Yesterday, Becca of A Los Angeles Love posted about wedding articles and the people who comment on them, specifically in reference to this wedding budget article on Jezebel.* Later on, my friend sent me a link to yet another subpar wedding budget article on Jez. If you haven’t read it (please do), what basically happens is that two women get together and make fun of stereotypically insane brides and their massively inflated budgets.

I read that article last night. And I got mad.

The ugly caricature of a bride is so utterly pervasive in our society. Television has a special way of exploiting the worst of the wedding industry for the purpose of our entertainment. And I understand why that is — who’s going to tune into a show about a normal couple balancing their budget and making rational decisions? But there’s something more at work here than just media.

What is up with the woman-bashing?

Yeah, you heard me. I said woman-bashing, because men are never implicated in this role. Oh, right, that’s because we’ve cajoled, manipulated, or deceived them into their reluctant walk down the aisle – or at least that’s what every beer commercial and sitcom implies. Ah, but that’s an argument for another time. Right now I’m focusing on common discourse about brides, and moreover, about women.

We’ve established guidelines for discussing what a woman chooses as her career, whether she chooses to have children, whether she chooses to stay at home. No, they are not always followed, but they are there, to remind people to respect the choices of others. But weddings? No. Weddings are the last frontier. Weddings are one place where lambasting women is the norm — is actively encouraged, even. Mention a wedding around the average person and their eyes reflexively start to roll. Their heads shake solemnly. “Those brides,” they smirk. “They are so crazy.”

Confession time: I used to do this, after I first got engaged. Many of my first posts made fun of the “typical bride,” caught up in a frenzied flurry of tradition and unnecessary consumption. But now, I’m just so, so over it. Maybe I’ve submerged myself so deeply in the blogs of actively awesome, actively sane people that the — I’m not going to say the B-word — MonsterBride image has become but a blip on my radar. In fact, I don’t feel like I’ve ever actually even met a MonsterBride in person, even though our mass media insinuates that I should be tripping over them at every turn.** I know they do exist, but it’s my understanding that they thrive only in their natural habitats; popular cultural evidence seems to suggest these are Kleinfeld’s, bridal expos, and Orange County, CA. Point being, MonsterBride feels like a tired myth gone completely awry. Why are we actively participating in perpetuating it?

This image is so entrenched in our culture that normal women — women whose values don’t align with MonsterBride’s — go through this process of initiation after getting engaged where they feel like they actively have to prove that they aren’t, themselves, a monster. I was all over this. There was a period of several months after our engagement when I overreached. I actively cornered people and tried to show them, hey! I’m OK! I’m getting flowers from the market! I don’t care about bouquets! I don’t want a white dress! Then I absolutely flipped out when my mother decided to email all the pictures from my dress-shop visits over Christmas to my entire extended family, because — OMG — there were pictures of me trying on ridiculously poufy, traditional dresses, and what if my family now thought that’s what I wanted? What if they thought I was one of those?

Is this perhaps what the women at Jezebel are going through? Are they simply trying to sever themselves from the myth of the insane bride? I don’t know, for I am not them. But this is what I do want to know: HOW is promoting the MonsterBride stereotype helpful in advancing the station of women? HOW have budgets become a ruler for evaluating a bride’s individual worth? Instead of wasting their time doing a self-congratulatory dance, these ladies should be at work examining why the stereotype exists, why the discrepancy in budgetary criticism exists, and how we should go about breaking these things down. For shame, Jez. For shame.

Let’s flip the fucking script. End this fucking nonsense. WE are the typical bride. Moreover, we are not just brides, we’re people. We are people planning a wedding. More or less with our partners.*** We have various goals, various budgets, and various options. We have our heads on straight and our eyes wide open. We are millions strong, and we count, too.

And we are awesome.

This is the only I will type this wretched word here, but: You know what happened to Bridezilla? We killed her. We murdered her and then we went to a bar, and we drank booze. Sweet, sweet booze.

Now, let’s stop talking about her.

Word.

***UPDATE*** Annnnnd Becca has just posted an email she sent to Jezebel (we are not the same person, I swear), in which she spells out her troubles with how Jez and the rest of mainstream media aren’t giving women and weddings a fair shake — and so much more eloquently than I have here.

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* For those unfamiliar: Jezebel is an online publication based out of New York that focuses on pop culture topics from a feminist standpoint.

** And that, because I have a vagina and all, I should be one.

*** Individual mileage may vary.