What Does Sex Have to Do with Marriage or Making Babies?

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 11:06 AM on February 25, 2008.

I was bemused, and not a little puzzled, when I read this tsk-tsking article about about "sexy" wedding dresses in the NY Times. I'm confused as to why the Times has a slate of fashion writers that hate innovation, playfulness, and creativity--you know the very elements that redeem high fashion insofar as it's a redeemable thing. Here are the dresses they think are too damn scandalous when draped over a bride.

Not a one of these wouldn't be considered a perfectly reasonable evening gown if it was a different color and worn to some kind of thing where you wear clothes like that. Considering that a wedding is probably many women's sole opportunity to dress up that much, why shouldn't she wear something that's appealing, instead of something that fits the image of the bride as a child-like virgin, fancied up for a ritual and deeply creepy deflowering? Wedding fans should be glad that the consumer culture has kept the practice alive in an era where people are increasingly disinterested in the wedding's traditional function as a ceremonial transfer of a female body from father to husband. But for some reason, the NY Times fashion section is fond of harumphing. Another writer there recently threw a temper tantrum when a designer dared to make men's clothes even a fraction as difficult, uncomfortable, and decorative-in-a-demeaning-way as women's clothes are.

Being pissed because brides are increasingly unwilling to play into the fantasies of those who enjoy saying, "Wow, she's so pure and virginal. I bet she doesn't even know what's going to happen to her later tonight. I shall cackle evilly now, because I'm a sadistic misogynist who likes his deflowerings violent," just made me roll my eyes. But of course, it got Rod Dreher all excited, and feeling empowered by the vindication of his deep misogyny by the fashion supplement of the Times, he dropped a time-honored slur right in the title of the post:

The bride's a slut. They call it progress.

He didn't get much farther than the opening story about a bride who wants the back of her wedding dress to dip down to buttcrack to show off her tramp stamp. Apparently, once you get the lower back tattoo, the gloves are off and Rod can call you all the names that he'd probably like to call all women. I have tattoos, so I suppose I should be personally offended, but I'm not really. I figure that the day I start doing things that Rod Dreher approves of is the day that I relinquish my right to high self-esteem.

But what really makes his post funny is this:

UPDATE: I just got back from the Ayaan Hirsi Ali event, which I'll be blogging about momentarily. But listening to her made me rethink my use of the word "slut" in this context.

Doh! For those who follow Dreher's blogging (though I often choose to through the Roy Edroso filter), he's often wrangling between the twin desires to demonize Muslims and his admiration for the way fundamentalists societies keep women under lock and key. Merriment ensues, if you like that dark humor sort of thing. But he's not going to let a little bit of feminist thinking creep in, no matter how well-padded it is in anti-Muslim sentiment. He immediately returns to demanding that women put our own joys and lives behind his desire to have violent deflowering fantasies at weddings.

I should be clear that when I said earlier that I missed old-fashioned hypocrisy, I meant that I don't really expect brides today to be virgins on their wedding day (though I hope that they are), but that I wish they would still honor the ideal by the way they comported themselves on their wedding day. Even if the couple has been shacking up prior to marriage, I think it's a nice and even necessary tradition for the congregation to officially overlook it in the ceremony, and if the bride proposes to wear white, then we all become De La Rochefoucaulds, and appreciate that she's honoring the old standard.

Even better would be if she carried a small whip with her and flagellated herself for having sex with the groom before that day during the ceremony. Even better would be if she let the groom beat her up in front of everyone for ruining his property values by letting him have access before he made the final purchase. Should the groom decline to beat his blushing bride for not providing him a hymen to break on his wedding day, the congregation could call his manhood into question. Fun for everyone! I love honoring the old standards.

On a related note, Diane Sawyer can go fuck herself.

I didn't know this happened when it did, but WTF. Because a woman does a book on her sexual fantasies, she's a "hypocrite" for writing a children's book? That makes no kind of sense. Seriously, what's the logic there? Shall we say that a woman can't be a mother if she's had sex? How does one then propose making that work in the biological sense? I guess the idea here is that women of course have to tolerate being fucked for god and country, but they can't allow themselves to have desires themselves.

Tagged as: sex, women, sexism, marriage, new york times, clothes

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.