A Portrait of the Dumbass as an Old Man

It's The Only Thing That's Fair

So I have over the years proposed a solution to a social problem that has generally been met with a response of total dismissal. I'm kind of curious as to why this idea just seems to bounce off of peoples minds.

The problem is, to foster gender equality:

1. What surname should a woman take when she marries?
2. How should the children be named?

The answer to part 1 is easy. Assuming the husband's name is obviously patriarchal, so the woman should keep her own surname.

So then how do you name the kids? The hypenated name thing obviously is bad tech and doesn't work -- just in the 3rd generation you'd have 7 hyphens in your last name. So my universally rejected proposal is, have the male offspring take the father's last name and the female offspring take the mother's last name. So you kind of have male and female lines. Males born without a known father would take the mother's surname, as they do now. Genderly challenged would be allowed to choose when they turn 18, maybe?

You might say, well, that puts children in the same family with different last names. Yes, it does, but that is not uncommon now when people are on their 2nd and 3rd marriages.

So my daughters would all be Grieve's or Sohan's, looking back as far as I know in their grandmothers. It would actually give a purpose to genealogy, which I generally find to be pretty much uninteresting.

So why is this idea so universally dismissed? It's The Only Thing That's Fair.

No biking today, roads were wet, took a nice long walk instead.