Its not an unusual thing for lesbian couples to pick a new surname for themselves.
why yall having a war in the comments? its a silly meme about last names, who the actual fuck cares?
Because their entire poltical and world view is based on identity politics. They cannot simply say “that joke sucked” and move on, they have to make it into yet another virtue signalling exercise and lecture everyone else because that is the behaviour they associate with being a “good person”.
Probably anyone who ever gotten any pressure about handling last-names after marriage might care. It’s definitely something that some people care about, and some people cop flack for their decision.
The joke is just a joke, but the problem is that this joke punches down. That’s generally poor form.
if you are getting “punched down” (aka offended) by a joke posted on lemmy, by a random guy, you should realize that it is simply not that deep
yeah i didnt get any pressure about handling last names, so you might say “you just dont get it” but when i go to linuxmemes and see a meme about a distro i use, i dont go to comments and start a war about it bc it is just a fucking meme, same concept
if you are getting “punched down” (aka offended) by a joke posted on lemmy, by a random guy, you should realize that it is simply not that deep
I think you’ve misunderstood what punching down means. It has nothing to do with being offended. It’s about the relationship between the person telling the joke and the subject of the joke. For example, it’s generally fine for anyone to make jokes mocking rich people; but its not ok to make jokes mocking poor people unless you yourself are very obviously a poor person.
People online do not understand jokes. I refuse to believe anyone in real life would be this dense.
In real life people would see this lol and move on, on the internet they write dissertations about some BS to virtue signal to other strangers how enlightened they are… 🙄
Truth Social is a better fit for y’all
Technicallly, it is still of her father.
I’m pretty sure only people on the internet argue about this. No one actually cares what other’s do with their last name after marriage.
This post has 2017 reddit vibes. Not in a good way either.
People literally change their names because they feel like it, so I’m sure people do care outside the Internet, specially in circumstances of abuse.
Well, reddit turned to shit around 2014, so the fact it still sucked around 2017 can’t be a surprise?
People definitely care, but not about which side of the family or if it comes from mommy or daddy. Most people just want an “original” name.
Holy comment section batman
Nice use of super dick to deliver the uncomfortable truth.
Jokes on you, my dad took my mom’s name
not just his name, but his DNA too!
Your dad took your mother’s dads name.
Turns out it was her middle name.
with no ill will for you, OP, genuinely fuck this boomer ass “joke”
a woman’s name is her name. she lives with it for 1 lifetime, absolutely no longer than her grandfather does. “male” is not somehow the default human identity. stop trying to enforce that standard.
Love the little respectful preamble you put there, can we make that internet discussion standard plz.?
u mad?
in my friend group we have a guy we describe as “default {name}”, in order to differentiate him from the other {name}s in the group. He’s a cisgender heterosexual white christian male (a rarity among us). Mostly it’s a joke, because we all agree that being mildly offensive is kinda funny, but it’s also a commentary on society at large. If you’re online talking to people you know nothing about, it’s a safe assumption (christian less and less as the years go by though).
It is absolutely ok to not be “default settings”. You’re not doing anything wrong by not confirming to that standard. I didn’t decide what default is, I learned it by observing society.
appreciate your insight! i fully agree with everything except perhaps:
You’re not doing anything wrong by not confirming to that standard.
still a correct statement on its own, but needs the clarification that it’s not chill to mock or hamper the efforts of that “Othered” community to subvert or reclaim their repression. while it’s certainly not wrong for a woman to conform to the patrilineal system, it’s not chill to “gotcha”-laugh at this woman for using the same name she and her mother have owned their whole lives.
it’s a very Rush Limbaugh-esque “you claim to he a feminist, yet you live under the forces and histories of the patriarchy, curious 🧐” joke, in that it’s not wrong, it’s just intensely and obviously comes from a place of ignorant disrespect.
I think the point of the joke might be more that an attempt to start a matrilineal naming scheme is foiled somewhat from the fact that the maiden name of the mother is derived from her father, i.e. you can’t escape that the last names all come from patrilineal sources for generations.
… just pass on the mother’s name to your children? Eventually it matters as much as that your ancestor was a smith. (and that’s besides the “not everyone wants to lose their name on marrying” point)
…yeah? exactly what i said? i don’t disagree at all except you possibly ignore that the butt of the joke is the woman, normalizing the very repression she attempts to subvert. it’s undermining and mocking the woman’s identity intentionally by asserting the dominance of patriarchal schemes over her own life and decision. (perhaps unintentionally, but nevertheless really.)
in America, historically Black names are also historically dominated by historical slavery and white supremacy (different functions, but the end result of subjugation is parallel). i would post a similar comment hating on a post mocking Black folk for resisting these patterns as well! :)
If a woman is committed to the idea, she could break the patrilineal naming convention simply by creating herself a new last name, and encouraging her children to take that name instead of their father’s.
