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Svenskaflicka said:
see above
(That scares me)
What's wrong with these women?
- Thread starter Svenskaflicka
- Start date
see above
(That scares me)
Svenskaflicka
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It's called Reality, dear. It scares all of us.
Dirt Man
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sweetsubsarahh said:see above
(That scares me)
What scares me, and most other men that I've known in my life is the whole wedding ceremony deal. First off: Putting those little toy bride, and grooms up on that tiered cake is unforgivable if you ask me. It's like the real bride, and groom have been put up on this saintly pedestal like Mt. Everest top, and the only place left for them to go is down from that day forward. Is that the message that we want to convey here? And what's all this bull shit about losing a son, but never losing a daughter crap? Did I suddenly have to cut off any connections with my own family just because I married into her's or what? And then of course there is the inevitable dispersement of my friends after that as how can her lifetime committment to friendship with me be compared with what I have had all of my life before her with them? Sorry, I just don't have a jealous bone in my body, and if I don't mind her associating with her friends why should it bother her if I associate with mine? Even if all of my friends are women. I never said I take this woman as my permanent furnature, to have and to OWN, so why should I become her PERMANENT doormat?
Now I realize that most males, and females are brainwashed from birth as to what their portion of a marriage contract endows them with, and what they are responcible for, but for God's sake people, marriage is the team sport of all team sports. It was never meant to be a one way street, but it is the greatest of all adventures ever conceived. So if you want to throw a party after the ceremony make it a bring your own booze, food, bedmate, and toys to play with party because I ain't paying the damn check! And make sure you tote out your own trash out when you leave. I will mow the lawn, but that's all.
What the hell are we celebrating here? Getting rid of the mooching brats? Or finding the house empty enough to once again boff the ole lady on the couch in the front room, or kitchen table once again. And what do we do if they get divorced, and want to move back in? Do I have to pay for the next moron she falls in love with too?
Okay, I've ranted enough, we now take you back to our regularly scheduled program thread. "How to throw away your life's savings on something useless."
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Svenskaflicka said:It's called Reality, dear. It scares all of us.
Keep it away!!
Svenskaflicka
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Dirt Man said:
*standing ovation*
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What's Love Got to Do With It? - NY Times, 2.1.2004 - FRANK RICH
The contest that counts is not between the Patriots and the Panthers. As always, the Super Bowl's commercials will very likely prove the main event, and today's show features a high-stakes ad-agency bout: for the first time, two prescription drugs for erectile dysfunction, Levitra and Cialis, are squaring off in the quest to grab a piece of the Viagra action. Who doesn't want to Monday-morning quarterback their double entendres? We've come a long way from Bob Dole, baby. Total sales for the three drugs approached $1.3 billion last year — a market that indexes not just erectile but marital dysfunction. The commercials we've seen thus far tend to depict vaguely forlorn middle-aged couples in need of a second honeymoon. One little pill and bingo! Suddenly the Levitra guy is tossing a football smack through the middle of a tire swing.
But American marriage may be beyond the redemption of GlaxoSmithKline or anyone else. We live in a country where the on-again, off-again J. Lo-Ben nuptials, now mercifully as kaput as "Gigli," got more attention than the Mideast road map. The reality TV craze, from "Joe Millionaire" to "Average Joe," works nightly to recalibrate the definition of marriage into a glitzy form of legalized prostitution. Britney Spears signs on to a 55-hour Vegas marriage "just for the hell of it," and someone else sells pictures of the festivities, including one of the groom sticking his hand down her pants, for up to $100,000 to supermarket tabloids. After the marriage was annulled, Ms. Spears told MTV, "I do believe in the sanctity of marriage, I totally do."
Now comes the coup de grâce: in a campaign year likely to be poisoned by a culture war over same-sex marriage, politicians feel compelled to play marriage counselors. Last month the president from the small-government party proposed a $1.5 billion program that will mount its own advertising push, among other federal elixirs, to promote "healthy marriages." Some might argue that taxpayers' money would be better spent on drug plans that cover Viagra for husbands who leave their wives for the N.F.L., or, better still, on job programs that would increase the ranks of the potentially marriageable. Cynics might say that the president's "healthy marriage" initiative is merely political posturing anyway. Congress will never sign on to such a scheme — or so one might hope — and meanwhile the president can claim credit for, as he put it himself, taking "a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization."
But what civilization, exactly, is he talking about? Since 1970, the percentage of American adults in this enduring institution has dropped from 68 to 56, the percentage of households containing married couples with kids from 45 to 26. As Mr. Bush substituted Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Laden, so he seems confused about the enemy here. Even as he gets bogged down battling gay couples who want the same civil rights as other Americans, the real culprit goes about its business. That culprit is a heterosexual culture determined to reduce marriage to a voyeuristic spectator sport as brutal and commercial as pro football but not nearly so entertaining or harmless. It says a lot about how out of touch Mr. Bush and his speechwriters are with this culture that he repeated Britney Spears's "sanctity of marriage" language in the State of the Union only days after she had made the phrase a national joke.
