planning a wedding, I'm also forgoing a lot of traditions - no bouquet toss (I never tried to catch them and yet, here I am, getting married), no garter toss (which I've always found gross and slightly embarassing), no money dance, no chicken dance, no ridiculous banquet tables and seating charts - just a party with ymmy munchies for our family and friends to celebrate with us.

It's still really expensive. It's still annoying to plan and to have over-zealous vendors try to "suggest" helpful things like idiotic guestbook ideas and stupid DJ games, but I'm hoping it will be fun.

is so fail. 0/10.

I mean, I guess it takes as much planning as any party, say a big birthday party, or family reunion.

But as far as everything "patriarchal" isn't the crux of feminism the choice to be and do anything you wish the same as any other member of society is allowed?

As such, you want a dress that looks nice, and white looks nice, so you have a dress that is white. That's not to say that you had a white dress to symbolize you virginal purity, that is that you had a dress that you wanted to wear that was white. You did what you want, no appologies necessary.

As to enjoying something gay people can't. Well, they can enjoy a wedding, and a party, and even if they shop around a religous ceremony. What they can't participate in is the legal institution which you aleady celebrated in vegas.

Any event you plan now is the same event that gay people get. A big party for all their friends with no legal standing outside of credit card debt.

The reason this woman is called the "feminist bridzilla" is because she is planning a "feminist wedding", as opposed to just planning her wedding.

Weddings are by their nature the couple's affair to do with as they please. If you wish mariachi music because you like mariachi music, then congratulations you have a mariachi music wedding. It doesn't matter that it's not traditional to your polish/dutch family background it's your wedding, enjoy.

So if you say I'm planning my wedding, and we wrote our own vows, and in lew of gifts we ask everyone to donate to planned parenthood because that's a cuase we believe in, then that's your wedding, and no one will be any more snide about that than if you asked them to buy you a cheese of the month club certificate and had a formal catholic mass. It's your wedding and you do what want.

If, however, you say, I am intentionally ensuring that no patriarchial imagry enters into my wedding, well now it's not your wedding, but the wedding of someone who is rejecting something that I guess you would have liked, since you need to qualify why your removing it as opposed to just not having it because it's your wedding and you want something differnt.

See, a normal person simply doesn't have something they don't want at their wedding, a feminist bridzilla removes something that wouldn't have been there any way since it's their party.

Congrats on your wedding. I wouldn't sweat the mini quiches. Feminism is about the freedom to make choices, and regardless of the wedding you choose, as long as you feel OK with it, that's the feminist thing to do in my book Kate.

Hi, peers. It's me, the weird one again. Just writing in to let you know that 99% of us are NOT actually JLo or Jennifer Anniston. Thus, we can make do with inexpensive weddings, and focus on enjoying this weird thing called a spouse. You know, that bonus add-on that comes with most big weddings. Great thing about the spouse, if you treat 'em right, they're there way more than one lousy day.

The reason that everyone ends up bowing to the traditions of marriage is that marriage is nothing but a tradition. There is no other reason for its existance at this point in history. This has been the case now for arguably two generations in the US at the very least. Joint property ownership, legal recourse in dividing property after a split, cohabitation counting towards health coverage, child rearing -- all of these things currently exist, even without marriage. I personally have used the first three prior to getting married.

"It's the ultimate in patriarchy" as a stance to rebel against seems then the ultimate straw man argument. Whereas everyone knows that once upon a time women were exchanged as property, in this country that is a LONG time ago. Like, history books long time ago. So "the patriarchy" pushing someone to get married seems kind of dishonest. Is it really mainly men who push for marriage in this country? I'm sure there is a case to be made that it is the vestiges of a male property ritual, but more immediately people will notice that almost the entire wedding industry is built around brides. The stereotype is of men who don't want to get married, but do for fear of losing their girlfriends. It may not be true, but I posit that more people have seen in their own lives at least as many ambivalent men walking the aisle as the other way around (and that's being conservative).

Since the prevalence of divorce, marriage doesn't seem final. Which ultimately makes it an expensive party. Like any party, it ends up being about the guests. If you need a bunch of people around you to certify your relationship to another, than your marriage will fail. So ultimately, the non-binding ceremony is about the guests. No surprise then that you skew towards their expectations. Why not? Otherwise you are inviting people to something only to be witnessed saying you don't believe it. Anyone can see how that would be confusing. So it should come as no shock to anyone who 'disagrees but still does it, but on their terms...' that the end result is a bunch of bluster, followed by the same result, followed by the realization that you are the exact same as you were three days before the ceremony. Same as the rest of us.