Untying The Knot: The Wedding Porn Edition

Fun Fact! The Wedding Industrial Complex turns over 17 billion dollars annually in the US alone. There are a fuckload of people whose livelihoods depend on the fact that every womanTM wants to be a big white pavlova princess! With photographers and flowers and bands, oh my! I am doing research into porn at the moment and it's amazing how wedding ephemera are fetishised and framed in a similar way to the boobs and bush(less)es on the screen. And I'm actually having trouble working out which is more degrading to women but leaning heavily to the Bride's Side of the Aisle (There is an actually a generic hybrid - link NSFW= Not Safe For Work, ie. dirty images ensue!- unsurprisingly. What is too niche for porn? Absolutely nothing! But that's another post.)

So for years I've had my very own dream wedding in mind. A non-wedding: the dream not to have one, just to be this cool iconolclastic goddess teetering on the edge of respectability, laughing in the face of the bourgeoisie, just me and Susan Sarandon and our Gauloises and arthouse fillums and young toyboys and air of general disdain ... Sorry, where was I? Yes. Not getting married. I'd studied the origins of the institution at university and am not a fan. In fact one of my all-time favourite quotes is Groucho Marx's "Marriage is a wonderful institution but who wants to live in an institution?".

Unfortunately this bloody man comes along and we bloody well have to fall in love and bloody want to make it legal for a variety of reasons so Ms. BigMouth now looks like a hegemony-happy, heteronormative hypocrite of the highest order. And it's bittersweet because I am in love but ultimately shackling myself to something that represents so much of what I viscreally, venally despise. But why can't I reframe the experience on my terms? I like big parties and the accompanying food and booze (a little too much sometimes, to which my not-ready-for-summer-bikini-bodTM attests) and we are doing it in Australia!!! It will be our one and only opportunity to gather our various family and friends from opposite sides of the world in one room, integrating so far disparate fragments of our lives and I can't bloody WAIT! We are lucky to have many people making the LONG trip over. If I'd just said "Party in Oz!" it wouldn't happen, no matter how enticing the invitation. But the biggest bonus for me is the official blending of our families - we only have small ones (mine is just my mum, brother, sister-in-law and me) so now he will have my relatives and I will have his, and life feels more supported, in a way. That's what I'm in this for. And, seriously, to hell with all that excess, misogynist (women = monolithic; Which SATC character are you?! I'm a Carrie!!!) WICrapola!

But what is freaking people the fuck out is that I'm not treating the wedding as the be-all and end-all of my existence and I'm not thinking of myself as some new person getting! married! at all: I'm just me, as me, doing a thing that doesn't define me any more than the fact that I have worn glasses for over two straight months (bloody iritis!) and am nursing some killer cramps today. (Missy P FTW!)

When we got engag[g]ed, I changed my facebook status to:"Doctor Plog is taking on the Wedding Industrial Complex". My old friend N wrote:"Good luck with the Wedding Industrial Complex! You will need all your super powers to ward off their insanity". I'm learning that these super powers include: the ability to block out white noise (venues, blah blah, rabbis, blah, blah) and to resist the temptation to punch anyone who refers to you as a bride/ the bride -- hang on, the wedding isn't for a few months. And lasts for how many hours? THAT'S where I'll be playing the role of "the bride", then and then only. But it's an inane title foisted upon you from proposal until the wedding where you become known as the equally preposterous thing called "wife"! I would have thought you were just the bride at the wedding but I guess for marketing purposes, the second you become engaged you become repackaged as a new consumer - one that is expected not to bat an eyelid at spending ridiculous amounts of money on idiotic things. Capitalism relies on the erasure of individual desire in order to effectively perpetuate the mass-market, so our very own wants come to us genetically modified and prepackaged, via spam email or billboard or word-of-mouth or the cultural osmosis that has kept the world going and institutions standing. Isn't it unlikely that EVERY Western woman getting married (age 17 - 70) just happens to have always "dreamed" of having exactly the same thing, irrespective of variabilities in age, experience and subjectivity?

And look at "The Package" itself, Hegemony-Style (£10,000+)! Big white dress, big white teeth, golden tan, slimmer bod in order that the photos be perfect, ripe for self-fetishisation, post-children, in the mournful knowledge that one will never look like that again. Lucky for me, I don't look like that now! In fact, perversely, post-proposal, I have started rapidly gaining weight. Even my body is rejecting this nuptial nonsense! It wants to become a plus-size bride and at this stage I'm letting it. (Come November I'll more than likely freak out and stop eating though. Disordered Eating Runs Deep.)

