By Steve Sailer
07/24/2022
In an age in which women have enough power and influence to punish criticism, it’s important to engage in critical analysis of women. As I’ve often said, painful as it is, criticism tends to make us better. If you are free of criticism, you will tend to give in more and more to your own worst traits.
Hence, I post a lot of op-ed excerpts in which women writers pridefully give vent to feelings that in the past they’d have tried to cover up. For instance, this op-ed is a textbook illustration of female conformism: the urge to do what other women want to do and the urge to make other women do what you want to do…assuming any textbooks dared mention this widespread trait anymore.
From The New York Times op-ed page:
Why It Matters That J-Lo Is Now J-Aff
July 23, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ETBy Jennifer Weiner
Ms. Weiner is a novelist. Her most recent book is “The Summer Place.”
It could be the plot of a Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy: Boy meets girl. Boy and girl date, fall in love, get engaged … but, alas, the nuptials are not to be. Boy and girl go their separate ways, each getting married, having children, getting divorced. They remain the “one that got away” to each other. And then, older and wiser, they fall in love again.
The second-chance romance leading up to last week’s nuptials between the multihyphenate star and the actor and director Ben Affleck was a pandemic gift that kept on giving, for romantics and celebrity gossip addicts alike. Every chapter of the Bennifer 2.0 love story gave us something new to chew on.
The most recent nugget: J. Lo’s decision, first announced in her subscription-only “On the JLo” newsletter, to change her last name. “Love is a great thing, maybe the best of things — and worth waiting for,” she wrote, signing off, “With love, Mrs. Jennifer Lynn Affleck.”
Obviously, this is a romantic gesture in the hope of helping this [very likely doomed] marriage survive. I wish the not so young couple well.
But Ms. Weiner can’t stop herself from publicly getting peeved over how the new Mrs. Affleck’s name change will affect her social status:
Ms. Affleck may be surrendering to the power of love with this, her fourth marriage. But given the cringe-y history behind the practice, a woman taking her husband’s last name feels to me like a submission — a gesture that doesn’t say “I belong with him” so much as “I belong to him.” And at this fraught moment for feminism in America, a woman like the former Jennifer Lopez deciding to change her name feels especially dispiriting.
Sure, taking your husband’s name might be a way of saying “this is for keeps.” But it is also a gesture inextricably rooted in peak patriarchy: specifically, in 11th-century laws of coverture…. When I married for the first time in 2001, I’d been working as a journalist for 10 years and had published my first novel. I had a professional identity, and I’d survived for 31 years with my awful, frequently mispronounced, playground-joke of a surname.
Most of my female friends — doctors, lawyers, nonprofit executives, venture capitalists — kept their names after marriage, too, so I felt zero pressure to change mine:
How’d that work out for you?
not when I married for the first time, and not when I wed my current and final husband in 2016. …
The idea of taking a husband’s last name always made me uncomfortable, reminding me of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Doesn’t everything?
In Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, the handmaids, who exist to carry the babies of the elites, are stripped of anything that identifies them as individuals, including their names. They become just “of” the first name of their commanders: Offred, Ofglen, Ofwarren.
It’s kind of hot, isn’t it?
By changing her name — to Jennifer Muniz in a previous marriage and now to Jennifer Affleck — J. Lo is aligning herself with the majority of women in America. In the United States, only about 20 percent of women have kept their maiden names in recent years, according a 2015 analysis by The Upshot.
Over the last 50 years, not-changing your name has been tried. It didn’t fail completely, but it hasn’t succeeded much either. The truth is that systems of naming individuals by their ancestry and sexual reproduction don’t work well together because everybody has so many ancestors that we quickly get two to the Nth last names. So, different cultures have different customs, none of which is wholly satisfactory.
If you believe a 2003 “Access Hollywood” interview, changing her name to Ben’s has long been J. Lo’s plan. But the early aughts were a different time. In 2003, Donald Trump was a failing casino owner and tabloid mainstay. Covid had not yet arrived to lay bare the sexism of the household division of labor and flush millions of women from the work force. Roe v. Wade was the settled law of the land. …
But these gestures matter. Names confer identity. And married women continue to give theirs up, while married men rarely reciprocate. No matter what else changes, that power imbalance endures. Dr. Rachael Robnett, an associate professor in the psychology department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, told me in a telephone interview that it reflects “men’s greater status and power in relationships, and also in society.”
Or maybe women want fathers to remember and be reminded of who their children are?
In 2016, Dr. Robnett surveyed undergraduates about their perceptions of women who do, or do not, change their surnames after marriage. What she found is that the women who keep their names are perceived as less committed to the relationship, and that their husbands are perceived as less masculine. “Some of the students were very blunt about it — ‘oh, she wears the pants in the relationship,’” Dr. Robnett told me.
Whether or not to take a spouse’s name is a personal decision. But the personal is political — now more than ever, and especially for celebrities. …
Imagine if, in her newsletter, she had said, “I love my husband. Right now, though, women are under attack, and I won’t participate in a tradition that’s historically rooted in women relinquishing their identities and their legal standing. I’m giving my husband my heart, but I’m keeping my name.” …
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.