When we did the stupid little cake-cutting-feed-each-other dealio, all of the guests were so busy shaking their asses on the dance floor that no one paid any attention to our “big moment”, and we were just really happy that everyone was drunk off their fucking asses and having fun.

Isn’t the entire institution of marriage misogynist?

Yep.

How can marriage even be defended in a feminist worldview?

Marriage is the only currenlty available mechanism for spreading some of the financial love onto mothers.

Men earn more than women; that’s a given.

Women don’t get paid anything for the toil and care of motherhood; another given.

There are no acceptable and sufficient provisions for childcare outside the home: given.

So the only viable option for a woman to raise her children out of poverty is to tie her financial future to a man, whether she is able to work or not; it is virtually impossible to bring up a family on one part time salary anyway, but chances are that when the children are very young she won’t be able to go to work anyway because that would involve essentially abandoning them.

However if the relationship breaks down and the man’s income is no longer available to her and her children, she’s stuffed – *except* is she was legally married to him.

In that case the state will make at least nominal attempt to force the man to continue supporting his children and keep them out of, as it were, the workhouse. Unmarried mothers, however, have no legal recourse whatsoever in these circumstances.

Feminism isn’t all about overthrowing old traditions. It’s also about protecting women and girls. And the insitution of marriage, while abhorrent it in principle as a legalised form of domestic servitude bordering on prostitution, is a necessary evil to protect mothers from the full impact of the fact that the state takes no responsibility for them whatsoever while expecting them to unilaterally make immense sacrifice in order to continue populating the tax paying classes.

However within that do your own thing don’t get too wound up about the less relevant details.

As both my husband and I are atheists there was no way we would get married in a church so having a civil ceremony was important to us. We omitted the statement that marriage was an institution between man and woman because we believe that it should be open to all adults no matter what their sexual orientation and there were a few other things that we were firm on having.

For things that were less important we were quite happy to compromise, especially if the goods/services were being provided by family and friends, the wedding cake I didn’t really care. I would have quite liked having a carrot cake or sponge but my mum who was making the cake had the final call and make a spicy fruit cake instead. I could have insisted but it didn’t seem worth the hassle for something that I wasn’t too fussed about. It was still stressful but it cost a lot less than many weddings both in financial terms and in sleepless nights.

Our wedding was wonderful even the dreadful dj made the evening for some people. He is the only thing I would change from the day if I could re-run it.

We were lucky in that our parents were all very laid back about our plans they didn’t insist that we do anything because it was tradition.

Certainly, if I felt I needed to shed one of my names for the sake of conciseness or whatever, I’d drop “Jessica” by preference.

Just a thought, and just my thought, but hey….

This is an interesting point. It’s as if there are two choices: Bee-weeeve in stuff, the only option for which is 100% lock stock tradition, or be jaded and above it all and believe in nothing but some kind of Randian narcissistic self-interest. This isn’t limited to the commentariat at Ace of Spades, either. I think it’s something that happens across various “rebellious” sectors of patriarchal culture . I know it’s something I myself battled with when I was younger and trying to figure things out.

The great thing about this false dichotomy from a patriarchal perspective is that it renders invisible the very real alternatives that exist, resulting in a mentality like that quote from Ace about how Jessica couldn’t possibly believe in any of that feminist garbage.