Wrongthink

My new wife is currently undergoing the process of changing her name to mine as a result of our recent marriage.

Not surprisingly, I have been derided that I would be so bold as to ask my wife to change her name to mine.  “She sould keep it,” says she, “or you hyphenate it.”

My retort is simple and obvious.

“If she keeps her maiden name, or includes it as part of a hyphenated, unsustainable 18 letter monstrosity, then she’s simultaneously submitting to patriarchy because her name is her father’s name, not her mother’s.  And it’s even worse, because she’s acquiescing to her mother’s choice in a reproductive mate.  Her father is a nice guy, but suppose he wasn’t?  You don’t get to choose your father but you do get to choose your husband.  So, if a woman is proud of her choice in a husband and proud that she has a choice, the best way to express that is by taking her husband’s name and dropping her father’s.”

Most of the time, jaws drop.  And why?  Because the morons who parrot this anti-patriarchy crap have literally never considered this point of view.  It never even crossed their minds.

It’s not like I’m some kind of genius.  Any reasonably intelligent person could reach this conclusion if they bothered to think about it.  But a lot of people – and of course by people I mean women, since no man has yet gone down this road with me – concluded that taking their husband’s name was one step away from signing a petition to legalize honor killing – and promptly shut off their brains.

Now, again, if you’re thinking – and I assume you are or else you would have stopped reading this already – there are a few followups you might ask me about my response.

First, unsustainability – what does that mean?  Why is hyphenation unsustainable?  Simple really.  Hyphenated last names are something that up until the baby boomers would have been, and were, flatly rejected by husbands.  Sure, some of them got through.  But imagine what will happen when a feminist insists that her child’s last name be a hyphenated combination and raises her child (her daughter) to be a man hating bitch feminist who also strongly believes in hyphenation.  And she marries a pussy man who was also raised in a household where mommy wore the pants and he too has a hyphenated last name.  What, prey tell, will they do with theirs?  Jones-Green-Smith-Brown?  Next time it will be 8 names, by the way.  This hyphenation nonsense grows exponentially.  After ten generations, a hyphenated last name could include over one thousand discrete last names.

Try signing a receipt with one of those.

“But Evan!  The Spanish already do that!”  Yes they do, but Spanish last names are finite.  You can get away with it when there are only 10 last names in your entire language.  Obviously if a Garcia-Lopez marries a Lopez whose children marry Garcias you don’t have this problem.

The counter-idea that people come up with is the concept of both man and woman inventing a new last name that might be a shortened combination or something entirely new that both the man and the woman change their name to.  This is actually not a bad idea in theory, but it would only work in a diseased society like ours in which familial bonds mean shit.

The entire concept of a family name was invented so that kinship – blood relations – could be derived through nomenclature.  The modern west doesn’t have a strong need for that because most people who would even consider doing this don’t really care much about their parents, many of whom are probably divorced.  Since the families they get their names from are either broken or inconsequential because they hate them, it’s not a stretch to propose changing a name.  Since we have DNA tests and population sprawls, we don’t have to worry about accidentally reproducing with our blood relatives, another function that family names served.

On paper it sounds good and like it might work, but I would be willing to bet that if everybody who got married simply invented a new family name that may or may not be anything like either of the spouses’ names, the world would get very confusing in a hurry because it would rapidly become impossible to keep track of families.

Of course, the counter-patriarchy argument would go like this: the world already loses track of girls.  Once they take their husband’s name, they lose the name connection to their families and become part of his.  Guilty as charged.

But here’s what I describe as wrongthink.  If you can agree that it is impractical to hyphenate last names and that it’s a generally good idea to have some kind of lineage connection in family names, you’re left with only two choices: the woman takes the man’s name or the man takes the woman’s name.

Now, it is easy to understand why our tradition is that the woman takes the man’s.  Men generally owned the property and spent more time out of the house.  Feminists hate this legacy because it’s different today than it was then.  They cannot fathom that any woman who lived before women had the same rights or whatever that they do today could have ever possibly enjoyed their lives because feminists define their entire way of thinking based on some arbitrary concept of fairness they’ve invented for themselves which causes them to judge every aspect of every male-female relationship as being biased for or against women.  When women get the short end of the stick it’s tantamout to the holocaust but when men get the short end – even if it’s egregiously so – they are as silent as the grave.

In today’s world, when a wife takes her husband’s name she is appealing to tradition.  And to a feminist, that is simply not a good enough reason.

I have never read Gulliver’s Travels because I already understand the point I’m about to illustrate using it as an analogy, but if you don’t, read it. In Lilliput, a war has broken out between two nations based on how they serve their hard-boiled eggs: big end down, or small end down.

We could argue all day long about the merits of either, and in fact the Lilliputians do, often violently.  But in the end, as is the point of this story, the choice is completely arbitrary.

Now we can debate the merits in the marriage name, but I won’t bother because my arguments are not definitive nor globally applicable.  I married a woman who would immediately start looking around the house for my lost balls if I had even suggested that she do anything other than take my name because she relishes the biomechanics of the male-female relationship, not fights against them.  But there are women out there who don’t and while I don’t agree with them I at least acknowledge that their opinion on the subject - and I stress the word opinion – is as good as mine or my wife’s.

So coming to no real factual argument either way, were I to argue in favor of “patriarchal” naming, I would have tradition on my side.  In other words, look, whether it’s the woman’s name or the man’s name is somewhat irrelevant because we’re both equal parties coming into the relationship right?  So we just have to pick one.  She might as well take my name because that’s what our culture has always done and changing it for the sake of changing it will just confuse people and raise eyebrows.

The real wrongthing here is railing against tradition because it’s traditional.  A lot of the time, the tradition is as good of a reason as any other and in many cases there is a very good reason that we have collectively forgotten or only a few of us are clever enough to figure out.

I strongly suspect that people who bitch about “traditional values” and tradition in general were raised with parents who answered “why” with “because I said so.”  It’s easy to rebel against blindly accepting certain traditions without question when you have a lifetime backlog of unanswered questions.  “Because I said so” – particularly when a parent utters it - is a memory that warps in adulthood into an effigy of the irrationalism of the previous generation and by extension, all generations before it.  If a parent can’t or won’t explain to a child why something is done or should be done in a particular way, then the child assumes it’s because there is no good reason and therefore they are free to invent their own reasons.  Only very smart children take the initiative to find those answers and are successful.  The not-so-bright ones don’t bother or can’t, so they become anti-traditionalists.

Yes, I claim that people who flatly reject appeals to tradition are not-so-bright.  This has been my overwhelming experience.

Now, naturally, all young people have a certain amount of this built in.  Our culture, and therefore our species itself, can’t progress if nobody is willing to question how things were done.  But as young people become older people, enough time passes that they either see their own cultural experiments crumble in front of them (e.g., feminism, hippy-ism, communism) or they are given enough time to think about some of the cultural ideas they rejected in youth.  Many people who claim to reject their parents’ teachings wind up repeating their parents’ words to their own children verbatim and then realize only then that their parent were right all along.  Life experience has a funny way of vindicating those who had those experiences before.  I’ve always felt that it’s foolish to ignore people – especially people who have no good reason to lie to you – when they are trying to warn you about the dangers on the road ahead.  They’ve walked that road before.

But then again, I’m a conservative.