Gender bender: Did Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively just kill the name 'James'?

A gender expert from a Midwestern university weighs in on the potential effect of a Hollywood couple using a traditional boy's name for their infant daughter.

|
Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds attend The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute benefit gala celebrating "Charles James: Beyond Fashion" on Monday, May 5, 2014, in New York.

A University of Wisconsin expert on feminism says Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively may have just doomed America’s most popular boy’s name, James, by giving it to their daughter.

Mr. Reynolds, who has been very private about his daughter’s birth and name, confirmed the baby’s name on NBC's "Today" show this week. The name had been a point of speculation since her birth just before the New Year.

According to the Social Security Administration’s website, the name James was the nation’s top boy’s name with 4,866,619 babies taking that name from 1914 to 2013. [Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the year range.]  

However, Myra Marx Ferree, an expert in comparative studies of gender, politics and American feminist movements at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in an interview, “If a little girl named James becomes a celebrity, then James will quickly cease to be a boy’s name and become a girl’s name."

“There’s a history of boys' names becoming girls' names. A very clever algorithm used on NameTrends.net which is based on the Social Security Administration’s database of baby names and if you type in a name it shows you a graph in pink and blue of the name’s use throughout decades,” Professor Ferree added. “Once a boy’s name becomes a popular girls’ name, parents just seem to stop using it for boys.”

Ferree said this happens because “one core dictate of masculinity is called ‘avoid femininity’ - don’t be a girl or like one in any way”

“It’s called androcentrism, the idea that things associated with men have higher social value,” she explained. “So it’s not such a big thing for girls to do boy things, but it’s still terrible for boys to do girl things because it devalues you. And it’s homophobic. It’s utter nonsense, of course, but it still goes on.”

According to Ferree, American culture has “gotten rid of the sexism that says girls can’t aspire to do boy things, but not the notion that guys who do girl things are of lesser value.”

“Girl things are still low-value things,” she continued. “Anything we put in the girl category is a bad thing for everyone. The name stuff is a nice indicator of that social value. Therefore, the boys’ name that becomes popularly used for girls is now contaminated with low, girl-value.”

Ferree says that she stumbled upon this gender-bender name phenomenon by accident when her sister, Gertrude, called her to tell her, “Everyone with my name is dead” after looking her name up on NameTrends.

“It caught my interest and I began using the website to track the gender changes in naming,” says Ferree. “It seems obvious from the graphs that parents simply stop giving boys a particular name the moment it is viewed as a girl’s name.  Interestingly, though, the same thing does not seem to happen to girls' names.”

Ferree says boys’ names with an “e” sound at the end are the most vulnerable to gender switching when they began to gain popularity when used for girls. However, it is the celebrity factor that, Ferree believes, marks a boy’s name for social extinction.

“Have some fun with it,” she said. “Type in Leslie and see how it went from exclusively a boy’s name to a girl’s name. Then try and find someone famous with that name right around the trend switch.”

The name Leslie abruptly switches from being a boy’s name to a girl’s name in the early 1950s, which is also when actress Leslie Caron became a superstar after actor/dancer Gene Kelly got her to act in the film, "An American in Paris," in 1951. Other famous films starring the actress include "Lili"(1953) and "Gigi" (1958).

“Go on,” Ferree coached in an interview, “Try Lindsey, Beverly, or Avery. Notice how they begin as a blue line and suddenly switch to pink and shoot up as the blue line just dies?”

Ferree concluded by saying, “If that little girl named James grows up to be famous, then you will see James become a girl’s name.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Gender bender: Did Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively just kill the name 'James'?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/2015/0320/Gender-bender-Did-Ryan-Reynolds-and-Blake-Lively-just-kill-the-name-James
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe