The Problem With Wedding Fetishes
by Lauren (Warning: This article contains spoilers for the 6th season of the TV show Scrubs. Don’t read if you don’t want to know some big things that happen in this season!)
It’s no secret I’m a big fan of the show Scrubs despite its outwardly gendered characterizations of its cast. I’ve already mentioned the problem of Carla and Turk, how on their wedding day Elliot exclaimed to Carla, “Oh my god, you never have to have sex again unless you want to!!!” and Carla’s immediate disinterest in sex after the wedding (until of course she wants to get pregnant… then she becomes an insatiable sex machine).
Charlie, my husband, and I are just now nearing the end of season six: Elliot just got engaged to her boyfriend Keith, of course it was a huge to-do. After their engagement (pre-planned so that Elliot could have it “exactly the way she’d always dreamed”), she begins planning the wedding and introduces her “Wedding Binder” that she has kept since she was a little girl. It’s full of all the details, all prearranged: the church that she’s actually booked every July 19 for the past 10 years, the dress, the seating arrangements, etc. It becomes clear that she has been planning for her wedding ever since she learned to talk.
The viewer is not surprised by this; Dr. Elliot Reed is an anal-retentive, control freak workaholic that lives half her life in an aristocratic fantasy world. But are we to take her pre-planned wedding arrangements as just an extension of her personality, or is there something else at work here?
Nobody, real or fictional, lives outside our decidedly gendered society. TV writers are no exception, and the characters they create are extensions of this. Sadly, we cannot believe Elliot’s reaction to her engagement is simply a comedic element of her character. We just can’t, especially when you consider how common this kind of behavior is. Elliot’s actions are exaggerated lampoons, sure, but the truth is women are taught from a very young age to dream of their future weddings, before they meet the person they are to marry, even before they can even begin to understand what love is!
Fortunately, we have the media to feed us ideas of what love is supposed to be. From Disney movies to folk tales to coloring books and dolls, young girls are taught from the get-go that their wedding will be the single most important day in their lives, so they’d better start dreaming now. And it’s amazing how many young girls actually do plan their weddings, or at least have some concept of how they want it to go, by the time they reach middle school. This is before they start dating, before they can possibly grasp the concepts of commitment and partnership, before they even know what they’re doing! Their dreams are hardly of love and partnership, but instead of capitalist, heterosexual fantasies that permeate the mind as girls develop into women.
Being one woman who definitely was a slave to her wedding day dreams at one point in time, I can attest to this: young girls imagine lavish weddings similar to those we see in fairy tales. And boy do we dream. We get together with friends and choose our dress styles, bridesmaids colors, flower arrangements, the works! (The popular game MASH comes to mind here.) While I am glad to say that I definitely grew out of that wedding fetish by the time I actually got engaged, and my wedding was nothing like I’d ever imagined (and thank god because my “dream wedding” was probably really tacky), that doesn’t make me any less concerned for young women today.
I started thinking about the times I was actually prompted to think about my wedding. One time I can remember was at ballet camp, where our teachers let us loose in the costume room and told us to pick out a “wedding dress,” choose a song, and make a dance we’d do if a ballet was made about our special day. It’s no surprise I remember everyone choosing a the same sequined white costume that we had to trade off and asking the teacher what the wedding song was in Sleeping Beauty.
You could write for pages and pages on the class implications of this activity. How many of us actually would have a wedding like Sleeping Beauty? Most young women do realize the “fairy tale” wedding is outside most of our families’ budgets by the time we actually start planning our own; even so, it’s no surprise every single detail of the traditional “big to-do” wedding reflects the fairy tale weddings we dreamed about as little girls, at least on some level.
It also made me realize how hard it will be if I have a daughter; I have to remember that simply keeping her away from Disney Princesses and Wedding Day Barbie is just not going to do the trick.
And this is a problem, especially when you consider the kinds of activities our male counterparts were doing while we were off in the corner writing our vows. They’re making believe they’re magical wizards, or sports stars, or adventurers, or some sort of animal, and we’re practically planning for the day when these wizards/ sports stars/ adventurers/ animals grow up and become princes. We’re thinking “some day my prince will come” before we even have the emotional and biological development to recognize what our individual “princes” (or “princesses!”) will be!
What sort of dreams would young girls have if we were taught to do anything but dream of becoming an upper-middle class, heterosexual bride? Many of us become successful human beings regardless of our wedding fetishes, whether we were ever able to shake them or not, but we must ask how things could have been different if we’d spent our childhoods playing explorer instead of house and dreaming of changing the world instead of our weddings. Where would that leave us, and better yet, where would that leave patriarchy?? You can say these gendered elements of our childhood are harmless normalities, good fun for little girls, and that Elliot Reed’s pre-planned wedding is simply a comedic element meant to entertain. But when you get right down to it, women today are selling themselves short, and it’s these very socialized elements that reinforce our behavior. If we don’t start encouraging our young women to think beyond the wedding, no one ever will. It’s not profitable, it’s not heteronormative, and it sure as hell does not sustain the controlling forces of patriarchy on which society profoundly depends…
