GLOBE AND MAIL 2009.05.30
THE FEMINIST BRIDE
I am woman, hear me roar 'I do'
LEAH McLAREN
Getting engaged is a bit like losing 10 pounds. It feels nice, but after a while the relentless congratulations start to make you wonder if there was something horribly wrong with you in the first place.
Je me souviens d’avoir pensé exactement la même chose… je pense que c’est peut-être parce que je me suis tellement fait féliciter que je me suis sentie obligée d’essayer de faire en sorte que « ça marche » (même si juste avant les fiançailles je me préparais à casser! Et le soir même, en disant « oui » je disais « non » dans ma tête!).
"Of course there was," my boyfriend said dryly when I pondered this out loud the other day. "Before, you were incomplete, unable to form a thought for yourself. And now you have a man to complete you." Har har. But the sentiment isn't so far off perceived reality, especially here in England, where the common social response to a woman showing her engagement ring is, "Well done." Translation: You've finally bagged one. Now, you can relax.
For a well-behaved feminist (which I do not consider myself, prone as I am to offending the delicate sensibilities of my vigilant line-toeing sisters), getting married is a political minefield. On the one hand, you have all the ludicrously outdated "traditions" to contend with - grown men falling to their knees, accomplished women being "given away" by their fathers, sexually liberated thirtysomething party girls donning virginal veils, to name just a few - and on the other you have the hard-liners who would like to scrap the feudal institution altogether.
“ludicrously outdated traditions” : exactement!!
In this contradictory era of bridezilla reality shows and record-low marriage rates, is there any way to find a balance as a modern, feminist bride-to-be?
Je suis constamment en train de me poser cette question, même si je ne me considère pas ultra-féministe… je me demande sans cesse pourquoi j’ai envie de me marier quand il y a tellement d’aspects de l’institution du mariage que je trouve ridicule. (La réponse à la fin de l’article…)
It's a question Jessica Valenti, 30-year-old blogger-in-chief of feministing.com and author of the book The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession With Virginity is Hurting Young Women , has been exploring of late. The first thing she noticed when she got engaged to her boyfriend, Andrew, was the way people demanded to know all about the proposal. "There was a real pressure to have a perfect story to tell," she said in a phone interview this week, "when the truth was we just had a conversation and decided to get married." After a while, the couple got sick of disappointing everyone with their egalitarian honesty. "It became so tedious we just started saying it happened on vacation in California, which was technically true." Having long detested the coyness surrounding engagements, I admire Valenti's dry-eyed approach to her own impending nuptials. Here, finally, is a woman who doesn't feel the need to act "surprised" by the decision to spend the rest of her life with someone - like the thought had never occurred to her until the sight of a diamond ring dazzled her into saying, "Yes!"
Ça aussi je trouve que c’est un « jeu » tellement ridicule! Et je sympathise tellement avec tous les gars : “a real pressure to have the perfect story to tell”… moi je trouve que j'ai DÉJÀ une histoire parfaite à raconter!
In a recent piece for The Guardian, Valenti wrote eloquently about her struggle to balance the somewhat contradictory roles of bride-to-be and feminist author."The fact that Andrew and I had had conversations about the misogynist traditions that accompany marriage made us a bit of an oddity, it seemed. Then there were the fellow feminists who felt that getting married was a sop to the patriarchy, and the problems that we encountered as a couple. Because, with the best will in the world, kissing goodbye to gender roles can be more difficult than it looks."
Like many couples, Valenti and her boyfriend struggled with the division of labour when it came to wedding planning. While they set out with the best intentions (he'd do the music, she'd do the flowers, etc.), reality soon came home to roost. "Several months later, when I found myself up to my eyeballs in sample invitations and band websites - while Andrew read the newspaper or dallied online - I was ready to throw in the towel on so-called domestic bliss." They have since worked out their issues, but the pressure to have a traditional wedding continues. Valenti puts it all down to consumer culture. "When you're getting married, there's a lot of pressure to buy a lot of useless stuff." I agree, but suspect it's much deeper than that. Weddings, after all, are one of the great markers of social status.
Whether she knows it or not, this is why your mother almost certainly wants you to have one. It's also why so many young women start pining for a ring and a pouffy dress before they've even fallen in love.
C’est trop vrai. Et je suis certaine que c’est programmé dans nous (les femmes) de vouloir « s’établir ».
The more traditional our weddings and engagements are, the more we play into this ceremonial rite of passage - providing our friends and relatives with the correct markers to determine our relative position in society. These start with the size of the diamond (translation: How much does he love you?) and carry on to the colour of the dress (how good have you been?) through to the lavishness of the party (how much are you worth?).
Voilà pourquoi je ne veux PAS de diamant (je sais déjà à quel point mon chum m’aime, il n'a pas besoin de le prouver en m'achetant une grosse roche qui brille). Si je veux porter une robe blanche, je le ferai parce que ça me tente, c’est tout (I don’t think we’d be fooling anyone! hihihi). Et si on fait un gros party, ce sera juste pour voir notre monde, surtout pas pour faire un « show » (et des gros mariages avec la grosse robe et les décorations et les fleurs et tout et tout c’est ça que ça fait! ouache!).
