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SECONDARY DOMINANCE
how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
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Thursday, March 18, 2004 :::
NOMENCLATURE
Matt Yglesias brings up a topic of interest to me by way of a Katie Roiphe article: how should naming and name-changing conventions work in marriage.
He makes the interesting suggestion that we should exert social pressure through shame on people to keep their own names, which is a bit too authoritarian for my taste, but which heads in the right direction. There are several options, and it's important to note that my position is that we should pick one option as the default, but allow specific couples to do whatever they want. The problem is how to change the default without the use of shaming. Here are the options:
1. Women change their names. (this is, of course, the current default)
2. Men change their names. (nice idea in the short term, but eventually ends up just as problematic as option 1.)
3. Hyphenation. (works for one generation, but then gets too complicated to be a practical default algorithm in subsequent generations. It's still an option for specific couples, but I don't think it makes sense as the default system.)
4. The couple chooses whichever name they think is the coolest and the appropriate member of the couple changes his or her name. (feasible, but too difficult to arrive at from our current position since the baggage of past sexist practice would impinge too much on the ability to make the aesthetic choice. I fear that most women would change their names and claim it was for aesthetic reasons when really it was as a result of the sexist status quo.)
5. Each member of the couple keeps his or her own name. I think this is the best choice, but we still have the problem of what to do with the names of potential children. Options:
a. The kids get the father's name. (less bad, but still problematic in the same ways as the current default.)
b. The kids get the mother's name. (less bad, but still problematic in the same way as option 2 above.)
c. The kids get hyphenation. (Parents get to keep their names, but the children are still saddled with the same complications as in option 3 above, not the least of which is the problem of equitably hyphenating two hyphenated names while still resulting in a two-name hyphenated result.)
d. Boys get their father's name, Girls get their mother's name. (Best option yet, but still problematic. You have multiple kids with different names but the same parents. In the case of more children of one sex than of the other the left-out parent might feel cheated by the system. It also reinforces the importance of sex in naming conventions, which is part of what we're trying to abolish -- here it's the whole "separate but equal" thing.)
5e. Parents keep their names. When they have children they choose whichever last name they think is the coolest, or which ever last name carries the cultural heritage that is most likely to need preservation in the face of the dominant culture. For example if Smith and Peterson marry, their children are probably the Petersons. If Peterson and Wong marry (in America), their children are probably the Wongs. It's not a perfect system, since one parent is the only member of the family with a different name, but the couple make the decision as a partnership. It's also much better than option 4 above because the parents retain their names. And it's not complicated -- anybody can figure it out and understand it, and it maximize the occurrence of aesthetically pleasing names in the population. This is my preferred option, and I intend when I marry and have children to follow it if my future wife is amenable. I wouldn't wish my last name on anybody, but I'd like to keep it for myself.
So how do we effect the change of the default while respecting the rights of individuals to use whatever system they prefer? Of this I am not sure. The problem is similar, though, to the problem of fixing the stay-at-home mom issue. Ideally all kids should have a stay at home parent for the first few years of life, but it's unfair to have the default position that Mom is the one who stays at home. The research indicates that in terms of the healthy development of the kids stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads are equally effective, so somehow we need to arrive at a culture where there are no societal assumptions about whose job it is. The resultant society would have a 50/50 distribution of the stay-at-home responsibility, with every couple making the choice based on what works best for them. One of the strategies of getting there is to shame women who stay at home and praise men who stay home, but that requires shaming couples who are doing the best thing for their situation -- and about half of all couples fall into this category.
I don't have the answer, but we need to figure it out, and soon.
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posted by Galen H. Brown at 11:24 AM
Tuesday, March 16, 2004 :::
IMPROVISATION AND TIME
Much as I admire Frederic Rzewski, I have to disagree with his opinion on the difference between Composition and Improvisation as reported by Kyle Gann:
"When I was young, I believed in the statement that 'Improvisation is composition in real time.' But as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that improvisation and composition are not only different mental processes, but even opposed to each other. In composing, you've got to remember every detail you write in the piece. But improvisation is just the opposite: you have to constantly forget what you've just done so you're free to do something else."
I'm certain that Rzewski is a much, much better improviser than I am, but the claim that in improv you have to "constantly forget what you've just done" seems wrong to me. If anything you have to remember better because if you don't maintain some sort of consistency the entire performance will be incoherent. We hear large scale organization when we listen to through-composed music, and thus we expect to hear related types of organization in improvised music. When composing you have the luxury of forgetting what you've already done because you can always go back and check, and you can always re-arrange things chronologically to achieve the desired effect. If you want your improvisation to be effective, though, you have to be smart enough to make the organization work in real-time.
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posted by Galen H. Brown at 11:53 AM
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