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It turns out that planning a wedding is a lot of work, and more than a little unsettling. As I skip from website to website, researching possible wedding locations, budget menus, and the boring nuts-&-bolts-y stuff like (sigh) plate rentals, I keep bumping up against an odd and (to me) nauseating sentiment: splash pages for various caterers, coordinators, and vendors often include tacit or explicit reassurance that on your wedding day, you’re a princess.
I don’t know where to start with this, so let’s start with yuck!
And now let’s look at some underlying assumptions:
The caterers need not address themselves to anyone but the princess the bride the broad, and possibly her mother; the groom is incidental to the process.
Every woman wants to be wrapped up in gossamer and fairy dust on her wedding day. (A quieter assumption, but no less pervasive: she’ll be sporting some pretty fierce high-compression undergarments to keep the telltale bulges of humanity under wraps.*)
This iconic creature, The Bride, is made of spun sugar and fractious nerves, and needs soothing.
Um. Did I say “yuck”? Oh. Well, good. Because yuck!
But now it’s true-confessions time. It’s true that I have no desire for the sparkly dress with the swooping skirt or the tiara or the horse-drawn carriage, because, y’know, I finished playing Cinderella when I was a child.
But.
I confess that I must have some lurking princess fantasy, given the pangs I suffered upon admitting to myself that we could not justify renting a bouncy castle.
*I’m uncharacteristically blasé about getting a dress. In fact, I’ve established only one inflexible guideline: I must be able to wear normal underthings with it. Oh, and to sit on the ground with kids.
I’ve been forced to consider my body lately, more than usual and with an uncomfortable level of scrutiny.
You see, I’ve been shopping online.
Image courtesy of Matthias Kabel under the GNU Free Documentation License.
I’d never been to a real bridal shower before, with balloons and buffets (note the plural) and centerpieces in the bridal colors. It’s so… girly: young women in heels and sparkly jewelry, older women in Coldwater Creek suits, and everything with a big bow on it, including the bride-to-be. The “activities” masqueraded as games, but actually constituted a highly regimented enforced feminization, and all the prizes were effusively floral bath products and arcane styling tools.
I won a couple of prizes and was inexplicably given several more: products to strip my exterior roughness, lotions to smooth me, eyeshadow and glossy lip stuff to make me slippery and shiny, and a pretty parcel full of metal prongs and barbs to strip off the horny and hairy bits of my face, feet, and hands. I was first tickled, then bewildered, and finally (secretly) a trifle panicked at this windfall of girly goods heaped on my lap, presumably intended to induct me, willy or nilly, into the ranks of girlkind.
But there was unlimited cake and coffee, so it all balances out.
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49 As a 1930s wife, I am |
I make a barely adequate 1930s wife, and I’ll tell you why:
- fails to wash the top of the milk bottle before opening it? Yes.
- gives [The Fella] shampoos and manicures? No.
- slows up card game with chatter and gossip? Yes.
- tells risque or vulgar stories? Oh, hell yes — this one time, I told a risque or vulgar story in a burlesque club, when we were between acts, and I … Oh.
I fare much better as a husband.
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126 As a 1930s husband, I am |
If you’re still not using Ask Metafilter, you’re missing out.
You’re missing intense and geeky discussions of specific word usage and shifts in the language.
You’re missing fun and useful threads of advice, like this one on getting through the winter.
You’re missing semi-sociological conversations about power dynamics and gendered space, like this question asking “What happens when men pass each other on the sidewalk?”:
Help me understand the power dynamics in play when two men pass each other on the sidewalk.
Over the last few years I’ve started to get an inkling that there’s a whole separate silent conversation happening between men on the street that I, as a woman, am not really ever aware of. How they make eye contact, how much space they allow for each other to pass, who moves aside, etc. When someone bumps me with their arm I assume it’s accidental; I’m starting to think such things between men are not always so (at least if the number of almost-fistfights my ex got into are any indication).I realize much of this probably happens on an unconscious level, but I’d love to hear any explanations or rules anyone can lay out, and whether this is a constant thing or contextual.
The ensuing discussion is fascinating and in some places contentious.
Anyone can read Ask Metafilter, and if you pay the $5 cover, you can join, ask one question each week, and give advice all the live-long day.
54. All’s Well That Ends Well, by William Shakespeare.
After reading Twelfth Night, I realized I have perhaps been giving the comedies short shrift, so I am revisiting them. All’s Well That Ends Well is not, to my mind, as charming, balanced, and rich as Twelfth Night, and [spoiler!] Helena’s determination to have and hold that schlumph of a man is puzzling. She’s charming, intelligent, loyal, and sweet-tempered; he is an ass. What a waste.