Romantic, isn't it? But what is romantic, and actually quite thrilling, is the idea of falling in love with someone and deciding to spend the rest of your lives together. I might not be a good bride or a well-behaved feminist, but just like Jessica Valenti, I am determined to be an excellent wife - provided I can keep my own name, of course. hahaha
C’est exactement comment je me sens : it IS romantic, it IS quite thrilling (ça donne des frissons! et un « cheese éternel »!) de tomber en amour et de décider qu’on veut passer le reste de nos vies ensemble.
[EDIT : Found a follow-up article, or rather, one written by the same author a few months previously.]
GLOBE AND MAIL 2009.02.28
TREND-BUCKING DEPT.
It's not marriage I hate, just weddings
LEAH McLAREN
[...]
Overnight, it seemed, all of our friends had decided to get married.
We were, as they say, "at that age." Where once there were dry martinis and dirt-dishing, suddenly there were mocktails and debates on family-style vs. buffet.
In short, it was boring. And, of course, we weren't getting married, which made it absolutely infuriating! So we got a bit drunk and wrote [a] catty poem and had a good cackle. And then we went to our girlfriends' various weddings and wished them all the best.
We were genuinely happy for them, after all. And besides, when you get past all the frilly nonsense, weddings are actually quite lovely, right? Well my girlfriend didn't think so. She was well and truly put off. Since we wrote our poem, she has bought a house and had a baby with a man she's firmly in love with - but she's sticking to her guns on the marriage front.
I, on the other hand, have muddled along, not knowing what to think.
But lately I (actually my boyfriend and I) have started to come around to the idea. We've been thinking that maybe, if we did it our own way, a wedding might actually be kind of fun.
Okay, so it's not exactly earth-shattering news. I imagine the headline, like one of those faux news stories in The Onion: "Woman, 33, to wed live-in boyfriend; parents relieved." But maybe marriage is not as hopelessly conventional as we thought. These days, in fact, it's becoming the radical choice.
It was recently reported that the proportion of married adults in Britain has dropped to an all-time low. I don't just mean that there are fewer people getting married (the marriage rate is the lowest since they started recording such things in 1862). But the result of the decline is that, for the first time, married adults are estimated to make up less than half the population.
The main cause being cited is the same one trotted out for any current social trend, from teen pregnancy to the mood swings of house cats: the credit crunch.
Apparently, people don't want to get married any more because they can't afford to. But I'm not buying it. After all, weddings, like child-rearing, can be done perfectly well on the cheap. And besides, the same trend was reported in the 2006 Canadian census, which showed that unmarrieds outnumbered marrieds by a small margin and that rates of common-law unions were fast outpacing formal marriages - and that was in a time of relative economic stability.
I think my generation has gone off marriage - or more precisely weddings - because the sentiment (which we believe in) has been obscured by the ludicrous pageantry (which we reject).
The thing that has always shocked me most about many newly engaged couples is the level of pretense required to fit into the Hallmark-approved idea of romance.
This starts with the proposal, in which he "asks" and she pretends to be "surprised." Then there is the engagement, in which she becomes suddenly obsessed by trivialities like napkin colours while he rolls his eyes indulgently and makes lame jokes like: "Just tell me where to show up." Then there is the social permission it gives otherwise sane, polite people to behave like spoiled celebrities, the ridiculous, narcissistic "princess-for-a-day" cliches and finally the unfettered materialism that turns so many otherwise happy celebrations into garish cake shows.
Suffice to say, I have some issues - not with all weddings (I have been to some very nice ones), but with the ghastly wedding machine. And so does much of my generation, if you believe the numbers.
The bridal industry, with its fabricated notions of formality and ceremony ("traditionalesque," as Rebecca Mead put it in her book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding) and Hollywood, with its consistent output of mawkish chick flicks such as Bride Wars , has conspired - as a primary school teacher might say - to ruin a perfectly nice thing for everybody else. So much so that if the trend continues, we will soon live in a society in which marriage, with all its good and honourable connotations of commitment, love and partnership, may soon be a curious anomaly.
Which is why I am urging happy, loving couples everywhere not to be afraid. Follow your heart. Be radical. Do it your own way.
Throw convention to the wind. Who cares what the neighbours say? You, too, can get married. Just don't be ridiculous about it.
[Another edit] "I Believe in Love"
"La mariage est un peu comme la conduite à droite (ou à gauche, en Angleterre). C'est une convention qui n'évite ni les incidents de parcours ni les accidents, mais en limite le nombre et la gravité. L'important est le voyage."
Robert Escarpit (Lettre ouverte au diable, p.82 Éd. Albin Michel 1972)
[Il est question de mariage]
"[...] c'est une si jolie idée que celle de vouloir faire le voyage à deux !"
Sacha Guitry (Mon père avait raison, p.31, Livre de Poche no 1953 )
"Le mariage est une course de fond et la lecture à haute voix une sorte de boisson énergisante romantique pour revigorer les coureurs quand il leur arrive d'être épuisés."
Anne Fadiman (Ex-libris, trad. Catherine Pierre , p.169, Mille et une nuits, 2004)
Aucun commentaire:
Publier un commentaire