The. Most. Important. Day: "It's My Day!" Part Two

 In August, I wrote a post about my problems with the cultural traditions surrounding the modern wedding, and the traditions of it being "the bride's day" and all that. I discussed the problem with all the focus on one person (the bride) instead of on the partnership of two people.

Last night, I had a bit of a revelation about this. Now, I don't remember exactly how my train of thought got there; I was out at the bar with some friends, one of whom is engaged and was talking about the planning of his wedding. I was thinking, as I so often do, about my plan to skip the whole wedding tradition and just go to city hall with whomever I choose to marry, and throw a big party later for all of our friends. And a thought crossed through my mind (I admit, I had been drinking wine, so the exact thought escapes me) that went something like this: Do I really want the most important day of my life to happen in city hall with just a few witnesses?


That's when I got it. The attitude of "It's My Day," the thinking of a woman needing one day to feel like a princess, to feel like the most important woman in the room, all stems back to the idea that for women, your wedding is supposed to be The. Most. Important. Day. Of. Your. Life. This idea is ingrained into us girls and women by our culture and the people around us.

Well, pardon me, but fuck that! I have had, and will have, a lot of important days in my life. Graduating college? Yeah. Getting promoted from intern to managing editor? Awesome! Night I met my current boyfriend? Pretty good, too.

Of course, a lot of this stems back to a time when a wedding was the most important day of a woman's life, because it meant financial security and status. And while we all love to say we've moved on, these assumptions and beliefs still follow us around. How many movies have we seen where the woman who is "always a bridesmaid but never a bride" is sad and lonely? She may have a great job, she may have great friends and a social life, she may be (probably is) super hot (Hollywood-standards hot, of course) but she is not married, so she must be incomplete and inferior. (This is one thing I liked in the movie Bridesmaids; sure, Annie's lack of a relationship is part of her sadness, but most of it stems from her failings in her career; she's not trying to get married, she's just trying to get her life together.)

And, again, the focus on it being the most important day for a woman, and for a relationship, takes the focus away from the partnership. Recently, my boyfriend pointed out that he thinks the way wedding anniversaries are counted is weird. "Why do they start over at the wedding? Does the relationship before the wedding, the months and years together before that one day, not count anymore?" It's an interesting thought. I do get the wedding anniversary thing; it's the date that you officially started a life together, and made that commitment to stay together and move forward as a pair. But it's interesting to think about, especially when so many relationships blur those lines these days. Some people talk about getting married way before they are officially engaged. Some live together for years before walking down the aisle. Some have children before getting married. The traditional way of counting the "years together" may not fit many relationships anymore. And the wedding may or may not be, or feel like, the most important milestone anymore. I can certainly imagine that after living with someone for months or years, the wedding/marriage may feel more like tying up loose ends and bringing everything together than embarking on a huge new step.

So with all this cultural change and blurring of the lines toward commitment, why is there still such a focus on the bride's day as the biggest day of her life? Is it because we haven't caught up to the changes in women's lives? Is it because the larger culture refuses to accept that some women have more important plans and milestones in their lives than marriage?

What do you think?

Practice Makes...Pathetic?

"I was shaking my head no when I pulled the vibrator from the envelope...It wasn't just the vibrator and thinking of my mother masturbating that upset me, but also that my mother's boyfriend had stopped sleeping with her and that no amount of love I gave her could equal what was in my hand."  Lisa Glatt, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, p. 120.

First of all, I would like to say that I am currently reading A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That and loving it. My post, which you will soon find out if you haven't assumed already is dealing with my problems with the quote above, has nothing to do with my feelings on the book. I think it's great; I just had such a problem with the sentences above that I had to stop and write about it.

When I read the section quoted above, I stopped cold, and I was a little angry. Why does the author (or character, perhaps) assume that a woman ordering a vibrator is lonely and not getting sex? It makes me sad that our culture has painted masturbation as something that only lonely people do.

Masturbation is not a sad, lonely, pathetic substitute; it's not the opposite of a sex life. Masturbation is a healthy part of a sex life. It's a supplement. Your partner is not in the mood but you are? Masturbate. Partner out of town? Masturbate. Partner not in the mood yet but wants to please you? Masturbate and let them watch. And in the same way, owning a vibrator/dildo does not mean that said owner is not getting any sex. Vibrators can be used for solo or partner time.

Now, I understand that the author could be using the vibrator scene to paint a larger picture in her novel. I won't ruin anything (I can't spoil too much, I'm not finished with the book yet) but the woman/mother who ordered the vibrator is dealing with cancer and cancer treatments such as chemo and radiation. So maybe the vibrator is supposed to symbolize her isolation from other (healthy) people, whether self-imposed or not, and her daughter's inability to understand what she's going through. I get it, and I'm not saying the author should have done anything differently. What I am saying is that it's interesting (and sad, and sex-negative, and woman-negative) that we are supposed to see this vibrator, this wonderful tool for a woman's pleasure without needing a partner, and see it as something sad, lonely, something heartbreaking. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her? I think maybe so...