55. How To Keep Kosher, by Lisë Stern.
As the subtitle says, this is a comprehensive guide to kashering the home kitchen. Stern’s clear, step-by-step instructions make this potentially overwhelming task seem manageable. She does include surprisingly little discussion of kitniyot, which is a fascinating issue, and hotly contested.
For #56, I’m counting two as one, thinking that properly represents the proportion of each that made any damn sense to me. Faith and I agree: linguistics is hard.
56a. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff.
I’ve been meaning to read this for years, enticed by its title, as who would not be? Despite the juicy title, this is one of the driest damn things I’ve ever read — and I’m an archaeology student, for cryin’ out loud. Lakoff (not unreasonably) expects the reader to have some very basic knowledge of both linguistics and cognitive science, and further expects his often quite abstract models and assertions to be transparent without the benefit of examples. Examples do bulk up a text, but often they are necessary. DO YOU HEAR ME, Lakoff?
56b. A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English, by Anthony Burgess.
This is both highly approachable and largely unreadable; Burgess fills the text with thrills, buzzes, and shudders. So contagious is his enthusiasm that the reader almost fails to notice how slippery and unsound his logic seems to be. Um, as far as I can tell. There are those better positioned to judge, of course.
57. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett.
Gripping and lyrical, but its effect was evanescent. I spent a week fervently recommending this to family, then completely forgot its existence.
58. Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson.
Meandering, but more engrossing and less dreary than Behind The Scenes at the Museum. This is why so many friends have recommended her writing.
59. Tales of the Night, by Peter Høeg.
Feh, I give up.
60. Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene, by Niles Eldredge.
The entire work is based on a series of fallacies: that altruism presents a “Darwinian conundrum” (pg. 176), which Dawkins, Blaffer Hrdy, and others have repeatedly shown it does not; that an adaptive trait is an innately good or desirable trait; that evolutionarily devised impulses dictate (rather than influence) behavior. Sloppy thinking is infuriating, particularly from a scientist, and Eldredge compounds his sins by writing abominably.
61. Life Before Man, by Margaret Atwood.
A 1970s Margaret Atwood novel about open marriage? I deserve everything I got.
62. Women and Ghosts, by Alison Lurie.
Great fun to read; Lurie seems to have had great fun writing it as well.
63.
#11. Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. The professor leading my introductory drawing class is more interested in providing us a place to draw and giving us enthusiastic praise than in teaching us techniques, so I turned to this classic for help, sure that it would contain novel tips and exercises to expand my range. Eh. For the total novice, this book would be a boon. For a moderately experienced or moderately talented artist, the exercises are a reminder, not an awakening. That can certainly be valuable, but I have already internalized truisms like draw what you see, not what you know, and am ready to move on to, for example, the formulas by which we create three-point perspective. Any suggestions? #12. The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. As always, Wharton is dry, witty, and displays a masterful economy of language. The book itself is beautifully balanced, with the playful manipulations of Book I echoed more darkly in Book II. This deeply angry book is written with remarkable restrain. #13. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. The dialogue makes me a bit dizzy: because the 1941 film adaptation is faithfully lifted from Hammett’s prose (although necessarily shortened and edited), I cannot read it without hearing Bogey, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Sidney Greenstreet. It is charming, dark, romantic, and brutal in turns. #14. Pornography, Sex, and Feminism, by Alan Soble. I tried, I really did, to give Soble a fair reading, even after he declared (only 23 pages in) that female scholars researching pornography have historically recoiled in disgust and fear from the prospect of procuring it. I’m not sure why I tried, but I assure you that I did. Perhaps more damning to Soble’s work, and emblematic of the simplistic nature of his reasoning, is his misreading of what constitutes the current literature on pornography, sex, and feminism. He takes several swipes, for example, at Andrea Dworkin, as if she is the current figurehead of modern feminism. As if, indeed, there is a figurehead of contemporary feminism, as if feminism were monolithic. #15. The Repatriation Reader, edited by Devon A. Mihesuah This text is essential reading for the serious student of the archaeology of North America. Mihesuah has collected a wide range of articles about the legal, ideological, and political issues surrounding repatriation of Native American remains and ceremonial artifacts, allowing the reader to explore the gulf between academic and Indian activist, and possibly paving the way for reconciliation between them. The unnecessary animosity that occasionally surfaces reaffirms my desire to work in museum outreach programs. With patience and hard work, we can bridge that chasm. Yeah, yeah, the idealism. Read the book.
Elli
Elsa
