She got hers, now he’ll get his!

18Jun08

So my best friend is getting married, and she chose me to be the maid of honor. I’m having some mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I like planning events; I don’t know, I just have a weird thing for making lists. Also, she is my best friend and is happy and it is nice to see her with a sweet guy who loves her as opposed to the freaks and stalkers she wound up with before. Lastly, the fact that she has to share maid of honor status with someone else really pisses off her attention-craving, d-bag sister. However, the wedding industry kind of makes me ill and the institution of marriage itself seems, at best, superfluous and at worst, a traditionalizing force that reinforces traditional gender roles. There was a time when marriage was a prerequisite for sex, living together, and having a family. There was also a time when it was meant to consolodate fortunes and reinforce ties between families. But none of this applies anymore. And I mean, if you’re already going to be fucking each other in every room of the home you bought together to raise your family, why waste thousands of dollars to bore your loved ones so that your fella feels that he now has legal justification for making you do most of the housework? So you can wear a big, poofy dress and feel like a pwetty pwetty pwincess, even though you are most likely a grown ass woman? So that you can be “given away” by your father, harkening back to the days when he would have basically sold you to your husband through back-door negotiations to which you would not be a party? So that you can wear white, initially adopted to symbolize the bride’s purity and women’s lack of worth without a nice, intact hymen? So that your boyfriend blows a few thousand dollars that could have gone toward a retirement fund or a house on a piece of stone some African kid probably lost a hand for? Even if you leave out the less gross aspects of weddings, it’s still not going to be fun because you have to invite your family, including the old people, and old people are frightened and confused by things like laser lightshows and all-dwarf KISS cover bands that would actually make a wedding fun.

But hey, even if it doesn’t really have meaning any more, there are certain legal perks that go along with marriage. For that reason, huzzah for the new laws allowing same-sex marriage in California! The first couple to be married was Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, two women in their eighties who have been together for over fifty years.

Honestly, how can anyone try to deny rights to anyone so adorable?

Filed under: GLBT, gender roles   |  Leave a Comment