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Thursday February 21, 2008
Category: CultureThe bride's a slut. They call it progress.
The NYT reports today on a new trend in weddings:
The gown was almost wanton — fluid but curvy with a neckline that plummeted dangerously. “It makes me feel sexy and beautiful,” said Natasha DaSilva, who slipped it on for a fitting last week.Cut away at the rear to reveal a tattoo at the small of her back, the dress suggested a languorous night in the honeymoon suite.
Except that Ms. DaSilva, who will be married on Long Island in September, plans to wear it at the altar.
“Why not?” she asked. “I want to look back in 20 years and feel like I looked hot on my wedding day.”
Ms. DaSilva, 26, thinks of herself as adventurous, but not so brash that she is about to cross a line. Dressing for a wedding as if it were an after-party is accepted among her family and friends. “For my generation, looking like a virgin when you marry is completely unappealing, boring even,” she said. “Who cares about that part anymore?”
Natasha DaSilva, that tattoo just above your butt telegraphs to the world that you're one classy dame. I'm sure your daughters will be so proud of you one day. "Wow, Mom, you really hooched up your wedding, didn't you?" Dreary old me, I miss bridal hypocrisy.
UPDATE: I just got back from the Ayaan Hirsi Ali event, which I'll be blogging about momentarily. But listening to her made me rethink my use of the word "slut" in this context. I should be clear that when I said earlier that I missed old-fashioned hypocrisy, I meant that I don't really expect brides today to be virgins on their wedding day (though I hope that they are), but that I wish they would still honor the ideal by the way they comported themselves on their wedding day. Even if the couple has been shacking up prior to marriage, I think it's a nice and even necessary tradition for the congregation to officially overlook it in the ceremony, and if the bride proposes to wear white, then we all become De La Rochefoucaulds, and appreciate that she's honoring the old standard.
When I say "slut," I'm being intentionally provocative, and as I indicated in a further comment below, the absence of her virginity is not what I mean by sluttiness, but rather her belief that her wedding day is an opportunity to show how little she cares about sexual purity. That's slutty behavior, period, and we shouldn't be afraid to condemn it.
However, I just heard a woman, Hirsi Ali, talk about how sexual purity is taken to such a psychotic extreme in Islamic culture that women are beaten, tortured and even murdered for having violated the code of honor. Hirsi Ali, who is no longer religious, said in her remarks that she believes religion should have nothing to say about sexual morality. That is clearly unacceptable to any remotely traditional religious person, but given that she's an atheist now, and given how badly she's suffered at the hands of the religious, one can certainly understand why she feels that way, even if one can't agree. That Islam and Islamic law is fanatical about sexual purity doesn't mean that a respect and an idealizing of sexual purity is wrong. Obviously there is a gulf between Christianity and Islam on this point.
Having said that, I feel discomfited, having talked privately with her and listened to her fantastic remarks, that I was so quick to use that kind of language to describe this bride. I don't change my judgment of her cheap morals and her bad manners, but I do wish I hadn't used that word.
posted by Rod Dreher @ 9:47am Permalink 
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Comments
There's a lot of lower middle class anxiety and bellyaching on this blog, but this entry deserves some kind of award for it.
Posted by: Jillian | February 21, 2008 10:50 PM
I don't change my judgment of her cheap morals and her bad manners.
It's a tattoo, Mr. Dreher. I mean, seriously, calm down, old boy. It's a tattoo.
But I'm really glad you don't have the power to put these nasty women in the stocks. Yet.
Posted by: Michael Bérubé | February 21, 2008 10:50 PM
Ummm...she's getting married for goodness sake, as in committing to a permanent (in theory) monogamous relationship. Doesn't that make her the opposite of a slut?
Posted by: Captain Bathrobe | February 21, 2008 11:00 PM
Yes, Larry, calling a woman a slut, even if she is one, is rude.
And we should all try hard not to be rude to each other, and it would be nice if we could all get along, and I'd like to buy the world a Coke, were it not for my lamentable inability to come up with the billions of dollars it would take to do this.
But the *point* of what Rod wrote, aside from all this hand-flapping about a rude word, is that we as a society no longer think of sexual morality as even an IDEAL. It's just "unappealing, boring even," to quote the fashion-impaired Ms. DaSilva.
The consequences of this have been far worse than a little rudeness here and there. The consequences of this have been children without fathers or mothers, children shuffled from one divorced parent to another, children being raised by grandparents while the parents cohabit, break up, find new partners and have more children so they can start the cycle all over again, children falling through the cracks into all sorts of poverty and abuse, all because it's "unappealing, boring even" to admit that the old morality had its good points and that as a society we might be lots better off if we still adhered to most of it.
Once and for all, I think we're all--even Rod--agreed that the word "slut" ended up being unnecessarily inflammatory to some here (though I do think regional usage varies, and may make the label more unacceptable in some places than it is in others). A better word, perhaps, would be "libertine." Surely in our enlightened days women who behave without moral restraint have earned the right to be called by that name, which was formerly the term of disapproval directed only at a man who cared nothing for morality.
Posted by: Erin Manning | February 21, 2008 11:05 PM
Thread is closed. Not going to put up with porn spammers.
Posted by: Rod Dreher | February 22, 2008 12:25 AM
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