So here's a wee anecdote to illustrate the idiocy: My lovely mum was in town for a few weeks. Last Friday, we accidentally caught the the tube to Angel so looked at a few shops and saw a nice dress. Then we caught the tube to Selfridges, looked around for an hour, bought aforementioned Angel-sourced dress (gotta love high street chains and their multitudinous replications!) and a pair of shoes dispayed next to dress. Wedding costume shopping: done! Feelin' gooooood!

Then my lovely, proud mum made the fatal (ego-wise) error of sharing our pleasure with the Bitch Sales Assistant. The following scene ensued:

Mum: (to Bitch Sales Assistant) It's for her wedding!
Bitch: (to me, disbelievingly) For your wedding?
Me: (sheepishly) Uh ... yeah.
Bitch: (bitchily) How come you're not wearing a wedding dress?
Me: (having felt pretty and happy only minutes earlier, now wanting the ground to swallow me whole) Um ... didn't really want the big white dress thing ... (apologetically) It's not really me (attempting humour weakly) And ... um ... not everyone looks good in white...
Bitch: Yeah that's what I thought when I was getting married but then you just get swept up in it. (unconvincingly) Oh well, I guess you just want something you feel nice in.
Me: (gratefully) Yes, exactly.

Silly fucking bitch. She's probably still paying off her multi-thousand pound confection. But mostly silly fucking me for letting myself be intimidated by a silly twat who's probably a decade younger than I am. It gets worse though: I am a fatherless daughter and so many of the rituals are enshrined around that relationship, albeit (a word my dad once pronounced al-bait, as if to rhyme with the 'arbeit' from 'makht frei' - he'd only ever seen it written - how cute is that?) shitty rituals based on the chattel (woman) being traded between older man and younger man. So I may have pissed off my dad with my militancy were he around, but then again, if all this crapola weren't so deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious, I wouldn't have the issue in the first place. So it's also making me really sad too and missing him all the time and it's affecting my sleeping. Boo To The WIC! Causing insomnia as well as Keeping The Woman Down (forcing us to want all this poo and then condemning those who do buy into it with the monstrous Bridezilla trope).

I am not a knee-jerk, pounce-on-every-perceived-cliche feminist -- it's a lot more complex, and beautiful, than that -- but I believe that there are valuable lessons us sad straights desperately need to learn from our gay sisters and brothers in their (necessary) use of gender nonspecific language. Our appropriation of that seems to render the marital roles more fluid, less prescribed. The words "husband" and "wife" are anachronistic to me, aged, outdated and a bit passe, as they carry with them centuries of baggage -- much of which has no place in my home, thank you very much. At their heart they imply a relationship of non-equals, a predetermined power differential. We are partners, equals. We walk down the aisle together, I won't be "given" to him. We wear matching wedding bands, he doesn't get to "bags" me with a diamond (the male-to-female equivalent of throwing a jacket on a chair) which only became a symbol of enduring love in the 1940s when Frances Gerety, a copywriter, came up with slogan "A Diamond Is Forever". If Mr P and I want to live according to the sub/dom paradigm (not an interest to date, as far as I know) then let choice determine who gets to play which role rather than anatomy.

Also, ixnay on the name changing menace. I'm a grown woman and that name is me: I've always been called it! (To those who reply "But that's just your father's name!" - duh! Have I just been renting it these past three-and-a-half decades?) But beyond discussions of patriarchy, it just feels like a weird, flee-from-self type of thing to do. There are only two legitimate reasons a person ought to change their name and I am neither in Witness Protection nor appearing in a porno. (Although re: the latter, who knows what the future holds? I am, after all, getting married, which is the feminist equivalent of lying back, shutting your eyes tightly, and getting well and truly schtupped by the patriarchy. It may as well be available on DVD. Sorry, Sisterhood.)

I hate you, WIC.

But, even more, I love you, Mr P. I especially love the fact that you don't mind living in a state that is perpetually subject to deconstruction and reconfiguration. We're so meta! And it proves your gender identity is far more secure than your friends -- I'm looking at you, D and M! Hello boys and Welcome To The Blogosphere! -- would have us believe.

xxx