Hello, my name is John Doe-Wifeowner

There is nothing wrong with a bride choosing to hyphenate her last name to the groom's in order to represent the union they are about to make. There is also nothing wrong with an independent woman choosing to keep her own last name.

I agree that there are some feminists who fight for the superiority of women instead of their equality; perhaps it's some kind of gender based affirmative action for all the ways men have wronged them in the past. However, I don't believe that sharing last names instead of trading out your identity qualifies as seeking dominance over the male species.

It's not hard to see where the idea of "auto-enslavery to THE MAN" comes from. The tradition of women taking men's last names comes from when women were property and you could buy one for a couple of cows. After making them take your last name, you could use your labelmaker to add a "property of ____" sticker to them, or tattoo your name on their arm, or why not just go ahead and brand them.

Men who don't have a problem with women not taking the man's name are either able to put themselves in the woman's shoes and realize that they wouldn't want to change their name either, or they realize that love shouldn't be based on a name. "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet"

Perhaps the issue hasn't been engineered to make men LOOK slightly chauvinistic, perhaps you force your name on a female because you ARE chauvinistic, and after silencing the woman's opinion, people are able to see that.

As far as your norm explanation goes, there are different types of norms. There are natural norms which stem from the way people naturally do things, like walking on your feet, sleeping while lying down, etc. You can act against these norms, but it's usually more trouble than it's worth. There are biological norms. Men have man parts, women have lady parts. Men don't have wombs, sorry. There are law norms, like wearing clothes. Finally, there are societal norms, like eating with silverware.
Not changing your last name is breaking a societal norm. It's about as "bad" as having a female pay for a date or, dare I say, ask a male out.

Also, not all societal norms are good. Slavery used to be a societal norm.
John Doe in the south without slaves was basically saying,
---" I do love America, but not enough to carry out a societal norm."
---"But John, slavery is a time-honored tradition of good housekeeping and healthy farming."

There's nothing wrong with being the provider or the nurturer. But only if that's what you WANT to do. When two people want the same position, and only one gets it, the other person loses and gets a Silver.

The downside to having a hyphenated last name is that it becomes longer. However, with the increasing population a longer last name leads to more combinations, so we'll have less people out there who are all named Jane Doe.
Plus, who wouldn't want a punctuation mark in their name?

Sidenote: In a gay marriage do both parties keep their own names, or would you become Wood-Rice.

Could you understand that perhaps some women wouldn't want to change their last name from Smith to Hooker. Changing your last name is a pain. You become harder to find for anyone who wasn't aware of the change. You have to perfect a new signature. You'll most likely have to order all new sets of monogrammed towels and other initialized objects. Changing your name also often includes getting a new email addresses and it's a legal matter, so you've got to talk to the social security people and probably fill out forms in triplicate, crossing all your 't's and dotting your lowercase 'j's.

You obviously wouldn't take the woman's last name, but you're clearly not ok with her deciding not to take yours.

A woman deciding not to abandon her family name has nothing to do with selfish pride; however, a man forcing her to give that up to spread his name, does.

Welcome to Wood vs Willis

Hello, and welcome to the blog. Wood vs. Willis is a blog experiment set up by Benjamin Wood and David Willis so that the fascinating arguments they have can be shared with the public.
Although many of the views posted will represent personal beliefs, there will also be items posted simply to provide a counter argument.
Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics for us to discuss.
Chances are, we aren't experts on the topics we'll be discussing. So just sit back and enjoy getting slapped in the face with other people's opinions; because that's what blogs are about.