Men and Wedding Planning

Posted: 18 November 2012

I am getting married at the end of the year to a lovely woman named Jane, and so my life in these last five months has involved an inordinate number of decisions around the height of cakes, the thickness of paper and the width of rings. I have also been informed on numerous occasions, by a wide variety of people, that the wedding is Jane’s ‘special day’ and that all major decisions, including what I will be wearing on the day, belong to her. Thankfully Jane has all along seen our wedding as a joint effort but this very common idea, that the wedding is a day for brides, needs some questioning.

While I am certainly pro-marriage I am not so sure that I am pro-wedding. I do not like the way in which the burgeoning wedding industry has taken the ideas of fidelity and self-giving love and associated them with make-up trials, chair covers and expensive cars. Interestingly the rise of the wedding industry and the amount of money spent is almost in direct correlation with the fall in the understanding of the nature and purpose of marriage.

My ideas about the nature of the wedding industry were confirmed when Jane and I attended a Bridal Expo with everything on show from jewellery to bonbonnieres to teeth whitening and even fitness training. One of the stalls was promoting a new wedding planning app in which the couple enters the basic details about their wedding to receive information showing the approximate cost of the wedding, according to industry averages. We had a go and filled out the few questions asked: date of wedding, style of wedding, number of guests etc. We were informed in no uncertain terms that our wedding, with 150 guests at the reception, was going to cost $105,936.09! This included $20,000 in outfits, $4500 in decorations (including $550 of balloons), $42,000 at the reception and $25,000 of pre-wedding expenses. Maybe this is the ‘industry average’ for a wedding, but if so, we all need to take a good hard look at ourselves and ask when exactly it became acceptable to spend more than a year’s wages on an event that is going to take less than a full day.

Now that I can speak from ‘within’ the world of wedding planning I can report that this is a world that has become overly feminised to the extent that male input is almost considered to be in the way. I assure you that wedding expos would not exist in their scope and size if men were playing a more substantial role in offering opinion. When one particular sex is solely responsible for weddings we find an imbalance in the end result. At one end, with women in charge, we find the costly princess-for-a-day model. At the other end, with men in charge, we see the disastrous results in TV shows such as Don’t tell the Bride.

While it is obvious that men and women are different this difference is meant to complement one another. Life is a not a competition to see which sex is most physically strong (that would be men) or which sex best nurtures children (that would be women). When men and women work together there is a wonderful balance. Where a husband might be happy to eat dinner every night straight out of a pizza box, it is the feminine charm of his wife that will civilise him and help him to see the role of a serviette. Where a wife might like to go shopping every weekend and continue to stock the house with ornaments that only exist to be dusted, it is the masculine practicality of her husband that stops her turning their home into a museum.

I am not blaming the many women who have taken over all aspects of wedding planning. Their leadership is often the necessary result of men who have scoured away like mice only wanting to know what date and time to turn up at the church. Just last week one newly married man was telling me proudly how he had left his fiancé to plan everything, as if this was some act of virtue! Both men and women need to embrace their roles in working with one another and using their natural gifts which at the end of the day will benefit not only wedding planning but life in general.

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Violence again Women. Australia says…Yes

Posted: 7 July 2012

In 2004 the Federal Government funded a $20 million campaign with the slogan, ‘Violence against Women. Australia Say No.’ The campaign was to bring awareness of violence occurring behind closed doors. As part of the campaign a TV ad was produced with a selection of men justifying why they assaulted women and the slogan making it clear that such behaviour was not tolerable. More recently a government campaign was launched called ’The Line’ which encouraged young people to consider where they would draw the line regarding issues such as ‘hooking up’ sexually at parties. The message in response to this possible quandary was not to engage sexually with someone unless there was mutual consent.

It may seem on face value that Australia is serious about stamping out abuse but I wonder just how serious we really are. While all these sorts of campaigns are of some value they fall into the interesting category of a secular government trying to teach morality. While a government may make laws to try and enact a particular behaviour they are seemingly unable to plug the illogical and confusing holes that appear in their attempts.

The last remaining ‘virtue’ in secular morality is consent. With consent two people can do whatever they wish, without consent, or with consent withdrawn at any time, one of those people becomes a criminal. According to the logic of the aforementioned campaigns so long as a woman says the word ‘yes’ a man is at rights to enjoy her sexually and vice versa. This would mean it is ‘moral’ for a man to go out to a different bar every night and find a woman who is lonely, needy or broken enough, that with a little kindness (and a couple of glasses of alcohol) he can have sex with on that night and walk away the next morning. If bars are not his scene he is legally able to buy consent with one of the estimated 20,000 people engaging in some form of prostitution across Australia in any one year. While it is obviously hard to gauge correct figures, one statistic to emerge from a poll was that 15 per cent of men sampled had visited a prostitute. Some samples have suggested as many as 40 per cent of the male population have visited or will visit a prostitute at some point in their life.

