I have summarized this article to my liking, but I really left most of the article in tact. It is too funny to paraphrase. I have also added a few thoughts of my own. I will post the link to Vanity Fair at the end, in case you want to read it in its entirety.
Wedding Facts, thanks to Gill:
A wedding and divorce could end up costing a couple a total of $50,000. The average wedding costs $27,000 and the average household pulls in $50,000 a year. It is the most money that most will spend in one day, and this isn't including the money that the guests spend (airline tickets, gifts, hen weekends, etc). Ok, so already ridiculous, right? Especially when 50% of first marriages end in divorce. The average divorce is likely to cost $25,000 and according to a recent study, it costs our country $112 billion a year. Gill calls the wedding day a "kitsch style crash of appalling taste, snotty tissues, lip gloss, dads dancing, and hypoglycemia," adding that they are like porn in that it promises way more than it ever delivers, except that we witness the scene with our grandparents and kids.
Gill on Wedding Attire:
On what men wear: "Men get a version of tails or tux, or a morning suit with a gaudy comedy tie or a ready-made ascot, apparently artfully knotted by an elephant. An ascot is supposed to be classy and old-world yet is an item of neckwear that was just as ridiculous then as it is now. Perhaps there will be the addition of a waistcoat that looks like it’s been made from the same fabric as a cushion in a Chinese restaurant. Then there are the trousers; no man has ever gotten married in trousers that fit and one wonders where it’s written that the groom’s trousers must always resemble a giraffe’s foreskin."
On the bride: "The first bride to popularize white wedding dresses was Queen Victoria. She was a tiny, round, plain girl with a nose like a claw hammer and less chin than a terrapin. Charitably, the best thing you could say for her on her wedding day was that she looked like an ornamental toilet-tissue cover. Before Victoria, brides wore what suited them. Red was a popular color; so was black. It’s universally said that all brides look beautiful. Every bride is told repeatedly that she is breathtaking, but white is an unforgiving un-color unless you’re a baby or a corpse. White is particularly bad on pale, pinkish people, but not quite as bad as on sprayed-orange people. The only girls who manage to look decent in wedding dresses are those who look great for a living and would look good in a trash bag or traction. Wedding dresses are a collective blind spot, an aesthetic dead zone. We are brainwashed to believe that a wedding dress is magic, that it has the ability to transform everyone into a raging, shaggable piece of hot, virginal, must-have, never-been-had gorgeousness. But, like all fairy spells, it only works for one day. In any other context, a wedding dress makes you look like a transvestite, which is presumably why the groom isn’t allowed to see it before it’s too late to change his mind.
Ok, sprayed-orange people and transvestites? A.A. Gill, you are the shiznit. I wonder what the groom thinks as his lace-covered Oompa Loompa approaches him......
Gill on the LIES we tell at weddings:
" How wonderful the bride looks in her dress isn’t the only lie told at weddings. The happy couple is wafted up the aisle in a fog, a cacophony of lies. There are lies about the in-laws, about gaining sons and daughters, and about not having slept with any of the bridesmaids. We fib when we say we’ll obey, we are mendacious about “sickness and health,” and we’ve got our fingers crossed in the “for richer or poorer” bit. We lie that we like the cake, we lie that the best man’s speech was funny, and we lie that this was the best wedding ever. Perhaps the only thing that isn’t a lie is that, underneath all the confetti and the balloons and the sugared almonds, there are two people who’d really like to be married and start a family."
We could call the author cynical, but come on. You know it's true. If you aren't cynical, you've seen "Pretty Woman" too many times. I reference "Pretty Woman" because it's the most far-fetched chick flick ever to have been made. Many of us will never get Richard Gere to climb up our fire escapes, so the chances of this happening to a hooker are even lower.
Gays do it Better
"Weddings are theater produced by straight amateurs using their own money. The resulting spectacle is what a dog show would be like if it were organized by the dogs. When gays remake weddings, the lighting will be the first thing to improve. Secondly, no one’s going to think that a fatless steak fryer is a suitable present, and the flowers won’t look ordered for a clown’s funeral. The music will also be classier; you won’t have to walk down the aisle to Meatloaf singing, “I would do anything for love / But I won’t do that.”
