"You should write something else about feminism," she said. "I could maybe help you get it into Slate."
Slate was fantastic, of course. I'd burn as many bras as Slate wanted me to burn if it meant they'd take my stuff. But still, what my friend was saying didn't make much sense to me.
"Yeah, but I'm no expert on feminism. I don't even think of myself that way."
"Seriously, Jilly? Your name is basically synonymous with feminism right now."
Really? Because of one humor piece?
Since then, I've put out pieces that would arguably make me significantly more synonymous with the term, but I still don't think of myself that way.
Not because it's not true. As far as most victims of society's rampant misandry are concerned, I'm probably on the "extremely aggressive, I don't even WANT to have sex with her she's so man-hating" side of the argument.
Because it's just never occurred to me that my opinions are particularly feminist.
They're HUMANIST.
Yes, I find the idea that women are somehow inherently unfunny ridiculous and worth mocking, because have you met most guys? Most people? The vast majority of the earth is inherently unfunny, it's not a gendered failure.
And of course I expect to keep my name, if I ever get married, which I may or may not, it's not really a life goal. Why? Well not because I'm some crazy feminist, just because I'm a person. Marriage is choosing to chain yourself to someone, not BECOME them, right?
And really, can't we all agree that there's something monumentally fucked up about the fact that every woman I know is aware that she should never be out too late, get too drunk, go to certain places on her own at all, and if she must, for god's sake, at least she should make sure she's holding her keys in between her fingers for possibly-necessary throat-stabbings. Which basically implies that the onus is on women not to go out and do something dumb like get raped. It might even be a heavier responsibility than the one men maybe ought to think about more often--i.e., "don't rape."
That stuff seems pretty basic to me. But apparently, it's radical enough to many, if not most, that it deserves a label, one that I'm happy to accept, but which seems to me approximately equivalent to calling me a "don't-spit-on-my-facist" or a "comfort-lover-ist" or an "anti-puppy-murder-ist." Yeah, they're true, I guess, but they're so obvious that the labels seem a little unnecessary, right?
Wrong.
Sigh.
This friend sounds pretty smart. I'm a humanist like you, and I don't want to change my name. People shouldn't have to change their names if they love someone. But then what do you do about kids? Whose last name do you give them?
ReplyDeleteShe's got it together, definitely.
ReplyDeleteThe kids thing is tricky if you don't want to enter the black hole of hyphenation. One version I heard that was kind of ingenious was that the parents decided, during the first pregnancy, that whatever gender the baby turned out to be would dictate all the future kids' last names. It turned out to be a girl, so all the kids in that family took their mom's last name, not their dad's.
The last name thing has an odd effect on me when looking at my family's history. If a relative has my last name, it feels like a "real" or closer relative. Whereas the connection feels weaker when it's a relative on my mother's side, just because of the different last name.
ReplyDeleteWhich is slightly absurd because DNA contributions are equal across both lineages, but mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother.
Yeah, I get that--I think not having the same last name as one of your parents might be hard.
ReplyDeleteFull disclosure, I'm not sure I'll ever have kids, so it's easy for me to blithely toss out the idea of never changing my name--there are no (anticipated) repercussions for me beyond the personal.