This is true, but who decided that a woman keeping her maiden name is just using her father’s name? That idea comes from patriarchy. If I inherit something at birth, like a rare coin, it’s mine, whether it came from my mom or dad. The same goes for a woman’s name—it’s hers because she’s had it since birth. Suggesting she doesn’t own it, and must create a new name to escape, reinforces the idea that only patrilineal identity matters and undermines her autonomy in making that choice.
The important part is that it is her choice to do so or not. My suggestion is just one possible solution that could be used by those who choose to do so. I’m not pretending that it’s the only solution, nor am I pretending that it’s even the best solution.
love it :)
yes, though I think a naming system like this isn’t an individual act as much as occurs on the level of social norms and rules; a single individual won’t introduce a competing matrilineal naming system just by convincing her children into it…
Either way, I somewhat agree with the criticism of the joke that the last name coming from a patrilineal origin isn’t a gotcha, though maybe that’s actually the point of the meme since Homelander is the one posing it as a gotcha (and he’s a villain, so it would make sense to symbolize a misogynist with him). The name would still be inherited in a matrilineal way even if it started as a patrilineal name further up the chain.
I guess there is a question of whether the name’s origin matters at all when we are concerned with the patriarchial nature of a practice where women lose their family names and men don’t. That practice being disrupted is what matters, not what the actual name is.
Notice they didn’t use ‘maiden name’ because then the joke falls apart
I assume they did mean “maiden name”, how else does the joke make sense? The mom’s maiden name is the maternal grandfather’s last name …
You mean their father’s last name?
Does the bank ever ask you for your mother’s father’s last name as opposed to her maiden name? Sounds like a scene from a wes anderson film.
Homelander has the best guy resting bitch face I’ve ever seen.
I’m noes! People are doing things I didn’t agree to again.
I know this is a shitposting community but these are, every goddamn one of them, the dumbest possible takes you could have opened a new year with.
A quarter century into the new millenium and our general intelligence level hasn’t budged since the ice age.
I think it’s gone down tbh. The average human is not experiencing the same novel problems that require troubleshooting and focus. A lot of thought is just decision based these days.
According to the little arrows on our comments, there were like, two people really angered by this thought that some people think the rest of people are stupid. It’s amazing.
Make up your own surname to assert dominance. Or go by your internet handle.
Reminder that surnames didn’t exist before the middle ages, you just had a singular name that people shouted to get your attention. Since you lived in a community of several dozen people, you didn’t need to do much to differentiate yourself from the other “John” in your town because everyone knows each other. You lived and died just as “John” and would be remembered by your kids for a generation if you were lucky. There was no need to keep track of genealogy, you were a pair of hands and legs, you were supposed to get out there and plow that field and that’s all your baron or lord cared about.
But somewhere after the black plague ravaged Europe and we lost a sizeable chunk of the human population, suddenly workers became in high-demand. Industrialist lords and landowners suddenly didn’t have people smithing their horse shoes or making their bread, so they had to go poach people from far away towns and suddenly workers had power and options. As a way to get noticed for your family’s tradeskill, you would have been wise to advertise this to wealthy employers, the best way was to attach your trade to your name. You were now John Baker to differentiate yourself from John the Drunkard if anyone came looking to hire someone who could cook bread.
So surnames are advertising. It’s all it’s ever been. There’s nothing ancient and special about your name, it was just how your ancestors tried to make a buck.
🤓
To be fair, even before the plagues, workers were way in demand (and hence every single adult that reaches majority, or youth that wishes to pretend). Throughout the agrarian age, societies suffered from a stark labor shortage, which is why even bastard kids were not too frowned upon, and even those with disabilities were sought for anything they might be able to do.
That all changed in the industrial age, when fewer people were necessary to run machines that did work.
In modern day, this is an issue with religious movements (cults whether dangerous or not) who decide to create their own commune. Either the intentional community has too few people to complete all the necessary tasks, or enough that renegade behavior (corruption, antisocial behavior, etc.) becomes a problem, since security details cannot help but become political.
/🤓
Unpopular opinion: Last names are inherently patriarchal and so is marriage
Unpopular opinion: Patriarchy as defined by feminists is a nebulous and unfalsifiable concept that can be replaced by “the devil” without changing the meaning of the sentence it’s used in.
Also, serious posting in a shitposting thread.
I donno but this sounds like something the devil would say
you could swap the subject of criticism with “the devil” in any sentence and it would be the same though?
