In my youth, I spent too much time watching movies and TV shows and reading fashion magazines. This filled my mind with unrealistic images that left me feeling like I was never good enough, no matter how I looked.
My mother was more grounded than I was. While watching a movie together, I commented on how much more attractive one woman was than another and -- to my shock -- Mom dismissively said something like "Oh, that's just clothes and makeup."
I eventually stopped spending so much time consuming such imagery and being brainwashed into thinking I really needed to look that way. I'm happier without that influence on my mindset.
When HGTV first came out, it was inspired by This Old House. If I recall correctly, it had three hours a day of original programming and it ran it twice back to back to provide a good viewing time for both the East Coast and West Coast.
I was a homemaker on the West Coast. I watched both airings of my favorite shows and on Saturday watched the repeat showing as well if it made the list. (Saturday's lineup repeated the same episode a third time for some of their shows.)
It was sort of like Blue Clues for grown ups.
Blues Clues played the same episode five days in a row because research showed this best served the educational goals of the show. It was intended to be a learning tool for toddlers and if you played the same episode five days in a row, by about day four, some kids were enthusiastically shouting the answers they had learned from previous airings when the host asked a question.
One of the early shows on HGTV was called Design on a Dime. The word Dime in the title referred to the fact that the budget for the makeover was a thousand dollars, twice as much as the $500 budget of a previous makeover show.
It was sort of a brag about it being a big budget show for the channel before the budgets mushroomed into something wholly irrelevant to my life. While being a brag about "We're in the money," it was also a reference to working with a shoestring budget of a sort accessible for middle-class Americans wanting to do something to improve their home.
HGTV started out as free education for ordinary people actually trying to improve their homes. It eventually morphed into Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless 23-hours a day and I stopped caring about it.
They eventually began doing kitchen makeovers with budgets on par with what I had paid for an entire HOUSE in my twenties and there was a lot less content aimed at the DIY set. It was thereafter mostly Decor Porn and mostly entertainment, not education.
You see this in every industry where looks matter, from home decor to fashion to the wedding industry. If you can take photos or video of it and being beautiful matters, it tends to steadily move towards eye candy that pays the bills for the publication in question and away from practical advice for ordinary people.
This does not work for me and I have a number of projects that are aimed at creating a channel for the kind of info that does work for me on topics like home decor (r/CleanHomeDesign) and clothes (r/FrenchWardrobe). But at the moment, it's all essentially hobbies in that it doesn't pay the bills and I don't see how it ever will.
Wedding planning very much falls under this umbrella problem space but I am not likely to ever do anything about it. I'm a big fan of quietly eloping, not of having a big wedding.
Studies show that people who have big weddings tend to be happier but my suspicion is this is because some people who have big weddings do so because they genuinely have a lot of friends and family and their big wedding is part of a social fabric and process of establishing a sense of community for them.
The wedding planning industry seems to mostly NOT be aimed at those folks. Those folks are somewhat often looking for budget-friendly ways to throw a big party for all their friends and say their vows in front of them at the same time.
In contrast, the wedding planning industry seems to largely be about wedding "porn" and seems rooted more in the idea of promoting the Cinderella fairytale story -- that if you are pretty enough, you can marry well and be set for life.
I think the Cinderella trope is actively harmful and I hate it about as much as I hate Christmas.
Christmas used to be an opportunity to give children and poor relations gifts and now it's an overcommercialized gun to the heads of most Americans that causes a mini-recession every January and helps keep Americans chronically in debt. Meanwhile, we act mystified by both the January recession and our inability to pay off our credit cards.
Historically, women were expected to be virgins on the wedding night and people didn't have a lot of money to spare for expensive single-use dresses, so ordinary women typically wore their best party dress to their wedding. Then people stopped being virgins on the wedding night, we generally moved away from being a subsistence culture and the one-time-use white wedding dress tradition was born.
The dress is a symbolic substitute for the virginity the bride probably doesn't actually have. That's why it's white: It's a symbol of purity.
The tradition of the big wedding was likely also rooted in the fact that paper records were not a big thing until relatively recently, so you wanted everyone you knew -- or as many as possible -- to actually SEE you exchange wedding vows so everyone knew you were actually married.
As things moved towards paper records, it mattered less how many people witnessed you exchanging vows. Either you had the official documentation or you didn't and that matters more these days for most things that being married legally impacts.
