Jody, Jodi, Jodie, Jodee, Jodey, Joedee, Joedey, Joedi, Joedie, Joedey

March 10, 2016 6:19 PM

Jody Rosen explores what it felt like growing up a boy with a "girl's" name, a Jody instead of a "Colin" when Jody is both the "country girl doll" star of 1970s toy commercials and "the wily sexual scavenger" woman-stealing man of traditional call-and-response, R & B classics, and military chants.

Duana, the "Name Nerd" at Lainey Gossip, on the "pink ghetto":

This trend or warning implies that girls’ names are worth less, and that a boys’ name once it ‘goes girl’ is no longer useful for boys, because they might catch girl germs or weakness or some other unexplained issue. . . .

Sometimes people tell me they wanted their daughter to have a ‘strong’ name so they chose a male name, and I get infuriated, because there is nothing weak about Margaret or Rachel or Vanessa or Sonia. And in fact, gender-neutral names don’t exist, because as soon as they start getting used for girls, the names drop out of the boy zone altogether. When was the last time you heard of a young boy named Mackenzie or Taylor?

There is nothing about a traditionally-feminine-sounding name that makes it inferior, and I really, really hate the implication that only by having a male name can you be on an even playing field. As long as we endorse that idea, we’re implying that anything non-male is somehow not as good or as ‘strong’. . . . If they’re saying he has a girl’s name, why is that bad? . . . the truth is I don’t see the names freely flowing between the genders, just tumbling one way into a supposed ‘pink ghetto’. I would love nothing more than to see male Sarahs, Kims, and Emmas start to equal things out, but until then, let’s avoid the implication that any ‘girl name’ requires fleeing in the opposite direction.

What's in a name?

posted by sallybrown (14 comments total)

I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named "Sue."
posted by Fizz at 6:59 PM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

he could always say it's "Joe D."
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:05 PM on March 10, 2016

Jodie is a good name for people who are free.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:08 PM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Also for mellow dopes who are susceptible to the touch of Satan.
posted by AndrewInDC at 8:40 PM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

This trend or warning implies that girls’ names are worth less, and that a boys’ name once it ‘goes girl’ is no longer useful for boys, because they might catch girl germs or weakness or some other unexplained issue. . . .

That's interesting, and certainly true of Hillary and whatnot, but it doesn't hold up for Jody. On the contrary:

According to the Social Security thingy, the name Jody went totally extinct (!?!) in 1997 after spending six years exclusively male, and more than a decade before that as mostly male. And it was only on the charts -- both the girls' and the boys' -- since the mid-forties, with the girls getting a scant two-year lead. They peaked almost simultaneously, in 1970 (2201 girls) and 1971 (1703 boys).

Jodie was exclusively female (outside of tiny anomalies in 1920, 1923, and 1969), starting as a slightly less popular variant of girl-Jody in the fifties. Incorporating it into the above makes boy-Jody roughly half as popular as girl-Jody+Jodie, but that's still pretty even as names go. Jodie eventually outnumbered and outlasted girl-Jody, but still died off a year before boy-Jody.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:13 PM on March 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

I have a friend named Jody. When I first met him, through the quirks of subcultural assumptions I assumed his name had a funky spelling, and for this reason his name appeared in my brain spelled "Joady." You missed one.
posted by rhizome at 9:52 PM on March 10, 2016

I don’t see the names freely flowing between the genders

Unlike in Tibet, as per this classic AskMe.
posted by progosk at 11:56 PM on March 10, 2016

It's the cooties model of naming; femininity contaminates a name, destroying its masculine credibility, hence names like Ashley and Lesley get irrevocably feminised. It comes from a patriarchial view of femininity as being lesser than masculinity.

I wonder whether this will change if/when gender becomes less significant in one's identity as a person. When gender-neutral pronouns (like the Scandinavian hen) get adopted, nonbinary gender identity becomes, if not exactly common, not unheard of, and the way we relate to people becomes more gender-invariant (except perhaps in dating, but that's nowhere as dominant a part of the human experience as pop songs and films would suggest), whether it'll be more common to see feminine names become masculinised because, damn it, Eleanor is a good name and it's good enough for my son.
posted by acb at 4:52 AM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I grew up as Joe-B, thanks to a need for differentiation between Joe-me and Mr. Joe from next door, who dutifully showed up whenever my mother, after failing to get a response from our come-home bell, would cup her hands and yell "Joooooooooe!"

"Sorry, Joe, I was trying to track the darn kid down," she'd apologize, and Mr. Joe would grin and head home.

So my middle name, an arcane and unguessable word that starts with B, ends with P, and contains a central silent K, was invoked and I became Joe-B for some neighbors and Jody for others, particularly to the careworn farm wife who lived on the steer farm across the road from our house who, when seeing me in my usual self-destructive bouts of playing with the electric fence, would call "Jooooooody!" until I'd guiltily approach the door to her summer kitchen.

"Jody, whyn't you stop giving yourself a thrill on the wire for a moment and tell me some more of yer beauty-full stories about Mars?"

It never occurred to me that Jody might be a gender-specific name, partly because I was a part-time Jody, partly because Jody on Family Affair was a boy, and largely because I came from a family with male Carrolls and Danas, so such things always seemed to be just names that certain people just had, not limited to boys or girls.
posted by sonascope at 6:03 AM on March 11, 2016

Jodie aint gonna be no daddy or doctor,
All Jodie is, is a part-time lover.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 8:00 AM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm just doing my job.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 8:06 AM on March 11, 2016

This is a complicated issue, naming conventions, and lines like this from the gossip site:

I would love nothing more than to see male Sarahs, Kims, and Emmas start to equal things out, but until then, let’s avoid the implication that any ‘girl name’ requires fleeing in the opposite direction.

give a pretty solid sense that the writer hasn't had children. It's all academic and very punk rock to think, I'm going to name my son Beatrix and my daughter Frank to fuck the patriarchy, until you're faced with actually assigning a name to this little being who fits into the palm of your hand and can barely open their eyes. It quickly condenses some of the rarefied bullshit we believe about social conventions when you remember how poorly treated you were over your slightly weird middle name or what have you as you're thinking about your kid's name.

Gendering names isn't even the big problem. The big problem is when people don't think about all the permutations that multi-part names can be reorganized into to form a grave insult. Like when my sister, whose last name is constantly mispronounced "hymen," almost named her first daughter Erin Zoe, until someone in the family pointed out that some demonic youth would have eventually discovered and popularized the nickname "E. Z. Hymen."
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 10:12 AM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I, for one, get irrationally* irritated when I come across a successful or notable man with a woman's name. "Oh! Wow – I've never heard of this woman landscape designer. She's won so many awards, I should look up her work...goddammit, it's a man again!" I once thought about trying to see what the relationship between successful men who have women's names and successful women bearing the same name. Sort of a take on the girl-to-Dave ratio. But you'd have all these impossible variables including when is a name a "girls" name and who is "successful" yaddayaddayadda.

*That's how desperate I have been for women heroes and success stories. But, it has happened enough times that it's actually a thing for me. A petty thing.
posted by amanda at 3:13 PM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sure, ladies are likely to get more job interviews with a "male" sounding name, books published (hi, J.K. Rowling), etc. On the other hand, various people think she needs to sign up for the draft and have a male roommate in college dorms.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:01 PM on March 11, 2016