Daily Feminism: Name Sharing

A Facebook friend of mine–not a real-life friend–recently used his status update to congratulate a newly-married couple with the following quotation from an Avett Brothers song: “Always remember there was nothing worth sharing than the love that let us share our name.”

It’s a nice thought, and a deeply enraging one. The name that the couple shares is not theirs: it’s the man’s, and it only becomes their name after the woman gives hers up.

You see, my friend is taking that lyric wildly out of context. The Avett Brothers are invoking a sibling relationship, so the name they’ve inherited is their from birth. Setting aside primogeniture, the sibling relationship is a democratic rather than a hierarchical one, whereas the kind of marriage in which the woman’s name disappears is hierarchical. You can argue all you want that each spouse in a marriage is equally important, or that your marriage is egalitarian, or that you like the tradition, or that it’s easier to share one name, but the very fact that it’s the man’s name that remains signals the presence of a gendered hierarchy.

I understand the impulse to change your name, I really do. I chose not to change mine, and in the spirit that allowed me to choose that option I am certainly not going to tell someone else what to do. But don’t misuse song lyrics to justify it. If you really want a love that let you share your name, choose an entirely new one.

Or–dare I say it?–share the woman’s name.

A few thoughts: Date Night and Radical Skepticism

I had a thought while I was cleaning the kitchen, about the movie Date Night, which I watched about a year ago and thought was a mildly amusing but basically forgettable. In a throwaway moment near the beginning of the movie, Steve Carell and Tina Fey’s kids are protesting their nightly bath. Steve Carell rolls his eyes: bath time happens every night, he says, and yet they act like somehow this night’s going to be different.

Well, it turns out, I think, that the kids actually have it right. The problem with Steve Carell and Tina Fey’s life is exactly that they’ve given up protesting. Since bath time (or whatever you want to fill in for unpleasant and mundane necessities) happens every day, there’s no point in fighting it. But the movie is exactly about the need to pretend that each day is somehow radically different from the day before–in fact, I think you could argue that the kids are radical skeptics who refuse to take on faith that just because something happened the day before, or every day before, it will happen again.

So, there’s your link between Steve Carell, Tina Fey, and David Hume.

Arise!

I’m reviving this blog for the academic side of my Internet persona. I have some goals that I need to hit and some writing that I need to practice. I don’t expect to update this on a regular basis or anything (we’ll see how the timing works on that), but it’s here if I need it.

So, my tasks through the end of the summer:

1. Send out Matter article.
2. Send out Hamiltons article.
3. Send out Author article, if it comes back from Fancy Journal.
4. Revise chapter three.
5. Draft chapter four.
6. Write job letter.

Gee, that looks like a lot when it’s all written out like that.

If you’d rather look at what I do my ever-shrinking spare time, go here.