rented house to rented house. She had nothing but Wells — from time to time — and her writing." Most of the time, Wells remained at home with his wife.

The moral of this story is, many great feminists were not so "feminist" in their love lives, and no one can be a shining example of any -ism 24/7. (The verdict is still out on whether or not Carrie's a "feminist" considering the entirety of her "self" is constructed around her love life. Her shoes remain fantastic, though.)

Can A Feminist Really Love Sex And The City? [Guardian]
'Our Relationship Was The Greatest Achievement Of My Life' [Guardian]
An Affair To Remember: The Greatest Love Stories of All Time [Google Books]