weddings

 

Welcome to the latest installment of Ms. Opinionated, in which readers have questions about the pesky day-to-day choices we all face, and I give advice about how to make ones that (hopefully) best reflect our shared commitment to feminist values—as well as advice on what to do when they don't.

Dear Ms. Opinionated,

Welcome to the latest installment of Ms. Opinionated, in which readers have questions about the pesky day-to-day choices we all face, and I give advice about how to make ones that (hopefully) best reflect our shared commitment to feminist values—as well as advice on what to do when they don't.

Dear Ms. Opinionated,

I'd be interested to read a column about wedding etiquette, because it's ludicrous what couples expect their friends to shell out.

We spend a lot of time in the handful of decades that we exist in this world being told things and telling things. But there are comparitively very few moments when we allow our pretenses to drop and we come together to share something honest, and complex, and for many of us a little (or a lot) scary. That's a transformative thing. 

I’d like to spend the next eight weeks with you looking at the history of weddings and marriage in Western culture, talking about how marriage is used as a tool of civil and economic inequality, and how the gender binary plays a role in how we think about weddings and helps to fuel the wasteful consumerism associated with THE SPECIAL DAY. Mainly I’d like to look at how anyone can say NO to the pitfalls of the wedding industrial complex.

Yet, as a proportion of their annual incomes, the Kardashian kouple may actually be more reasonable than many other Americans. In 2007, the average cost of the American wedding was over $28,000; while the recession caused a bit of a dip for a few years, the price is now back up over $24,000.  These costs represent about half of the country’s median annual household (not individual) income; half of the money a couple makes in an entire year will be spent on their wedding.  Kim Kardashian made $18 million on her faux fairytale, so the budget was only slightly over what she made on a single day. If she’s being unreasonable (and she is), so is everyone else.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

After she read my last post about sexist Christian music, my friend, Sarah Morice Brubaker of Religion Dispatches, told me I'd gotten a terrible Christian song called "How Beautiful" into her head. I'd heard it many years ago, but what I didn't realize was that it makes frequent appearances at evangelical Christian weddings. It's a truly horrific song, but it got me thinking: This business about "husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church" is more or less the foundation of Christian Right politics. Any guesses where we can learn all about it? That's right: Dippy Christian wedding songs!

My love of Beyoncé has been well documented on this blog before, so I won't get into it again here. However, I do want to talk about Bey's new video for "The Best Thing I Never Had," or rather, talk about the way other people are talking about it. First, the video, which is mostly just Beyoncé dancing around and looking really pretty in a wedding dress:

Hooray for the Prop 8 ruling! Sure, we have to wait to see what the Supreme Court says, but in the meantime I thought we could celebrate with a special BitchTapes (the way all important political events should be celebrated, obvs). A mix filled with fun songs about weddings, complete with some same-sex marriage jams! So, without further ado, I now pronounce you feminist and mixtape. (Track list after the jump!)

Why are little girls obsessed with weddings?

After seeing Bride Wars, it makes some measure of sense that Anne Hathaway would mount such a spirited defense of her role in it. Hathaway is, in fact, the only life that this film has. Hathaway's performance enables her to occasionally lift her character, an altruistic schoolteacher named Emma who gains strength and confidence while fighting for her dream wedding, out of the dull and uninspiring mess of the film around her. But I wouldn't recommend Bride Wars to even the most die-hard Hathaway fan. She's just another victim of this ludicrous and offensive film.  More after the jump...