It's "Her" Day: The Birth of the Bridezilla

You always hear it. If you're a woman you know what I'm talking about. Marriage. Weddings. Are you dating anyone? When are you going to find Mr. Right? And most of us just sit there like:

 In our culture, it seems to be that the pinnacle of a heterosexual woman's life is the day she meets Mr. Right and marries him. Television does a very good job at portraying this, as I talked about in my last post.

Today however I am going to focus on the show "Four Weddings" on the TLC network, home to a majority of today's wedding reality television. The premise of four weddings is that four brides all go to each other's weddings, judge them and vote for who gets to win an all-expenses paid honeymoon. If anyone of you are slapping your foreheads in despair, just wait, it gets better. The categories they have to rate the weddings in are dress, food, venue, and overall experience. What's funny is how some of the bride's comments include "I liked that you can tell they really loved each other." Why because they were like this the whole night?

 And some of them are just super competitive and critical, making remarks on how the centerpieces were too small or the chicken was dry. Because that's what a wedding is all about. That's what our culture has turned it into. A spectacle of food, flowers, dancing, all to please others. To show that your marriage is worthy because you threw this awesome party and everyone agreed that it was awesome.

Here is a clip of a bride who won, and she actually states in the clip that she learned about weddings from the show because she's never been to a wedding before. Again throughout the clip, notice how she always says "I" or "mine." My wedding, my vows, my day. Aside from it sounding very narcissistic, it perpetuates the heterosexual ideal of romance being ultimately expressed through marriage and having a wedding. If you don't get married, you obviously don't love them that much (I wish sarcasm had a font).

The way this show perpetuates the idea that weddings are "her" day is that only the brides judge each other's weddings, the groom's aren't involved in the critique. Also what I notice almost every episode is that at the end when the winner's groom comes out of the limo, he always says "good job baby you did it." Which shows how our culture thinks that planning a wedding is the bride's job, which again goes in with the idea of a wedding being "her big day." In fact the groom is hardly in the show at all, only in snippets throughout the episode and at the end the winner's groom deliver's the news. And I've never once seen a same-sex couple on the show either. (Edit as of 12/13/13, I just saw my first episode of Four Weddings with a lesbian couple, yay representation!)

TLC did a groom-centered episode of Four Weddings once, but really it was just done for humor's sake. As you will see in this clip, the groom's are pretty clueless about weddings and dresses in the interviews.

With all this emphasis on weddings being about the bride and being the biggest day of a woman's life, it's now wonder where the "bridezilla" came from. I've never planned a wedding, but I'd imagine I'd go crazy too if I had all this cultural pressure to plan a wedding and believed it was solely my responsibility to do so. 

 Again one of the problems with our culture perpetuating this idea of "her big day" is that it is hetero-centric. Meaning that by those standards, if two gay men want to have a wedding, what do they call it? "Their big day?" That would be ridiculous! Who plans the wedding? Or if two women want to have a wedding, do they split the responsibility and the attention? Oh no! Gender norms will have to be broken! *gasp* These are things that don't get any light shed on them because of this huge prevalence of heterosexual romance in our culture. It's not "their big day" it's "her big day." Also as I stated before, another problem with calling a wedding "her" big day is that it places getting married as the pinnacle of a woman's life (as well as becoming a mother, but that's another story).

Again thank you for reading and share your thoughts below!