It's against this backdrop that Diane Sawyer's "Primetime Thursday" interview with Howard Dean and Judy Steinberg Dean, just 48 hours after the president's speech, was as depressing in its way as the president's threat of a constitutional amendment to discriminate against gay couples. No matter who gets elected president, the Deans' marital trial by prime-time newsmagazine will linger as one of the uglier cultural signposts in a season that has already brought us the new TV series "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance" and David Gest's filing of a "domestic violence" lawsuit against Liza Minnelli.
Though I have no vested interest in Howard Dean, it was refreshing that he initially refrained from using his wife as a prop on the campaign trail. (Take Joe and Hadassah's shtick, please!) The Deans didn't want their marriage to be a proto-feminist, anti-feminist or even "Everybody Loves Raymond" role model. They simply refused to pose for the contrived and usually fictionalized marital snapshots that the political press demands and then analyzes to death. If I've learned anything from my own two marriages, it's that no one knows what goes on in another couple's marriage anyway — not even the Clintons'.
When post-Iowa panic drove Howard Dean to reverse himself, it was sad, even though his wife gave her assent. The Sawyer interview was painful to watch not just because it was one long chain of "When did you stop beating your wife?" questions on the subject of the candidate's temper, but because Judy Dean was clearly shy and unpracticed in the art of spin. The only image she cared about passionately was the one she projects to her children and her patients. She seemed genuinely ignorant of the whole media game. "I don't like watching TV that much," she told Ms. Sawyer. She hadn't even seen her husband's infamous "scream" until a friend gave her a tape of it the day after. Not watching TV — and not wanting to be on TV — has in itself become a form of virginity in America, rarer than the other kind, so rare as to be poignant. There was nothing fun about watching it being violated for public consumption, even if the Deans were wholly complicit in their own video deflowering. (So much so that the Dean campaign would soon distribute 120,000 videos of the show to New Hampshire voters.)
Like everyone else, Ms. Sawyer likened the Deans' joint appearance to the Clintons' Super Bowl Sunday "stand by your man interview" on "60 Minutes." (Celebrate its 12th anniversary tonight.) But the Deans were not defending themselves against charges of marital turbulence and infidelity. Quite the contrary: they were defending themselves against charges of having a marriage that was if anything too deficient in the melodrama that might lend it entertainment value and too private to be repackaged as a circus. Now they found themselves damned if they defended their attempt to keep their marriage off the public stage and damned if they didn't. No sooner would they explain how they tried, as Judy Dean put it, to "balance" their careers with their personal lives than Ms. Sawyer would point out that the Clintons "had a young daughter at the time they campaigned" or that John Edwards's wife had "been out there" on the trail with her children. There were 20 questions about Judy Dean's absence from the campaign altogether, as clocked by the writer Alexander Stille in The Los Angeles Times.
The implication of the questions was clear: where do the Deans get off refusing to turn their marriage into a spectator sport? It was downright un-American. Why couldn't they display their marital bliss with the same polish as that other happy two-career political couple, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver?
As it happens, the Deans were not the only celebrity marriage that Ms. Sawyer covered for ABC News of late. Just two months ago she interviewed a couple far more famous, Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter. On Dec. 10, Trista and Ryan, as they are known, were married in prime time on ABC in the most-watched American wedding in history, second in audience by only a hair to that of Diana and Charles. God knows it was something to see, an epic display of everything that's gone wrong with American marriage, all packaged and sold as "the wedding of your dreams."
For those who had the good fortune to miss it, Trista is a physical therapist and former Miami Heat dancer who had previously tried and failed to snare a guy on the ABC reality show "The Bachelor." ABC brought her back for "The Bachelorette," a gender-reversed retread of the same series, and after much prime-time deliberation she chose Ryan, a firefighter, as the winner over 24 other men seeking her hand. The network turned the marriage into a four-hour extravaganza (over three nights) in which the couple gleefully surrendered their privacy. According to Trista's "Bachelorette" contract, published by the Smoking Gun Web site, only one activity was off-limits: the producers promised that no hidden cameras would be "positioned to intentionally capture images of you urinating or defecating in the bathroom." (The consummation of the marriage also went unseen, but you never know what might be auctioned off on eBay.)
The betrothed were paid $1 million for allowing the cameras to facilitate our voyeurism. The wedding itself cost nearly $4 million, also paid for by the show. Much of the endless televised foreplay that preceded the ceremony was therefore devoted to shopping, with Trista taking to the wares of Rodeo Drive as joyously as the hooker played by Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman," another Disney entertainment. This, too, is in keeping with the present marital culture. As Rebecca Mead reported in The New Yorker last year, Americans now spend $40 billion annually on weddings, a bigger business than McDonald's or PepsiCo. Marriage may be in decline, but its value as a brand lingers on.
