Confession time. My current guilty pleasure is the TLC show Say Yes to the Dress. Yes, Friday night Professor Bean and I are curled up watching brides try on gown after gown, break down in tears when they find “their dress,” and spend thousands of dollars. So what do I, a rabid feminist, get out of this show?
Let me be perfectly upfront–mostly the appeal of this show is snarking and feeling superior. It might not speak highly of my morals, but sometimes, nothing is more fun that sitting back and mocking people for caring desperately about things I think are silly. This is also, by the way, the reason I love the website Go Fug Yourself.
There is also the pleasure of simply looking at the dresses. Sometimes they’re beautiful and sometimes they’re…not. Either way, wedding dresses are one of the few dramatic, formal pieces of clothing left. And it’s amazing how many variations on “long white dress” designers can manage. The dresses I like best are what I call “stripper wedding” dresses. Apparently, the current fashion in wedding dresses is to show off the goods (maybe to make all the other men jealous?) and the extreme version of that is this dress:
Yes, the bodice of that dress is a lace, see-through corset. What did you wear to your wedding?
However, aside from the fluffy, snarky fashion-y reasons, there is a slightly serious reason for watching the show. Sometimes, surrounded by my feminist friends and working in academia, I forget how differently most of the world thinks about gender issues. Say Yes to the Dress serves as a reminder that for most women–for most of the world–it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that “your wedding is the most important day of your life.” The show normalizes a host of behaviors–being appalled if the finance tags along, grown women describing themselves as princesses or Cinderella–that were actually off my radar as issues. It is unnerving but good to be reminded that traditional views still have a huge sway for most people.
But mostly, it’s about the snarking.
I would question whether or not this show accurately reflects mainstream America, or normalizes anything. Ok, I haven’t seen it, so this is all speculation. But why would producers want to make a show about genuinely ordinary people? That would be boring. I find it much more likely that they seek out the most extreme example of this behavior that they can find, in order to display it to the public for their gawking pleasure.
I don’t think the idea is that they’re supposed to be “ordinary” people. I think the idea is that their views on weddings are the same as ordinary people’s views, and those ideas are extremely gender-stereotypical. For example:
1) Grooms are almost never present for the dress shopping. Many of these couples adhere to the “groom shouldn’t see the bride before the wedding” principle.
2) Customers and store staff invariably talk about how women dream about their wedding dresses from a very young age. Some unbetrothed women even buy dresses, saying things like, “now all I have to do is find someone to propose to me.”
3) One episode featured a staff member buying her own wedding dress. She spent half the episode showing everyone in the store her gigantic engagement diamond. Because we all know it’s impossible for a man to claim his woman unless he buys her an ostentatious ring.
4) The word “princess” is used at least ten times each episode to describe how the bride-to-be looks (or wants to look). We should make a drinking game out of it, actually.
5) Most brides bring friends/family along to help them decide on their dresses. If a mother comes along, she invariably criticizes and belittles the poor bride (classic mother/daughter conflict). If her friends–or especially sisters–accompany her, they inevitably snark and criticize as well (because they’re *jealous*, of course!).
6) Wearing a veil is not optional for these brides.
I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Oh gah. I suddenly remembered parts of my teen years, and girls around me obsessing about weddings, huge magazines talking about wedding dresses, and the ultimate determination to find out if you should marry a guy – write your name with his last name as yours, and see if you like it.
*twitch*
Point taken.
I think I don’t watch this show for precisely the same reasons you do.