When I dogsit, I tend to watch copious amounts of “Say Yes to the Dress” which is Tivo’d by the family I housesit for. Since I can’t work the remote to watch television being currently aired (I don’t have cable and really can’t maneuver around 3,000 channels) I watch what they have “taped.” This also includes “16 and Pregnant” and “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”. These are not shows I watch on my own, or really care for aside from a minor sociological curiosity. However, I am strangely fascinated by “Say Yes to the Dress” simply because I like to gawk over how utterly insane and inane these women and their families make the event of getting married. I don’t plan to get married to my life partner, though we are currently, casually, planning a commitment ceremony which is a gesture to our families and an excuse for use to get needed gifts such as a mattress and maybe a blender (Though, we’d really love a waffle maker if anyone here is looking for “John and Alex Love Gift” ideas.). However, that sense of obligation to have any kind of formal recognition of our love is one that is only being casually entertained and is by no means a necessity or end-goal for us. We are us and will be regardless of official approval granted by family, government, or gods. The institution of marriage itself has been deemed discriminatory and embodies a certain set of associations and societal expectations that we do not condone and will not approve by entering into any formal “contracts” of that nature.
Still, I watch “wedding porn” and sometimes gaze at table center ideas and invite formats simply out of curiosity and a kind of horror to see what sort of superficial value people place on what should be a very serious and deep time in their lives. I can’t imagine spending $38,319 dollars on a wedding like one couple I read about in Modern Bride. Their itemized list of expenses included $1,000 for hair and makeup for six people, $900 for stationary, $2,306 for flowers, and $4,000 for photography (http://www.brides.com/wedding-answers-tools/wedding-timeline-budget/2011/07/how-much-does-a-wedding-cost-venue). That sort of extravagance is something I cannot conceive of both because I don’t have the financial backing to dream of doing it myself but also because I wouldn’t if I did. $38,000 is a house payment, several house payments. The kind of attention paid to dresses, floral arrangements, catering, lighting, photography, gifts for the wedding party and guests is seriously overemphasized. All of the categories the website is broken into are concerned with some kind of commodity that entails weddings. Even the links and stories about “real weddings” are not so concerned with the relationship details of the couple but rather their financial and decorative choices. They have a brief bit about how the couple met, perhaps their age, and then they jump straight into location, dress brand and cost, catering details, number of guests invited, invitation quirks, etc. They are also very interested in helping the reader discover how they can have a similar wedding experience. How to recreate the table settings, make their own invitations or find the same press or floral companies to make them for their very own use. These weddings are about spectacle and the magazine serves to flaunt and perpetuate that sort of thinking.
Modern Bride also turned out to be extremely hetero-normative, though not entirely. Five out of the five hundred “real life” couples I looked at were same-sex couples. That’s…you know, 1% of all couples represented on the website. However, they did have a section on “fun summer hues” for cakes where they featured various rainbow decorated wedding treats. They were advertised as seasonally appropriate for a summer wedding but also doubled as an appealing option for an audience who might be looking for a nod to gay pride. It was irritating and confounding that the website would bury these kinds of acknowledgements of same sex unions under mounds and mounds of heterosexual propaganda. Their attempt to escape criticism for being tolerant of non-normative wedding practices is almost the equivalent of not including them at all. Their attempt to walk the fine line between appealing to both groups was not very successful or convincing.
Overall, I discovered that the conception of weddings represented by Modern Bride was one which presents them as an event designed to impress and please other people. They even had a whole article about how to “Create a memorable event by putting your guests’ needs first” (http://www.brides.com/wedding-answers-tools/wedding etiquette/2010/05/BLM FW09 WeddingGuestNeeds). These representations of weddings do, as Morrison asserts perpetuate “traditional American values” that is, they are “big, expensive and involve a lot of shopping.” Additionally, they are celebrations of “well-off white people” with the occasional “bridesmaid of color thrown in as a nod to multiculturalism” or the occasional “couple of color,” or same sex couple all included in the name of diversity within an industry concerned with exclusivity.
Sitting in Debartolo Hall on campus a year ago, I overheard the following comment after a senior announced that her boyfriend had finally proposed to her (at the Grotto, of course).
ReplyDelete"OH MY GOD, that ring is so big. He must really love you so much."
My soul died a little.