With the rise of the internet, things have gotten more complicated. It's existence means you can share photos and videos from your wedding with people you actually care about who can't be there or merely crow your joy to the world.
Or, alternately, fake the whole thing more convincingly, a la this clip from a TV show that was tentatively called "Everyone Lies" while still in the planning stages, before they settled on House: In spite of recognizing the legitimate needs of people who may only marry once for love and remain together "until death do us part" and thus need help getting this one-time important event right, I don't personally like the wedding planning industry. I think it is mostly actively hostile to gender equality and actively promotes the idea that women don't really need to succeed in the world of work.
It promotes the idea that marrying well is the best way for a woman to get The Good Life.
Wedding magazines tend to be bridal magazines. They are aimed at women, not men, and I am not seeing the world do much to develop alternate ideas about how a serious career woman can genuinely find happiness with a life partner as opposed to pretty women essentially politely selling their bodies to wealthy men as their Cinderella-inspired life-plan for how to achieve material comfort.
There is no good means to separate fashion and decor from this heteronormative -- "patriarchal" -- social construct.
Suburbs were designed on the idea of separating the public sphere and private sphere, but only for men. A lot of women's work is done in the home, so living in the suburbs does nothing to help homemakers separate their work life and private life.
The existence of the TV show Sex and the City seems to lefthandedly acknowledge a connection between female liberation and city life. It's hard to live in an American suburb and escape the 1950s social norms that helped foster their birth.
Men seem to both intensely dislike the idea that a woman may be only or primarily after their money and also seem to do a lot to prevent women from really having other viable options. Men seem to fail to recognize that the way out of this trap is to foster female liberation and the ability for women to make money on their own and not need a well-heeled husband or boyfriend to pay their bills.
If you REALLY want women to sleep with you for the sex, not for your money, you need women to be able to comfortably support themselves and this means a LOT of societal practices have to change starting with the initial courtship steps that set the stage for the pattern of the relationship.
This is likely why the dating practice of splitting the tab, with each person paying their own way, gets called Dutch Treat.
The Dutch have a better than average track record on women's rights. They likely realized at some point that if you are a man and don't want to de facto be paying for sex and don't want to attract women primarily after your money, you need to not have dating practices that encourage women to say "yes" because you can afford to take them to more expensive restaurants and entertainment venues than she can afford to pay for out of pocket.
My mother was more grounded than I was. While watching a movie together, I commented on how much more attractive one woman was than another and -- to my shock -- Mom dismissively said something like "Oh, that's just clothes and makeup."
I eventually stopped spending so much time consuming such imagery and being brainwashed into thinking I really needed to look that way. I'm happier without that influence on my mindset.
When HGTV first came out, it was inspired by This Old House. If I recall correctly, it had three hours a day of original programming and it ran it twice back to back to provide a good viewing time for both the East Coast and West Coast.
I was a homemaker on the West Coast. I watched both airings of my favorite shows and on Saturday watched the repeat showing as well if it made the list. (Saturday's lineup repeated the same episode a third time for some of their shows.)
It was sort of like Blue Clues for grown ups.
Blues Clues played the same episode five days in a row because research showed this best served the educational goals of the show. It was intended to be a learning tool for toddlers and if you played the same episode five days in a row, by about day four, some kids were enthusiastically shouting the answers they had learned from previous airings when the host asked a question.
One of the early shows on HGTV was called Design on a Dime. The word Dime in the title referred to the fact that the budget for the makeover was a thousand dollars, twice as much as the $500 budget of a previous makeover show.
It was sort of a brag about it being a big budget show for the channel before the budgets mushroomed into something wholly irrelevant to my life. While being a brag about "We're in the money," it was also a reference to working with a shoestring budget of a sort accessible for middle-class Americans wanting to do something to improve their home.
HGTV started out as free education for ordinary people actually trying to improve their homes. It eventually morphed into Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless 23-hours a day and I stopped caring about it.
They eventually began doing kitchen makeovers with budgets on par with what I had paid for an entire HOUSE in my twenties and there was a lot less content aimed at the DIY set. It was thereafter mostly Decor Porn and mostly entertainment, not education.
You see this in every industry where looks matter, from home decor to fashion to the wedding industry. If you can take photos or video of it and being beautiful matters, it tends to steadily move towards eye candy that pays the bills for the publication in question and away from practical advice for ordinary people.
