Privilege Shmivilege

Ok, so it's a default position (and the local Jezzies laugh at it) but a big preoccuopation in our "right on" world is the concept of privilege - that automatic comfort of those in whatever prioritised hegemonic construct, whether it be raced, gendered, sexualised, whateved. And that which has registered most profoundly with my self is the category of coupledom. It has always pissed me off that the fact of finding a partner - which is so arbitrary, so accidental, so sliding doorsy - that which has no bearing on individual merit or individual anything - has become, in our contemporary idiom, a marker of merit, of achievement, of ascending to a necessary stage of development. I was a militant single, an "I'm ok, you're ok, if you think I'm not ok then fuck you - it's you who has more than a few screws loose". It's what informed my anti- wedding registries, it's what fuelled my animosity towards every parent of every wonderful but unattached friend of mine who dared make that individual feel less than gurnisct, it's what brought on my allergy to table plans, first dances, bouquet tosses (tossers) ...

And now ... I'm married.

Do I feel like a wanker? Like a hypocrite? Like a traitor to the cause?

I do.

Do I feel, simultaneously, cocooned in the institutionalised safety of Mr Plog's arms, in the knowledge that we have officially declared ourselves a discrete unit, legally sanctioned, apart from all others?

I do.

Fact is, despite it all, the best day of my life TM was probably one of my best. I made every effort in the world not to be the typical bride TM - which in itself resembles the worst form of misogyny to the degree that I tried so fecking hard not to be what I perceived the worst form of woman ever - she who conformed to the notion that the role of weddinged one was the be-all and end-all. And yet - and yet - being surrounded by so many who were truly rooting for me - for my happiness, for my fulfilment, regardless of who was standing by me - or if, indeed, anyone was (seriously - I could have been one of those Oprah-validated fruitcakes marrying myself and I think the same crowd would have assembled, with the same good wishes) meant so much, touched so deeply - and I carry with me that feeling, through sleet and snow and the passage of persistent ebbing.

I am still sixteen. I worry so much about how I come across, about being seen to do the right thing. Full of sound and fury, signifying babkes.

But then Mr P and I press our rings together and in the loosest, laziest Yiddish translation say: "Wonder Twins Powers, Activate". ("Vunder Tzviling Koyakh Far'firn").

And in that moment, everything feels ok.

Wedding List = Wedding Pissed

I may be smug, middle class and a Guardian reader but there is little I rally against more in life than Wedding Lists or Bridal Registries or whatever you call that socially ordained entitlement whereby couples in love skip merrily across department store floors, furnishing out their little nests in the hope that the mint green sushi bowls and 1200 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets muffle the sound of their inner ids screeching "Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!"

I know all the arguments. I come fully equipped with counter-arguments.

"You'll get ten toasters!"
Um ... we've been living together for five years. I doubt anyone would give us a toaster. Besides - we dig the toast! The toast gets eaten almost daily.

"You'll need things"
We've got things. Anything else is a bonus, an upgrade, a luxury, a gift! But under no circumstances is it a need.

"But you get to kit out a whole place"
Uh ... yeah. At the expense of all our friends and family.

Throw some at me, bitches! This is my area de expertise: gifts, my friends, are my forte. I give them, I receive them, hell, I even sell them! The whole essence of the gift, in my way informed opinion, is the manifestation of feelings between people and about shared experience. What's the "perfect" gift? One given that recalls a private joke or a previous conversation, one sparked by a shared interest or motivated by the interest to share one. And if you don't want to put in that much thought, fine. Buy me a toaster. Buy me forty blenders. Buy me nothing! But money can't buy me love and weddings shouldn't be about fecking things. I have been called idealistic about this, immature. Been told "You can't live on love alone". Duh! Like I didn't know that. Everyone these days knows you must, absolutely, live on champagne and fucking.

Once upon a time (almost) everyone squeezed themselves into the confines of coupledom but not everyone gets married these days. Some people are single by choice. Many are denied the right to marriage on the basis of the sex of the person with whom they share their lives. The world has, thankfuckfully, evolved beyond the married/leper dichotomy that characterised much of recent Western social history. As my dad would say, not always in a complimentary way, our generation, inspired by Seinfeld and Friends, were led to believe that friends were the new family and family were just comic peripheral characters on the side (Estelle Harris, Jerry Stiller, Elliot Gould ... a theme, d'you (jew) think? That's for you, G!). But at least broader thinking about family/ relationships leads to more inclusive policies that concern themselves with affording equal civil rights to all people regardless of whether they find a romantic partner, a platonic best friend or a group of like-minded citizens.

So until those groups, or indeed singles, get to have weddings, those of us who do should use ours as platforms for the demands for equal rights for all! Down to heteronormativity and the really ridiculously reductive Gay/Straight, Couple/Single Binary! Until every last polymorphously perverse intersex collective can swan around John Lewis/David Jones/JC Penneys and kvell about china patterns and DVD stands, this lady behind these words is happy with whatever she gets and whatever she doesn't get. He and I have a million times more than my parents ever had. A trillion times more than Nana and Zaida. Getting married is so so so not about things. And if it is for you, well, I feel so sorry for you.

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

Theoretical Chicken Stock

I've been accused of being a "Theoretical Feminist", that is, feminist in all that I say but non-feminist in all that I do. See, I'm a loud (too loud?) militant advocate for gender equality yet I live my life in a completely unreconstructed kind of way: I've never learned to be entirely self-sufficient and I've always had other people carrying me, cutting me too much slack, making excuses for me.

I actually used to feel so crazy-guilty when that Destiny's Child track that implored "All the women, independent" to throw their arms about (I'm paraphrasing here) that I would cower in the corner and pray that nobody noticed that I was the only one of my peers (some of whom I would classify as non-feminists if not actively anti-) to whom those words did not relate.

I once tried to argue that I was living a feminist utopia, having elected to have neither a family nor a career. Suffice to say, that was a difficult thesis to defend.

And now I'm becoming a "wife", a classic "female drag" role. Anyway I'm going with "partner", "married partner", if I must. The inherent gender equality of same-sex rather than opposite-sex (!) couples serves as an excellent guide to us sad, tired heteros. Now if only they were afforded marriage equality ... but that's a Civil Rights story for another time ...

"Bride" is another character for us female impersonators to adopt, but it's easy to avoid. I just stare blankly when anyone asks weddingy questions and say, vacantly, "You'll have to ask the Feyonce. He's doing all the arrangements".

Hmmmm, just realised, he actually is doing all the arrangements. Ha! Not so theoretical now ...