Reading about the latest allegations against Woody Allen by his adoptive daughter, I once more stumbled over the name giving customs in the US and other Anglophone countries.
That woman's name is Dylan.
Dylan.
As someone who did not grow up in an Anglo-Saxonian cultural context, this strikes me as extremely dissonant and hard to swallow as I would always think of Dylan as a guy's name. I'm not gay, and I can't imagine fornicating with a girl while I whisper in hear ear "Yeah, Dylan. Suck me dry". Why in the world would parents, who are not some lunatic gender feminists, give their boy or girl a name that cannot be clearly identified with one sex? In Germany, it was only until a few years back that administrative bodies demanded that the first given name of the child must be unambiguously male or female in order to secure the welfare of the child. That is not the case anymore, which is okay because I don't think that the government should dictate how you can baptize your child.
However, for some reason I always shudder when I hear of a guy whose name is Ashley or Lindsay. Total mindfuck. Apparently, some of these names were clearly male in the past but then became common for girls as well.
It also seems that this trend for unisex names occurs in some cultures as well (Japan, Turkey, indigenous tribes in the Americas) while it is totally unheard of in others (Germany, Finland, Spain).
Does anyone here have a unisex name? What is it like?
That woman's name is Dylan.
Dylan.
As someone who did not grow up in an Anglo-Saxonian cultural context, this strikes me as extremely dissonant and hard to swallow as I would always think of Dylan as a guy's name. I'm not gay, and I can't imagine fornicating with a girl while I whisper in hear ear "Yeah, Dylan. Suck me dry". Why in the world would parents, who are not some lunatic gender feminists, give their boy or girl a name that cannot be clearly identified with one sex? In Germany, it was only until a few years back that administrative bodies demanded that the first given name of the child must be unambiguously male or female in order to secure the welfare of the child. That is not the case anymore, which is okay because I don't think that the government should dictate how you can baptize your child.
However, for some reason I always shudder when I hear of a guy whose name is Ashley or Lindsay. Total mindfuck. Apparently, some of these names were clearly male in the past but then became common for girls as well.
It also seems that this trend for unisex names occurs in some cultures as well (Japan, Turkey, indigenous tribes in the Americas) while it is totally unheard of in others (Germany, Finland, Spain).
Does anyone here have a unisex name? What is it like?