This is so true. Why on earth do the flowers have to look like they were ordered for a clown's funeral? That description made me come close to peeing my pants because it's totally true. He says that wherever queer culture goes, heterosexual women follow. That's because they're fabulous. I wish I had a gay man in my pocket. I could pull him out whenever I am cooking, throwing a party, or shopping for jeans and that would be awesome. And so would every other heterosexual female.
History on the wedding cake
"The original wedding cake was a biscuit broken over the bride’s head to represent what was about to happen to her hymen." Say what? "Today the happy couple jointly hold a very phallic knife and together force it through the virginal white icing into the soft, moist sweetness, and in America, for those who are slow at symbolism, they then push cake into each other’s face as a sort of cakealingus."
Gill's take on the institution
"I understand that the bureaucratic holdup in allowing gays to have weddings like the rest of us is a problem with the exclusivity rules of the club. I thought that marriage was supposed to be a basic building block of society, that marriages come together to give the nation-state its tensile strength. Marriages make families, and families marry one another, creating a web of security and morality. Surely the right thing, the conservative thing, would be to get as many people into marriages as possible. The really radical-right, hair-shirt-and-burning-torches thing would be to insist that gays get married because, without wanting to be indelicate, all the stuff that gets the religiously intense so book-thumpingly incandescent about homosexuality is all the stuff that goes on before you’re married. If you want to stop them having fun up against walls and behind sofas, just let them get married. They’ll soon learn there’s precious little cake in the face after the wedding.
There is a misconception that marriage is particularly Christian and a misconception that there is only one way to be married—neither of these is strictly or even loosely true. The whole heathen world has found ways to be married, often with multiple partners, usually polygamy, sometimes polyandry. Christian marriages have not always been a single man and woman over the age of consent. The age of consent itself is a movable social whim. It’s 16, 17, or 18 in America and as young as 12 in some countries. Plenty of Christians have been married as children. Marriages between blacks and whites have been universally legal in America only since 1967. The truth is that marriage is a temporal institution, set down by the state, overseen by civil servants, and sometimes sanctioned by the Church. I hesitate to speak for God, but I doubt that he cares whether or not you spent $27,000 and wore a hideous white dress to get his attention. Vicars certainly don’t encourage it. For most of the 2,000 years of Christianity, marriages were matters of connubial fact, entered into without fuss or fashion, or indeed a church. Weddings were largely for the rich. They were contracts for those with property and dowry and titles.
Priests today will often pointedly draw your attention in their homilies to the truth that a wedding is the public admission of a private fact. Marriage is an oath made by a couple before God; it doesn’t need a piece of paper or a stamp, a license or a government, to make it more binding or blessed. Gays have always been able to marry before God. The problem has never been God; the problem is the rest of us, and that simply comes down to equality. You can’t be a little bit equal. Equality is an all-or-nothing deal. An equal right to be married before the law must be both equal and a right, without favor. It must be color-blind, and it must be gender-neutral. A lack of heterosexuality can’t disqualify a civil right, just as a lack of hair or not understanding the rules of baseball do not.
But I understand that the religious right find all this very vexing, very upsetting. So, I suggest we give them something in return to make them feel better. This may seem radical, but just consider it for a moment. What if we swapped them gay marriage for divorce? After all, that’s the greatest threat to the cornerstone of marriage. We will ban divorce. You get married and you stay married. If it doesn’t work out, you might just go and marry someone else. There are Christian precedents for this. You will be responsible for your children and accountable to all your spouses. It’s the divorce that is the desperate cancer of community life. That’s money that goes out of the family, out of health care, out of education, and out of the kitty for your daughter’s wedding. Fifty percent of first-time marriages fail. The wedding and the divorce together could set the couple and their family back more than $50,000—better to cut the misery and the recriminations, the affidavits and the poverty, the guilt and the tears, and just enlarge the family. You could use the money to go on holiday, to build an annex for visiting spouses, or to buy a decent wedding present for your gay uncles.
Gill makes a lot of good points, regardless of what you believe. I always appreciate someone who says what the rest of us are thinking, and even better, says it with wit. Thank you, A.A. Gill and Vanity Fair for always producing great content! Hope you enjoyed this article as much as I did.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/09/can-marriage-be-saved
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