It turns out that it doesn’t take a lot to have something named after you. Doing a quick google search reveals that you can attach your name to a star, a street or even a sex position. But what about storms?
According the Met Office, storms alternate between male and female names, which are alphabetised each year. They do this to raise awareness of these drastic weather conditions and make them easier to follow on TV and social media platforms. So what do we have this year? The selection includes:
Aileen, Brian, Caroline, Dylan, Eleanor, Fionn, Georgina, Hector, Iona, James, Karen, Larry, Maeve, Niall, Octavia, Paul, Rebecca, Simon, Tali, Victor and Winifred.
Seems pretty fair, right? Well apparently, this wasn’t always the case. As of 1953, storms names weren’t so equally divided, in fact they were only named after women. Girlfriends, female saints, celebrities, and politicians were all used to name various geological disasters, and the use of these names began to spiral (pardon the pun) out of control.
Weathermen - and yes at this time they were men - described the storms using sexist clichés. These digs justifiably angered many female activists and meteorologist, but none more than Roxcy Bolton.
Roxcy Bolton, who died in May last year, was a pioneer and leading women’s rights activist. During her lifetime, she founded Americas fist rape treatment help centre and managed to convince meteorologists to change the naming of storms to both male and female names. Living in Florida, a hurricane prone state, Bolton was fed up of hearing about the destruction that "Betty" had caused, or how typically "temperamental" storm "Hilda" had been, so she decided to do something about it.
At the time, Bolton rightly stated that women “deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster” and as such she decided to work with the National Organisation for Women to change this misogynistic trend. Then finally in 1979, after a long battle, a resolution was passed and men’s names were introduced into the selection pool, with the second hurricane of that year called hurricane Bob.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.