Only in the Guardian

I think we can file this pile of unmitigated cack in the bin marked “first world problems.”

An interesting debate was launched on Twitter when @KenSmith asked whether it was about time we dropped “maiden name” for the gender-neutral “birth name”. The tweet said: “Maiden has a ghostly cargo of Victorian sexual anxiety.”

Interesting and Twitter is an oxymoron. Twitter is verbal diarrhoea for the hard of thinking.

However, the matter in hand; it’s not an issue. The term maiden name may hark back to a previous era, but so what? There are important things to be worrying about. This is not one of them. Unless you are a purse-lipped, pompous, self-righteous, right-on hipster who reads (or writes for) the Guardian and gets a fit of the vapours over perceived slights that might be sexist, offensive or some other PC bollocks, because you have nothing important in your life to be concerned about, so write an article that is, frankly, the usual dog whistle for the kind of stuff the left gets its knickers in a knot over.

There was an overwhelming consensus that “maiden name” seems outdated at best and, for most people, sexist.

Outdated, maybe, but sexist? Fuck me, these people are cretins. And, outside of  the rarefied atmosphere of the Twatterati and the Guardian,  you won’t find an overwhelming consensus because normal people are too busy getting on with their lives to be worried about such trivia.

Other people questioned the concept of changing one’s name on marriage at all as outdated. These days the husband sometimes takes the wife’s last name, or they double-barrel it. And with marriage equality, there may be two husbands or two wives, rendering the concept of a “maiden name” even more old-fashioned.

Not this old chestnut. A woman taking her husband’s name on marriage is a convention in the Anglosphere. It is not compulsory. Yet, despite this, the majority still choose to do this. So, er go fuck yourselves. Given that no one is being forced, it isn’t a problem, okay?

My youngest son’s surname comprises my wife’s surname, followed by mine. If a bank ever asks his “mother’s maiden name”, it will be the first half of his own surname. Which doesn’t sound a very secure security question to me.

No, but it says an awful lot about your pretentiousness, doesn’t it?

Not everyone was comfortable with “birth name”. Alternative suggestions included “childhood name”, “native name”, “née”, and “original name” or “previous name” which, as @JonathanWest pointed out, “covers all cases of name change, not just to marriage and not just to birth name”.

Good God almighty. There are people spending energy worrying about this stuff. I suppose it keeps them away from things that might actually matter though…  A bit of a blessing, then.

I agree that “maiden name” is dated and sexist. I hope we can avoid it in the Guardian. Wikipedia favours the style “Jane Smith (born Jane Jones)” and this, when relevant, seems fair enough.

Well, I don’t agree. Nor, for that matter would my mother, who has always been happy with it. Again, the self-righteousness, pomposity and pretentiousness simply oozes off the screen.

It’s sexist to ask a woman (but not a man) her maiden name, or to ask anyone for their mother’s maiden name. It’s none of their business, just its none of their business to know whether a woman is married (“Mrs”) or not (“Miss”) unless she chooses to tell them.

The none of your business argument may well hold sway – and that  would be perfectly reasonable response depending on who is asking and why, but it is not sexist. It simply is not.

“Maiden name” does not take account of equal marriage – a male couple don’t have “maiden names”, a female couple have two, which are probably the names they actually use, so the whole thing becomes as dated as “spinster” or “bachelor girl” – or for that matter “confirmed bachelor” – now sound.

So language evolves and mutates and terms we once used fall out of fashion. So what? That the Anglosphere still uses the name change for women and not men does not make it sexist – because, and get this – women choose to do it, despite there being no compulsion to do so. Women want to take their husband’s name. They are making an overt commitment and it is a statement of love.

That’s the trouble we have here. The cultural Marxists festering over at the Guardian want to undermine everything that gives cohesion to our society and they attack it wherever they can. Here’s the thing; if someone chooses to take their partner’s name upon marriage, it is none of their damned business. The majority, despite the rad fems and dicks like David Marsh, continue to do so. This is a good thing. The Guardianista remain a shouty minority out of touch with the real world.