I remember the scene in Parenthood when Steve Martin accidentally finds his sister's vibrator, his divorced, single, lonely sister, and bursts out laughing while she is mortified. No one else in the film mentions sex toys or masturbation aids. Why? Because people (according to our culture) in relationships don't need to masturbate. If you're in a relationship you must be getting ALL the sex you need/want exactly when you need/want it.

This is not reality. And it truly can cause real-life problems. I was amazed the first time my boyfriend turned me down for sex. I couldn't believe that he, a male human, didn't want sex every time it was offered. And I was hurt when he suggested I masturbate (which I had never done) because I thought it meant that I was pathetic and lonely. It's just not true. Most women who masturbate have more orgasms when they do have partner sex. Why?

Practice makes perfect.

I just wish our culture could accept that.

Editing Out Sex

Recently, I heard Bruno Mars' "The Lazy Song" on the radio. It's a weird song. It's all about not doing anything all day. I get it; everyone loves a day off. I just don't know that the best way to sing about it is by crying "I'm gonna kick my feet up and stare at the fan, Turn the TV on, Throw my hand in my pants..." No reading?

Anyway, the main problem I have with this song is the way that it's edited on the radio. One verse's lyrics are "Tomorrow I'll wake up do some P90X, Meet a really nice girl have some really nice sex, And she's gonna scream out 'This is great!'" When I was driving along listening to the radio, the word sex was beeped out. Why?



Going back to my discussions on the book, The Purity Myth, and on abstinence-only education, our country is overly obsessed with sexual purity, even while our culture is bombarding us with overly sexual images. And abstinence-only education only teaches kids and teens to stay away from sex: no explanation of masturbation, no explanation of desire and attraction, no explanation of safe sex options. So, somehow, I'm not surprised that just the word 'sex' is considered so risque that it has to be silenced out of a popular song (a song that 13-year-olds are listening to everywhere, a song in which the edit does absolutely nothing to keep listeners from knowing what the silenced word is). But I wondered, if the line referenced drugs, if it said "Meet a really nice girl, do some really nice X,"would the line be edited in the same way? It might be; I don't know. But the fact that I even wonder, that I think our culture might glorify drug use more than responsible sexual encounters, is pretty sad.

What's worse is the attention given to specific words. The only reference to sex in "The Lazy Song" is the word sex: no details, nothing explicit. On the other hand, we have Katy Perry's song "Last Friday Night," a huge hit right now (complete lyrics here). It is all about a hungover morning after a blackout night and a one night stand. The entire song is about reckless drinking and un-remembered sex. However, this song isn't edited on the radio. Why? Because it doesn't use the words sex, drinking, one-night stand, etc. Can kids read between the lines? Of course! Do they know what this song is about? You bet! But without a specific, single word to edit out, it doesn't seem to matter.

Now I'm not saying that Katy Perry's song is inappropriate or should be censored. But I am saying that songs, films, and other forms of popular culture get edited all the time, and for all the wrong reasons. We need to stop focusing on single words and images that seem "dangerous" or "risque" and start looking at the bigger picture.

Passive Consumers vs. Insidious Messages

This post has to be quick because I need to keep working on my paper, but I was reading one of my sources and found something that made me kind of angry. I'm reading a book on women's magazines by Amy Beth Aronson (and I'm only in the introduction so it's possible that I'm jumping the gun here). In the intro, she writes, "Most scholarship has seen the women's magazine as capable of perfect domination, and its popular women readers as phantasmagorically 'feminine': passive, dependent, and witless in the extreme" (Taking Liberties, p. 3).

I don't think this is true. Now, I can't speak for "most scholarship," but I've spent the semester in two sociology courses (one on gender and one on popular culture) and in one English class (on feminism and literature). In none of these classes did we discuss the female readers of women's magazines as passively dominated by the magazines and their messages. That's far too easy (and lazy); the relationship between reader and writer, between the consumer and producer, is much more complicated than that.

The problem with women's magazines, as I see it, is not that women feel the need to blindly take in and emulate the images they find within the pages. The problem is that the images are consistently narrow; the women presented are all the same. Yes, many magazines today present the single, working woman as legitimate (maybe even ideal, at least for a significant time of her life); however, the single working woman is also white, upper middle-class, and thin. The ideal image that women are presented with excludes most of the American population. And even though women tend to look at these magazines knowing that they do not represent reality, we are still left feeling inadequate. If we told, over and over again, that we are not good enough, not thin enough, not pretty enough, not in shape enough, not working enough, not motherly enough, not anything else that these images present enough, we start to believe it, even as we fight not to. How many women have you met who feel guilty for having career ambition? How many women have you met who are against rape, but feel they personally can't say no to unwanted advances? How many women are struggling with body-image issues even when they know that their bodies are healthy, average and sexy?

I haven't finished Aronson's book, so this post may end up being unfair to her writing. Even so, I think this more complicated view of women's magazines (and our culture) is necessary; we have to look at the overwhelming amount of images presenting American women with an impossible ideal (as well as look at the millions of other ways in which women are discriminated against and told they are not enough) in order to effectively understand the effects these magazines may (or may not) have.