Patriarchy

Tuesday

John Ehrett

Women Talking bludgeons itself with its message

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking begins with a genuinely bone-chilling premise. Within a remote Mennonite “colony,” the women find themselves awakening from drugged slumbers, bearing the marks of violent sexual assaults in the night — blood, bruises, and mysterious pregnancies. Who’s responsible? Based on the promotional material, I expected this to be a story about secrecy and community. And that would be a very compelling story: women trapped in isolation form whisper networks among themselves, which finally reveal their common experience and allow them to bring their attackers to justice. Thematically, this would get at the intractability of human evil, even within “intentional communities,” and the harms of a subculture that treats bodies as shameful.

Monday

Casey Chalk

Why are wives still taking their husbands’ last names?

“Why don’t more men take their wives’ last names?” asked the Washington Post in a recent piece about a Maine husband who took his wife’s name. And why is it less common for a woman to keep her existing last name, which accounted for only about 20 percent of marrying women in 2015? Amazingly, even in our progressive era, women are still choosing to assume the names of their husbands. It’s obvious what side WaPo comes down on. Their article quotes an author who labels women taking their husbands' last names “bizarre and anachronistic.” It quotes the mother of another husband who took his wife's name, praising her son’s decision for “subvert[ing] the dominant paradigm.