Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters (15 page)

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 increased almost 100 percent since 1990. That includes the cost of engagement rings—which I have a
ton
to say about later—which has increased 25 percent over the same period.

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 one. But seriously, where’s the logic here? It’s a pain in the ass to change your name (legally and all that), it represents an exchange of ownership (presumably dad’s last name to hubby’s), and you don’t get to have your last name anymore! I don’t know, maybe your last name is terrible and you can’t wait to change it. Still, it irks me. Maybe because so many women still change their name without a second thought. As if we
have
to give in to the norms without a fight. So at the very least, please, if you get married, just think the last-name thing over. And besides, hyphenation is the new black.

Outside of all the other problems that go along with marriage as an institution—sexist past, the insane consumerist present—there’s the small problem of not everyone being allowed to get married. I mean, if marriage is such an awesome and wonderful thing, shouldn’t we all be able to do it?

The same-sex marriage debate has been quite the controversial topic since Republicans decided to make it an issue in 2004 when (sigh) Bush got reelected. You would think that
with all the effort these folks put into getting straight people to marry, they would be overjoyed that a whole other section of the population wants to join in on the fun. But alas, homophobes abound in the government—and in the U.S. voting population, unfortunately.

After some cities started performing same-sex weddings (we love you, San Francisco, Portland, and New Paltz!), Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2004. That started a shitstorm of homophobia that went way beyond the presidential elections.

Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund reports that thirty-eight states have since passed laws by state legislators banning same sex marriage; President Bush is even trying to push a constitutional amendment that would prevent same-sex couples from getting married (because apparently, the Constitution should be used to take away rights, not give them. Ugh.)

It’s pretty unbelievable when you think about it: How can you legislate love? Hate to sound cheesy, but it’s true.

And if you’re thinking,
Well, there are always civil unions and partnerships
. . . I call bullshit. Civil unions don’t carry the same legal benefits as marriage. According to NOW, same-sex couples are denied more than one thousand federal protections and rights, ranging from “the ability to file joint tax returns to the crucial responsibility of making decisions on a partner’s behalf in a medical emergency.”
¹
These are rights that married couples do have. You know, cause they have The Sex that makes The Babies and are therefore
acceptable. There are also financial issues that same-sex couples are prohibited from obtaining—like benefits and property inheritance. Not to mention the fact that gay parents have limited parenting rights if they’re not the biological parent. You can’t tell me that’s not amazingly fucked up.

But for me, the biggest issue surrounding same-sex marriage is a pretty simple one—human rights. How can you relegate certain people (because of who they love!) to second-class citizenship because you think gays are icky? Give me a fucking break.

I think what this goes to show—outside of the unbelievable ignorance and hatred that some people have in their hearts—is that marriage isn’t only about love.

For the same reasons the government is pushing marriage on women who are on welfare, they’re trying to keep it away from same-sex couples. They see it as an ideological thing—a way to restore (enforce) their “traditional” values. Whether we like it or not. Fun fact: In the same breath, President Bush managed to talk about his Healthy Marriage Initiative (the program that tells women on welfare that they don’t need a job, they need a man) and define marriage as a heterosexual institution. In his 2003 statement on the creation of Marriage Protection Week, he said:

Romantic, huh?

It just goes to show you how easy it is to take institutions like marriage and make them into something discriminatory and just plain wrong. Because so many of these ideas of marriage, romance, and love are built on sexism and consumerism, they’re that much easier to pervert.

Clearly, romance has become the domain of the dollar—and the government. So I say let’s take it back.

There’s no reason we can’t have fulfilling romantic lives without adhering to the bullshit standards that are set before us. Mix it up. Create your own standards and your own romantic norms.

Then that way, the next time you see some display of a played-out romantic ideal, you can laugh it off. Hopefully all while wearing your I DON’T FUCK REPUBLICANS shirt.

Whether it’s repro rights, violence against women, or just plain old vanilla sexism, most issues affecting women have one thing in common—they exist to keep women “in their place.” To make sure that we’re acting “appropriately,” whatever that means.

A huge part of keeping women in their place has to do with creating a really limited definition of what a “real” woman is like. And a ton of that what-makes-a-woman nonsense is attached to motherhood. Apparently, by virtue of having ovaries and a uterus, women are automatic mommies or mommies-to-be.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think motherhood is an awesome thing—if that’s what you want. But there’s something insanely disturbing about the idea that because I
can
have
a baby, I
should
have a baby—and that this is something I should want to do more than anything in the whole wide world. And if I don’t have that desire? Well, something is just plain wrong.