Full Frontal Feminism_ A Young Women's Guide to Why Feminism Matters - Jessica Valenti [46]
What I love about feminists (and this isn’t me tooting our own horns, I swear) is our ability to take sexist crap and transform it into something awesome.
Take Valentine’s Day. Inspired by Eve Ensler’s award-winning play The Vagina Monologues and the resulting campaign to end violence against women, feminists on college campuses across the country started V-Day. On Valentine’s Day, they perform the play, and proceeds generally go to a local organization that fights violence against women. Too cool.
And that’s just one way young women are changing this nonsense around. It gets a little harder when you start talking about the biggest romance beast of them all—weddings. Some feminists are subverting the whole wedding thing as well—planning untraditional ceremonies, keeping their last names (thank god), and asking for donations to gay-rights organizations in lieu of gifts.
Killing Bridezilla
Wedding fever is the scariest disease I have ever seen. The big expensive ring. The big expensive dress. The big expensive party. It’s excess at its best. And note that I didn’t say “marriage fever.” The obsession with getting married has somehow lost the whole rest-of-your-life vibe. For straight folks—especially women—marriage is supposed to be the ultimate destination. You spend your life dating toward it, worrying about it, and then arriving there and paying a hell of a lot of money for it. This isn’t to say I’m against getting married. I think it’s great if people want to make that kind of commitment to each other. What worries me is that young women are being taught that unless you have a Tiffany ring and a Vera Wang dress, your wedding and marriage are crap. And what happens to the women who get married and then find out that marriage is not all it’s cracked up to be? As we’ve already figured out, women are still—still!—doing the majority of housework even if they have full-time jobs. And marriage is still being positioned as the “natural” thing people (women, especially) should want to do. We should want to get married and have the wedding; we should have been planning this since we were little girls and playing “bride” with pillowcases over our heads like veils. And if it never really occurred to us to get married, well, clearly something is amiss.
Not to mention, should anyone really be all that excited about a privilege not everyone has? If marriage is such a super-fantastic institution, shouldn’t all of us be able to partake?
The whole wedding insanity started bothering me when I first watched A Wedding Story on The Learning Channel a couple of years back. It’s a cute show: It shows the bride and groom describing how they met, how the proposal went, and how crazy in love with each other they are. Aw. But the majority of the show is about the planning of the wedding and the wedding itself. It’s not called A Marriage Story, after all. But shouldn’t getting married be about, well, the marriage rather than the party? Not that wanting to have a nice wedding is a bad—or new—thing. But the cash aspect has changed significantly in recent years, and the focus on consumerism versus romance is kind of disturbing.
The show—the word, even—that epitomizes this all? Bridezillas. In case you’re not the trashy pop culture whore I am, Bridezillas is a show that features brides basically losing their shit emotionally while planning their weddings. They go crazy spending money on ridiculous stuff and are major bitches along the way. (Okay, literally, I was watching Bridezillas while writing this, and, I shit you not, it featured a gay male couple. So now I slightly love the show.)
As much as I’d like to say that it’s just the show that makes weddings look more monstrous than they actually are, the stats back up the Bridezillas ideal. A 2006 study showed that the average amount spent on U.S. weddings is almost $28,000. For a party. I’m sorry, but that’s a down payment on a house. Not only is this a ton of money, but the amount couples spend on weddings has