Portia de Rossi Takes Her Hus — , Er, Wife's, Name

I'm missing something. Either that, or Portia de Rossi's gone badly off the radical feminist reservation:

If you take your husband's name, you must be dependent and incompetent. If you don't, of course, you're a ball-busting feminist — or that even more pitiable creature, someone without a husband at all. And, in most cases, you still have a name that came down to you patrilineally anyway. Luckily, there is one woman who's thrown off the chains of the nomenclature patriarchy and received only praise for it. I speak, of course, of Lady Gaga.

Sheesh.



Gaga's an open-borders extremist so what does she know? Anyway, the screencap's to The Daily Caller, which links to The Daily Mail, "Portia de Rossi to become Mrs DeGeneres as she takes Ellen's name."

These two make one high-profile Prop 8 couple, dontcha know? (They were married August 2008, months before the November election, in Beverly Hills). But I'm wondering if this is some statement on the consolidation of the post-feminist world. Things do change:

Taking your husband's surname, traditionally, makes you an auxiliary, an adjunct, the cute female sidekick, a spinoff, a derivative, Mrs. Him. But for some women now, it's an assumption, rather than a loss, of power -- shared power. "Instead of feeling like I 'belong' to my husband now that I have his last name, I feel like we are on equal footing, says Amy Owings, 34, a executive assistant in Overland Park, Kan. "We are both Owings, so now I claim him as much as he claims me."

Still, I'm out of the loop on lesbian culture. Is it a pathbreaking thing for gay women to adopt the dominant cultural identification of the patriarchical Mr. and Mrs. nomenclature? No doubt Catherine MacKinnon's steaming over this: "Feminism stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage, and sexual harassment."



RELATED: "Portia de Rossi: A Gay Staunch Feminist."