Today's Bitch List

Today I am going to do some general bitching about things I hate. I know. In my last post I said I was going to be grateful for this life I have, but, come on! Some stuff is just really annoying and I have to say something about it.

• First of all, why do we still say "maiden name"? I mean, who in the hell is even a maiden anymore before she gets married anyway? Why can't we say "pre-married name" or "A" name "birth" name or something--anything!--but "maiden name". It is a terrible term regardles of the historical connotations that women are property and should go to their marriage beds unsoiled and all that crap. The world has moved on. This term is antiquated and useless. Let's all just get rid of it!
• This second issue has always kind of bothered me, but what really got me thinking of about it was last summer my husband and I took a walk on Seminary property that had its own cemetary for the Brothers and Sisters who had passed on over the years. Yes, that is a Seminary Cemetary. Many of the sisters who must have been widowed and then joined the "sisterhood" (sorry, I am not Catholic, I don't know the correct terminology) were memorialized on their tombstone as Mrs. Man's First and Last Name, Sister in Christ. Many of the names were very foreign, an indication many of the women were imigrants who must have traveled far and died in this large, wild new place, the United States. So, then, who was this woman, really, who first lost the name she was born with in a very different homeland to her husband, then her husband's name to Christ? She passed through life, first her father's, then her husband's, then Christ's, her life stages marked through ownership by different men. Now, in death, she is only remembered through who owned her last. Sad. So, basically, I hate it when a woman marries, not only does she take her husband's last name (a cultural, patralineal thing that is probably never going to go away) but she is forever after identified as Mrs. His First and Last Name. I can't stand that! Isn't it bad enough that she has to give up her last name, but to completely lose her identity in her husband's? Is that really necessary in this day and age when we are all spouting off about equality and how women are right up there with men rights-wise? (I kept my "birth" name for my second marriage, and hyphenated for the first, but when you do that you get weird looks, and, like Rodney Dangerfield always said, "I get no respect") I can understand that we all want to have a same last name in a family, it has to be someone's to trace family history and all that, so we might as well stick with tradition and use the husband's, but I think we should be beyond women giving up their first names, too. So don't do it. Keep your first name. It is yours, your identity. Keep it.
• Another thing I really hate is the term "pro-life". Who decided that these dead fetus slinging nutcases were "pro-life"? That connotates that anyone who is "pro-choice" is an axe-slinging psycho-killer or must be the opposite, "pro-death". I always have to stop and think when I hear "pro-life" because I am pro-life! I think everyone should live life to the fullest, and I would never kill anything except maybe some ants or flies that got into the house or the mosquito trying to make a snack out of me in in the summer. I don't even like mouse traps, way to inhumane! But I do believe that women have dominion over their own bodies, that accidents or mistakes happen sometimes and women know that there is no way they can carry, much less, raise a child. But they bear the burden in those situations. Women would ultimately be the ones responsible for carrying the child and raising it. So-called "pro-lifers" often chime in, "Well, there is adoption." Pregnancy is a serious health condition!!! Women should not be forced to take on a serious health condition that the gods of chance blessed (or cursed) them with that in and of itself cause them to become too sick to work (or finish school, or anything else) or possibly even die. Women are not Factories. They should not be forced to "cook" a baby for nine months only to give it up when the buzzer sounds. And making a serious, responsible decision not to carry life for whatever reasons is just as valid as deciding to carry life. It doesn't make you selfish. It doesn't make you "pro-death" or an axe-slinging psycho serial killer. So my question is, why do us "pro-choice" people allow the so-called "pro-life" people continue in this deception? Why don't we market a better, more accurate term, "anti-abortion" or "anti-choice"?

Well, that is all the bitching I have for today. I am off to work off some of this aggression on my "Life Glider".