Feminism's woman problem

Mistaking catty anger for philosophy

I’m not sure if you were aware of this, because I wasn’t, because ultimately I make it a point to really not care about anything celebrities do, but it turns out that last month Jennifer Lopez changed her name to Jennifer Affleck after getting married to, well, obviously you know who she got married to. This is surprising for a number of reasons, chief among them that famous women simply do not do this, particularly when their maiden name is the functional equivalent of a $500 million cashier’s check. Plus, we can all admit it, “J.Lo” has a nice ring to it, but “J.Aff” sinks like a lead brick, so I dunno what her next move is.

As a rock-ribbed, inflexible Catholic conservative, I find this sort of traditionalism very encouraging. You do have to consider the possibility that Mrs. Affleck just did this for no other reason than it was a cool thing to do; conservatism is sort of the edgy thing these days, after all, and at any rate they did get married in Las Vegas, and this is the bride’s fourth marriage, so let’s not all get too heady about it just yet, fingers crossed though they may be. Still, it’s nice.

One person who was not happy about Mrs. Affleck’s revised Form 1120S was the writer Kate Cohen, who at the Washington Post this week claimed that Jennifer Affleck’s decision to take her husband’s name was…wait for it…sexist!

Every choice to conform to sexist social norms makes it harder for other women to choose otherwise. Every woman who has plastic surgery or Botox or gets her hair dyed or, yes, changes her name makes it harder for other women not to.

Uh, I’m not sure that’s how it works. But quite beyond that, this just underscores something that many critics of feminism have noted for many years: Feminists ultimately have a problem with women, not men; their ultimate grievances lay with the fact that women have free agency and often make choices that feminists personally do not like.

It seems clear that’s the basis in which Ms. Cohen’s objections are grounded. I mean, look, most women prefer to take their husband’s name. It’s really not hard to figure out why. Ms. Cohen refers to this phenomenon as “a naming convention based on a literally medieval notion that wives are legally subordinate to their husbands,” which seems beside the point, especially in this case; I mean, it is quite obvious that Mrs. Affleck holds a pretty distinct positional advantage over her better half, being worth about four times as much as him and enjoying a global celebrity cachet that even a highly celebrated actor/director will never enjoy. Whatever else J.Aff is to her husband, “subordinate” is not it.

You will likely not find very many women, even those who take their husband’s last name, who want to be “subordinate,” at least in the Carolingian sense. But also, so what? Who cares? Hell, maybe the Afflecks do have some sort of manorial thing going on or something. Does it really matter? I suppose it does to feminists who have a deadline to meet, but to the rest of us it’s, you know, whatever. It’s fine.

Here is the uncomfortable truth that many feminists really do not like to admit: Given the choice, it seems that many women do prefer something resembling a more “traditional” life than whatever it is that feminists envision for them. There are a few decades of solid data on this front; even given the extraordinarily generous family leave/work policies, for instance, many women in affluent Western European countries opt for what Jennifer Kingson in 1988 dubbed “the mommy track,” and there’s meaningful data in the U.S. to indicate as much as well.

And that’s okay. If a woman wants to prioritize her career over a family, sure, go ahead. If she wants to do the opposite, that is okay too. The issue for feminists is that a whole lot of women—most of them, really—seem to prefer the latter to the former.

We can sit around puzzling out why women tend to gravitate toward those life choices, of course, but if your first instinct is to dub this choice an intrinsically bad one, you probably don’t really care either way. In any event, feminism should probably figure out how to resolve its problems with women before it purports to try and help them any further. Many happy returns to Mr. and Mrs. Ben Affleck!