Full Frontal Feminism_ A Young Women's Guide to Why Feminism Matters - Jessica Valenti [47]
Depressingly, 56% of Americans oppose gay marriage.
Again, I’m all for a good party, but do we really have to spend this kind of money to prove to our friends and family how in love we are? And why do we feel compelled to spend so much? To keep up with our friends and the gross celebrity culture that shows folks spending hundreds of thousands on one night? Call me a hopeless romantic, but it seems to me that getting married should be about how much you love someone—not about how hot you look in a $5,000 dress. Just saying.
Of course, commodifying marriage is nothing new. Marriage hasn’t always been about romance and love; it was about business arrangements, joining families together, and the like. And I’d be a terrible feminist if I didn’t mention it was (is?) about passing ownership of women from dads to husbands.
It would be nice to think that this “ownership” aspect of marriage is dead and gone, but it still exists in various (and numerous) forms. You may not like me for saying this . . . but engagement rings piss me the hell off. It’s a frigging dowry! Now, I like me some jewelry. And I like gifts. But the only purpose of an engagement ring is to show that you “belong” to someone, and that your man makes bank. You don’t see men sporting engagement rings, do you? Recently, I was talking to my friend and fellow feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte about the engagement ring debacle. I mentioned that perhaps if men started wearing engagement rings too, we could put the whole controversy to bed. (Was this a desperate bid to reconcile my feminist sensibilities with my love of things sparkly? Um, more than likely.) Amanda pointed out that she thought engagement rings only got superpopular when wedding bands for men became the norm—the idea being that there always has to be something extra to mark women specifically as property. So if men started wearing engagement rings, next thing you know, ear tags for women (maybe with their fiancé’s income stamped on them) would become popular. I’m joking, but you get the point.
On a personal level, I’ve been having an increasingly hard time with the idea of engagement rings. I’m at that age when my friends are getting engaged by the dozen—and a lot of my friends are guys. Frankly, I see the ridiculous amount of money they’re spending, and the stress and the pressure they’re under to prove their financial worth—and it just depresses me. I feel like shaking their significant others at times: “You’re making us all look bad—we’re not gold diggers!” But then I remember that the blame shouldn’t be put on the women who buy in to this stuff. The wedding industry is tremendously powerful and wealthy, and the norms concerning engagement, marriage, and pretty much anything about heterosexual love relationships is pervasive like a mofo. It’s impossible to escape. So it’s kind of shitty to look down on women for simply partaking in romantic social norms. That said, it would be nice if we could start thinking about getting past this stuff and recognizing it as the materialistic distraction it is. I’m sorry, but so long as we keep buying in to the idea that we need to be bought, we’re not going to think of ourselves as people deserving love and respect—just trinkets.
While at the end of the day I’m not going to fault someone for wanting a ring, there are certain things (and maybe because they don’t have to do with jewelry) I can’t get over. For the life of me, I will never understand why a woman today would change her last name. It makes no sense whatsoever. You want future kids to have the same last name as you and your hubby? Hyphenate, bitch! Or do something, anything, but change your last name. It’s the ultimate buy-in of sexist bullshit. It epitomizes the idea that you are not your own person.
Eighty-one percent of women get married intending to change their last names, so clearly I’m of the minority opinion on this