This does not work for me and I have a number of projects that are aimed at creating a channel for the kind of info that does work for me on topics like home decor (r/CleanHomeDesign) and clothes (r/FrenchWardrobe). But at the moment, it's all essentially hobbies in that it doesn't pay the bills and I don't see how it ever will.
Wedding planning very much falls under this umbrella problem space but I am not likely to ever do anything about it. I'm a big fan of quietly eloping, not of having a big wedding.
Studies show that people who have big weddings tend to be happier but my suspicion is this is because some people who have big weddings do so because they genuinely have a lot of friends and family and their big wedding is part of a social fabric and process of establishing a sense of community for them.
The wedding planning industry seems to mostly NOT be aimed at those folks. Those folks are somewhat often looking for budget-friendly ways to throw a big party for all their friends and say their vows in front of them at the same time.
In contrast, the wedding planning industry seems to largely be about wedding "porn" and seems rooted more in the idea of promoting the Cinderella fairytale story -- that if you are pretty enough, you can marry well and be set for life.
I think the Cinderella trope is actively harmful and I hate it about as much as I hate Christmas.
Christmas used to be an opportunity to give children and poor relations gifts and now it's an overcommercialized gun to the heads of most Americans that causes a mini-recession every January and helps keep Americans chronically in debt. Meanwhile, we act mystified by both the January recession and our inability to pay off our credit cards.
Historically, women were expected to be virgins on the wedding night and people didn't have a lot of money to spare for expensive single-use dresses, so ordinary women typically wore their best party dress to their wedding. Then people stopped being virgins on the wedding night, we generally moved away from being a subsistence culture and the one-time-use white wedding dress tradition was born.
The dress is a symbolic substitute for the virginity the bride probably doesn't actually have. That's why it's white: It's a symbol of purity.
The tradition of the big wedding was likely also rooted in the fact that paper records were not a big thing until relatively recently, so you wanted everyone you knew -- or as many as possible -- to actually SEE you exchange wedding vows so everyone knew you were actually married.
As things moved towards paper records, it mattered less how many people witnessed you exchanging vows. Either you had the official documentation or you didn't and that matters more these days for most things that being married legally impacts.
With the rise of the internet, things have gotten more complicated. It's existence means you can share photos and videos from your wedding with people you actually care about who can't be there or merely crow your joy to the world.
Or, alternately, fake the whole thing more convincingly, a la this clip from a TV show that was tentatively called "Everyone Lies" while still in the planning stages, before they settled on House: In spite of recognizing the legitimate needs of people who may only marry once for love and remain together "until death do us part" and thus need help getting this one-time important event right, I don't personally like the wedding planning industry. I think it is mostly actively hostile to gender equality and actively promotes the idea that women don't really need to succeed in the world of work.
It promotes the idea that marrying well is the best way for a woman to get The Good Life.
Wedding magazines tend to be bridal magazines. They are aimed at women, not men, and I am not seeing the world do much to develop alternate ideas about how a serious career woman can genuinely find happiness with a life partner as opposed to pretty women essentially politely selling their bodies to wealthy men as their Cinderella-inspired life-plan for how to achieve material comfort.
There is no good means to separate fashion and decor from this heteronormative -- "patriarchal" -- social construct.
Suburbs were designed on the idea of separating the public sphere and private sphere, but only for men. A lot of women's work is done in the home, so living in the suburbs does nothing to help homemakers separate their work life and private life.
The existence of the TV show Sex and the City seems to lefthandedly acknowledge a connection between female liberation and city life. It's hard to live in an American suburb and escape the 1950s social norms that helped foster their birth.
Men seem to both intensely dislike the idea that a woman may be only or primarily after their money and also seem to do a lot to prevent women from really having other viable options. Men seem to fail to recognize that the way out of this trap is to foster female liberation and the ability for women to make money on their own and not need a well-heeled husband or boyfriend to pay their bills.
If you REALLY want women to sleep with you for the sex, not for your money, you need women to be able to comfortably support themselves and this means a LOT of societal practices have to change starting with the initial courtship steps that set the stage for the pattern of the relationship.
This is likely why the dating practice of splitting the tab, with each person paying their own way, gets called Dutch Treat.
The Dutch have a better than average track record on women's rights. They likely realized at some point that if you are a man and don't want to de facto be paying for sex and don't want to attract women primarily after your money, you need to not have dating practices that encourage women to say "yes" because you can afford to take them to more expensive restaurants and entertainment venues than she can afford to pay for out of pocket.