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.
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?
“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
(edit: by “that user” i mean @rooty, if that wasn’t clear? @shneancy@lemmy.world you are totally correct)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Been divorced twice, neither of them gave much of a shit and never changed their surname back. My wife’s Filipino and was very proud to take my surname. Ran right out and changed all her documents. Her enthusiasm was touching!
I’m in the opposite place! Met my dad when I was 20 and he really wanted me to change to his surname. Sorry dad, that would have felt really weird.
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.
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.
It is weird because we as a civilization believe women are persons and corporations are not. And sooner or later, Molotovs will be thrown in support of this notion, since silence is being interpreted as consent.
Whoops. That was my outside voice.🪀🪀💣🪀
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
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.