“the devil (covid-19) caused a pandemic”
“the devil (billionaires) is pushing more people into poverty”
“the devil (adhd) is making me procrastinate doing the dishes”
“the devil (you) has really weak criticisms of feminism, since if only he read about it, he’d realise he can see and feel the effects of the patriarchy everywhere. and the way he talks right now makes me believe he only knows the concept from strawman memes”
In these examples you used “the devil” as a placeholder for explainable phenomena with varying causes, none of them being unfalsifiable. Now consider the following sentence:
“The wage gap is causes by the patriarchy” – Surely there are no complex causes being substituted by a nebulous concept here, is it?
the concept is only “nebulous” to people who are talking out of their asses, when they haven’t even bothered to look past the word definition and strawman memes about the patriarchy
man, please, stop making yourself look like a fool, go read about it, it’s really not that hard
none of us would judge you @[email protected] if you picked up and perused this free copy of Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks right now. in fact that would be really cool.
“i refuse to listen to what feminists say, and because of that i have no concept of their actual positions and it’s all really nebulous and confusing to me” —that user
Which feminists are you even referring to exactly? There are different waves of feminism and different strands (like liberal feminism, marxist feminism, black feminism, …). Either you picked a few straw(wo)men who have a shitty definition or you are confused by the variety of definitions and approaches and that confuses you.
my comment was about @rooty who said “Patriarchy as defined by feminists is a nebulous and unfalsifiable concept” not you or anyone else. because of course, people who actually read any wave or subsect of feminism will immediately find feminists have a whole host of concrete and evidenced conceptions of the term patriarchy.
i was seeking to laugh at @rooty who has clearly never done any work to listen to any feminist and gets all their undestanding of it from straw man memes.
it seems people like yourself are misunderstanding my language to mean the opposite, sorry for any confusion.
Sorry, I didn’t read the username and thought it’s rooty again
ohh that might explain some of the other downvotes too lol
yep and it’s good that opinion stays unpopular
Okay well, whats the benefit to the male?
An aspect of patriarchy is patrilineality. Belonging to your fathers lineage rather than your mother’s or even being stripped of your heritage and being a mere adjunct to your husband isn’t materially benefiting the man but lays the ground for that
the patriarchy doesn’t benefit the male. in fact, most men are overall harmed by the forces of patriarchy.
the goal of patriarchy is to subjugate and repress an “other,” that is, women. it’s true that patriarchy gives privelege to men, but equating privilege and benefit is to misunderstand the core components of the system.
Why would that be the case? How would marriage between two equals in a non-patriarchy be patriarchal? What about marriage between two women? What about last names in a society of beings without gender?
I think you didnt mean ‘inherently’
is that an unpopular opinion, or just a well-known fact?
Maybe all my downvotes come from people who say it’s the latter? I’ve been in bubbles that see it as a well known fact, I’ve talked to left leaning people who didn’t. Maybe it’s just a wording I used to attract attention, maybe not, we will never know for sure.
my instance doesn’t show downvotes, so all I see is that you have lots of upvotes 😊
I suspect downvotes would come from people who disagree that marriage is patriarchal, tbh - I think a lot of people don’t really understand patriarchy or feminism, so they might thing you are being hyperbolic, like claiming marriage is akin to beating your wife or something.
Or they could just be responding merely to the language and not even the content, i.e. by talking about patriarchy at all or posing it in social terms they might think you have been duped by woke propaganda.
Whether it’s an unpopular opinion just depends on what crowd you are in. I think a lot of people understand marriage is a patriarchal institution, that a patrilineal naming scheme is part of that patriarchy, etc., but I’m sure there are lots of people who think that is false, or over-stated, or who aren’t entirely sure what ten-dollar words like “patrilineal” actually mean, lol.
my instance doesn’t show downvotes, so all I see is that you have lots of upvotes 😊
In that case: the majority is still upvotes so I’m not complaining or anything :)
I think the downvotes come from a semantic disagreement, based on a strong or weak definition of the word ‘inherent’.
huh, that sounds like a rationalization, a way to find a problem with a critique that sounds more defensible or reasonable than defending patriarchy
Last names are inherently patriarchal
They’re worse, they’re inherently capitalistic. They were made to promote someone’s business or trade in the days just after the Black Plague when skilled workers were highly sought-after.
If you live in America or Europe, your last name is an advertisement. That’s all they’ve ever been.
Sigh. Lemmy in a nutshell.
