Postcards from the Wedding Industrial Complex

Rebecca Traister's a hardline feminist blogger at Salon. During last year's presidential campaign, Traister attacked GOP running-mate Sarah Palin in an essay published in September 2008: "Zombie Feminists of the RNC: How Did Sarah Palin Become a Symbol of Women's Empowerment? And How Did I, a Die-Hard feminist, End Up Terrified at the Idea of a Woman in the White House?"

Now here's your "die hard" feminist defending fellow (not-so die hard) feminist Jessica Valenti -- who broke with the pack and tied the knot earlier this year -- on her decision to marry TPM blogger Andrew Golis. After Valenti was featured in the New York Times this week, Traister doesn't sound so militant after all:

As life brings us all kinds of surprises and complications, I've found that many people who have strongly held opinions about marriage -- say, a lifelong desire to walk down the aisle in a Princess Di gown and stuff cake in someone's face -- can shift in a heartbeat after befriending one gay couple who can't marry, or falling in love with a partner who doesn't want to, or can't because they're the same gender as you. The personal is political is true in reverse, that the political becomes personal at some point, and can change rapidly. I know some women who talked and talked about weddings when we were younger, and who now find themselves single parents by choice, or in long-term relationships with men or women they don't plan to marry.

This clarifies for me why the Jessica issue is fraught for some people: They see her as trying to have both -- the staunchly held political view, the books about the evils of the Wedding Industrial Complex, the intersectionality-based approach to marriage as an exclusive institution and the Vows column, the bustle, etc. -- without admitting a shift on either side. In a funny way, I wonder if even her anti-wedding detractors would have been more satisfied if she'd just said, "You know, falling in love and getting sucked into the complexities of party-planning has made me feel differently about some aspects of the marriage business." I am not saying that that would have been a good idea, and I am not saying I agree with her detractors. Jessica is my friend and I am very happy for her. I'm just wondering aloud.

Be sure to go back over to Salon and read the other entries. One of the funniest protocols of leftists today is that they can't get married because gays can't get married. That is, a modern leftist heterosexual is required ideologically to substantiate the deviant norms to the radical gay fringe seeking a reengineering of society's institutions. And if for some reason an un-gay progressive woman decides that she'd actually like to, you know, excercise some of her God-given natural essences - like having children - she can expect to be demonized for selling out to the Wedding Industrial Complex. That concept in itself is Marxist-Leninist in its epistemology, and thus for leftists marriage serves to reproduce hieararchies of oppression, and by logical implication, systems of racism.

It's pretty convoluted, but what's especially good is how radical women really don't believe this sh*t after all. You know, as we see in Valenti's case, they might actually fall in love and "die hard" principles be damned! Notice where Traister was all too ready to excoriate Sarah Palin last year -- for example, "The pro-woman rhetoric surrounding Sarah Palin's nomination is a grotesque bastardization of everything feminism has stood for ..." -- now she's just "thinking out loud" at how nice it is for her good friend Jessica to walk down the feaking aisle. Oh, how awful that a fully independent (and rational) woman might actually find enrichment -- God forbid! -- by falling prey to the hegemonic "complexities of party-planning."

Really? Do these people even have a clue? Institutions such as marriage develop over time because social norms coalesce around workable functions of monogamy, economic stability, child-rearing, and the regeneration of values. While femininsts have long repudiated those norms -- just read Andrea Dworkin for some confirmation -- the fundamental crisis of feminism captured by the Valenti wedding should in fact be a point of celebration for conservatives and a victory for conservative values. It's pretty fascinating.

As it is, though, the postmodern truth reinvention complex will devise some new theory seeking to explain the sociological endurance of marriage traditionalism within a neo-radical paradigm of anti-faux feminist progressive praxis.

I can hardly wait!

Hat Tip: Pandagon (where else?).