The post-wedding sexism guide: Be prepared for these bizarre encounters…
You might not notice it now, because our culture appears besotted with the search for The One and having that Big Fat Dream Wedding, but marriage doesn’t have the greatest reputation. Wives are even more unpopular. I read every blog going about being a feminist bride but I didn’t come across anything about being a feminist wife, and as a result I was thoroughly unprepared for the post-wedding sexism I was about to encounter. If you’re about to get married, it might pay to be prepared for some of the bizarre encounters you are probably going to have with friends, family and colleagues in the days and weeks after the wedding. So here’s the scoop…
How do you hope chest as an Offbeat Bride?
Older members of my family are asking about my hope chest… Do you have anything to put in your hope chest? and There’s a linens sale coming up if you want to pick up some things for your hope chest. I haven’t considered a hope chest at all, and really that the concept of having a hope chest from a young age freaks me out a little. But here’s where things get complicated…
News flash: Being a woman doesn’t mean I know how to plan weddings
While I am a cisgender woman, I do not always adhere to the expectations of my gender (like many women). While I’ve come to terms with it in most parts of my life, there is something about the wedding process that shoves it in your face again and again and again…
While many vendors have been kind with my ignorance once I flat-out own it, there seems to be a constant, persistent expectation that I should have more of this wedding thing figured out, or that my double-X chromosome has given me fluency in this secret wedding language.
My relationship is not a statement: Stop viewing our wedding decisions as some sort of socio-political performance
It started with the oh-so-popular taking of my husband’s last name question. The reason I really wanted to keep my own name had nothing to do with feminist ideals — I simply like the sound of my own name. Needless to say, this was just the first of MANY questions I’ve answered with similar responses.I’ve learned that no matter how I respond, someone will view it as a statement. All we’re really trying to do is throw a beautiful and fun wedding with all of our friends and family. Our relationship is a relationship… not a statement open for critique.
Take this ring keep it to yourself: why we skipped the ring exchange
When we started thinking about writing our own ceremony, both my husband Clayton and I felt that there was something that wasn’t really feeling right for us about putting a ring on each other’s finger. It could be that we’re punks, it could be that we’re feminists, it could be for a bunch of different reasons. But even the idea of us saying “please take this ring” instead of “with this ring, I thee wed” or something like that, was just not feeling right for us. So I thought that instead of exchanging rings, we could just put the ring on ourselves.
Is it possible to have a feminist wedding?
I have a Masters in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In other words, I’m a professional feminist. I had been with my partner for ten years when he proposed, and while it somehow came as a shock, there was no doubt in my mind that I absolutely wanted to marry him. Like any crafty member of my generation would, I desperately started googling “feminist wedding,” a fruitless endeavor. So what was going on? My entire identity had been built around feminism, so why was it that I was contradicting my own beliefs?