My Name ‘Til Death
It was a lazy Sunday evening as usual, random studying interrupted by the occasional break of watching bad television. Particularly bad television.
We had were watching “‘Til Death” on whichever channel it happened to be on. To be honest we were only paying mild attention to it when one of the main couples started having a disagreement. The wife who IMDB lists as “Steph Woodcock” complains that her current surname (being ‘Woodcock’ of course) was a bit of a downgrade vs. her previous one (it was something nice and common like ‘Jones’).
Her husband “Jeff”, however counters by saying however that he “gave her the option of hyphenating”.
“Excuse me?” I thought to myself.
Of course I could count on C. to put it bluntly. “Oh, go fuck yourself,” he replied to the television.
Why is it still ok in this society to tell women how they are allowed to name themselves? Of course the supossed humour of the scene is that “Jeff” is the stereotype of the effeminate male who lets his wife walk all over him. A man just isn’t a “man” if his wife doesn’t take his name upon the signing of the marriage license *laugh prompt*.
In a world where we let parents basically name their children anything they want, and let people name themselves whatever the heck they want when will we face the fact that man, wife and children all sharing the paternal last name is just a tradition. A tradition that people can choose to partake in… or not.
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