So whether one is obtaining sexual pleasure by scanning the bars and clubs or by scanning the Yellow Pages for ‘Adult Services’ there is no mention of what effect this has on the emotional and mental well being of vulnerable women. Completely leaving aside the social costs of marital infidelity, the fact that the rise of ‘legal’ internet pornography is changing the way men understand their own sexuality and the epidemic of sexually transmitted infections…what is this social acceptance of commitment-free sex doing to us?

Allow me to tell you what it is doing. When society advocates consent as the only moral compass and thinks that violence is only possible when someone withdraws that consent it completely negates that we are often broken and hurt people. Some of us have a tendency to use others and others of us have a tendency to allow ourselves to be used. Deep down we all want the same thing, love, but more often than not we get confused about how to find it.

The notion of free-sex and legal prostitution sends the very clear message that a person is an object and in some situations we can use them as such. While most people would not advocate me selling myself to be used as a punching bag, we seem to think it is ok to violate the body of a woman we don’t even know so long as she says yes. The word yes however is easy to say. If a woman is alone and someone is showing her attention, she may say yes. If a woman is desperate for drugs or money, she may say yes. That does not mean in any way that the actions she is saying yes to, are of benefit to her overall well being.

A nation which allows its citizens to treat the most needy and vulnerable as objects for another person’s pleasure is not a nation that genuinely understands the human condition. We can roll out all the feel-good campaigns we want about anti-violence and the importance of consent but until we acknowledge that all people, no matter how desperate they are have a right to be treated with complete dignity, then we actually do advocate certain types of violence in certain situations.

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University and Women: A Fair Combination?

Posted: 21 March 2012

A new university year has just begun and thousands of fresh faces are sitting in lecture halls being prepared to one day step into the world and make their mark in their chosen career path. The necessity of the journey through university and into a well paid career is almost an unspoken law. Yet I wonder if we are placing young people, especially young women, into what will one day be a difficult position that compromises their potential for genuine happiness.

From their earliest years children hear the mantra that men and women are equal, and while they are certainly equal in dignity they are not equal in ability. I do not mean that one sex has more ability than the other; I mean that each sex has a different ability, each sex has different strengths. The complementarity of the sexes is the reason that the natural family of father, mother and children is the best model; it is far better to have a loving father and a loving mother than to have two loving mothers or two loving fathers. However preferring to ignore all evidence to the contrary and in the push to describe gender as no more than a social construct, society tells us that men and women must achieve the same level in all things. If men can drive a tractor, women must be able to drive a tractor; if men can run a corporation, women must be able to run a corporation. It seems to focus though on women being able to achieve in traditionally male roles, not the other way around.

And so with this as the foundation, young women, believing that their happiness is to be found in a successful career path, dedicate some of the best years of their lives to studying law, business and economics. They do well (which is no surprise) and they move out into the workforce with a massive potential to achieve anything they set their sights on.

But then as they begin to make real progress in their field, a new challenge approaches…the call to marriage and family. These very talented women were told to make something of themselves through their chosen career path; they have sacrificed and worked as hard, if not harder, than their male counterparts. In all the talk about being whatever you want to be, no one made much mention of the distinct and unique role of motherhood. Certainly these women sense the importance of raising their children and being a good wife and mother, but they have also invested all their energy (and a great deal of their money) becoming highly educated and a genuine asset to their particular industry.

One recent article attempted to explain why it was that so few women were making it into senior executive positions. With the average career spanning thirty or so years, the article found that “five years of ‘career interruption’ due to family responsibilities [i.e. having children] should hardly be a disqualifying penalty”. And this idea demonstrates the actual problem; the task of full time mothering can supposedly be over within a few short years allowing the woman to get back to her career with minimal disruption.

There will be some that will disagree with me citing themselves or women they know as fine examples of balancing a successful career and a happy family all at the same time. My point however is not to make a statement about any particular situation but rather to question the wisdom of a society that pushes its women into an academic and career driven world when at some point many will be asked to make a choice to leave it or attempt some sort of balancing act between raising a family and raising the company profit margin.

While true feminism seeks to uphold the dignity of women and their particular gifts, our secular Western society parades around a false feminism. It is one that makes little girls think they have to be better than boys and women think they need to achieve in all the same fields as men. The truth is that men are not women and women are not men. A successful life is not necessarily one that ‘juggles’ between family and career. Motherhood is a respectable and vital role that should not be seen as an afterthought that can automatically attach itself onto a career. Society would do well to remind its young women of bigger realities rather than pushing them to be like men in all that they do.

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