Except that it’s older than that, even in Europe, there was quite some time between the Black Plague and capitalism. But they originate in China where they are much older. Sure, capitalism is composed of many aspects and maybe China had some aspect associated with capitalism back than as well and I’m not too sure about the connection between Europe and China regarding last names. I donno.
In The Second Sex, De Beauvoir quotes Engels as he argues that patriarchy (as we know it today) likely arose with the advent of private property. So there is some relation to capitalism (of which private property is a core component), but it goes back way further than the Black Plague and marking it down to “trade promotion” is over-simplistic at best in that it’s wayyyy worse than that.
What you are saying is that private property laid the basis for patriarchy and (much later) for capitalism
That is what I am quoting De Beauvoir and Engels as saying, yes.
that’s right, promoting your trade is capitalism folks
On Spain we have two last names, one for the father other for the mother.
And while before the father’s was always the first, since many years couples of newborn babies can choose the order of the surnames.
Is the latter your mother’s first or second last name?
First last name. Example:
Mother: Maria García Perez
Father: Juan Rodríguez Domínguez
Their kids can be named:
Adela García Rodríguez
or
Adela Rodríguez García
Ans once selected the order with the first kid all the kids from the same couple must follow the same order.
So it’s the mother’s father’s name, or the names of both grandfathers. Still patrilineal
I mean, if you go that way, when surnames where created in the middle ages it was the name of the man.
All spanish surnames ending in -ez mean “son of”. And it’s always male names.
But change has to start at some point.
Some cultures trace heritage both patrilineal and matrilineal, so taking the first last name of your father as your first and the second last name of your mother as your second would be that.
I’m curious, which country does it like that? Seems pretty interesting.
Yeah I’ve always thought it was weird that women are supposed to give up their identity to a man to be married. I’m not really sure why hyphenated names aren’t as popular in the western world or why people don’t occasionally chose to take the woman’s name. I know that women don’t have to change their names, but then often you’ll have the kids as the same name as the father anyway but not the mother. So I’ve heard many women say that they did it so their kids would share their last name.
Hell, I don’t even like my father. But my name is who I am and I like it.
Hyphenated names are too long. One of my good friends has one and people just refer to him and his siblings by the initials of their last name, like “Tim MP”
How do hyphenated names work after the next generation? Seems like that would get out of hand quickly when people with hyphenated last names start having kids with each other.
The way that I’m gonna do it is whoever has the coolest/most unique last name is the one whose name is adopted. If they’re both equally cool, then hyphenated it is.
So, just do what a few couples in my circle of friends did and use her last name after marriage?
I would think it would be just as weird to collectively switch to matronymic last names as a society. It would make more sense to me if couples just decided which name they liked better and went with that, be it coming from the man or woman. So a more even split of that sort of pattern is what I mean.
Yeah, that’s what people do here in Germany.
Ah I didn’t know that! Interesting!
It is weird because we as a civilization believe women are persons and corporations are not. And sooner or later, molotovs will be theown in support of this notion, since silence is being interpreted as consent.
Whoops. That was my outside voice.🪀🪀💣🪀
Sorry I’m not understanding what you mean
The reason women take their husband’s name is because they’re property, and rights to their person transfers from their father to their husband.
That’s it.
And right now (at least in the States, maybe in some parts of Europe) there are large far-right movements trying to return society to those days.
Find your crew or your fam, and have them give you your given name. Then choose your surname. Break free.
Ah ok yeah your first comment was sarcastic then haha
with hyphenated names: what would the children do then? you can’t keep adding more and more names like that (both practically and legally in some cases). serious question because I’ve also thought about that
In Canada, you legally pick up to 2 of your parents’ last names for your last name
My name is Maximus Decimus Arnold Garfield Butcher Smith Hendrickson Meridius, and you shall have my name.
You clearly haven’t met Brazilians
I think it varies with culture, but from my understanding, usually they take the first name of the two hyphens for their own marriage.
So you have John Doe and Jane Smith. They hyphenate their names as Doe-Smith and the children do as well.
Say they have a daughter Sally Doe-Smith who meets Tim Johnson-Star. So they marry and hyphenate their names as Johnson-Doe. Both Smith and Star get dropped.
Yes, in examples like this, it still ends up as getting rid of the maternal aspect of the lineage in the very end…but the point is still that both parties are keeping part of and changing another part of their names. It’s not an all or nothing total switch of identity. The lineage is male, but the here and now is an equal compromise of identity.
Not enough to balance things out
Maybe not quite, but iml it’s certainly leaps and bounds better that altering your identity entirely in submission of a partner.
Yeah, my mom said she didn’t care about taking my dad’s last name, that it didn’t matter since, in her words “women don’t have last names anyway” they are just a way of tracing men’s family lines.