Yet neither the $1 million cash nor the $4 million ceremony that sealed their marital contract were mentioned when Trista and Ryan were interviewed by Ms. Sawyer on "Good Morning America." While the Deans were treated like freaks, the stars of "The Bachelorette" were treated as a perfectly normal all-American couple. And perhaps these days they are. Trista and Ryan's wedding broadcast was the top-rated show in virtually every major television market, the one exception being Washington, where it was beaten by a rerun of "Law and Order." If only more of our politicians had tuned in, maybe someone would have figured out that it could be harder to restore the sanctity of marriage than to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The contest that counts is not between the Patriots and the Panthers. As always, the Super Bowl's commercials will very likely prove the main event, and today's show features a high-stakes ad-agency bout: for the first time, two prescription drugs for erectile dysfunction, Levitra and Cialis, are squaring off in the quest to grab a piece of the Viagra action. Who doesn't want to Monday-morning quarterback their double entendres? We've come a long way from Bob Dole, baby. Total sales for the three drugs approached $1.3 billion last year — a market that indexes not just erectile but marital dysfunction. The commercials we've seen thus far tend to depict vaguely forlorn middle-aged couples in need of a second honeymoon. One little pill and bingo! Suddenly the Levitra guy is tossing a football smack through the middle of a tire swing.
But American marriage may be beyond the redemption of GlaxoSmithKline or anyone else. We live in a country where the on-again, off-again J. Lo-Ben nuptials, now mercifully as kaput as "Gigli," got more attention than the Mideast road map. The reality TV craze, from "Joe Millionaire" to "Average Joe," works nightly to recalibrate the definition of marriage into a glitzy form of legalized prostitution. Britney Spears signs on to a 55-hour Vegas marriage "just for the hell of it," and someone else sells pictures of the festivities, including one of the groom sticking his hand down her pants, for up to $100,000 to supermarket tabloids. After the marriage was annulled, Ms. Spears told MTV, "I do believe in the sanctity of marriage, I totally do."
Now comes the coup de grâce: in a campaign year likely to be poisoned by a culture war over same-sex marriage, politicians feel compelled to play marriage counselors. Last month the president from the small-government party proposed a $1.5 billion program that will mount its own advertising push, among other federal elixirs, to promote "healthy marriages." Some might argue that taxpayers' money would be better spent on drug plans that cover Viagra for husbands who leave their wives for the N.F.L., or, better still, on job programs that would increase the ranks of the potentially marriageable. Cynics might say that the president's "healthy marriage" initiative is merely political posturing anyway. Congress will never sign on to such a scheme — or so one might hope — and meanwhile the president can claim credit for, as he put it himself, taking "a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization."
But what civilization, exactly, is he talking about? Since 1970, the percentage of American adults in this enduring institution has dropped from 68 to 56, the percentage of households containing married couples with kids from 45 to 26. As Mr. Bush substituted Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Laden, so he seems confused about the enemy here. Even as he gets bogged down battling gay couples who want the same civil rights as other Americans, the real culprit goes about its business. That culprit is a heterosexual culture determined to reduce marriage to a voyeuristic spectator sport as brutal and commercial as pro football but not nearly so entertaining or harmless. It says a lot about how out of touch Mr. Bush and his speechwriters are with this culture that he repeated Britney Spears's "sanctity of marriage" language in the State of the Union only days after she had made the phrase a national joke.
It's against this backdrop that Diane Sawyer's "Primetime Thursday" interview with Howard Dean and Judy Steinberg Dean, just 48 hours after the president's speech, was as depressing in its way as the president's threat of a constitutional amendment to discriminate against gay couples. No matter who gets elected president, the Deans' marital trial by prime-time newsmagazine will linger as one of the uglier cultural signposts in a season that has already brought us the new TV series "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance" and David Gest's filing of a "domestic violence" lawsuit against Liza Minnelli.
Though I have no vested interest in Howard Dean, it was refreshing that he initially refrained from using his wife as a prop on the campaign trail. (Take Joe and Hadassah's shtick, please!) The Deans didn't want their marriage to be a proto-feminist, anti-feminist or even "Everybody Loves Raymond" role model. They simply refused to pose for the contrived and usually fictionalized marital snapshots that the political press demands and then analyzes to death. If I've learned anything from my own two marriages, it's that no one knows what goes on in another couple's marriage anyway — not even the Clintons'.
When post-Iowa panic drove Howard Dean to reverse himself, it was sad, even though his wife gave her assent. The Sawyer interview was painful to watch not just because it was one long chain of "When did you stop beating your wife?" questions on the subject of the candidate's temper, but because Judy Dean was clearly shy and unpracticed in the art of spin. The only image she cared about passionately was the one she projects to her children and her patients. She seemed genuinely ignorant of the whole media game. "I don't like watching TV that much," she told Ms. Sawyer. She hadn't even seen her husband's infamous "scream" until a friend gave her a tape of it the day after. Not watching TV — and not wanting to be on TV — has in itself become a form of virginity in America, rarer than the other kind, so rare as to be poignant. There was nothing fun about watching it being violated for public consumption, even if the Deans were wholly complicit in their own video deflowering. (So much so that the Dean campaign would soon distribute 120,000 videos of the show to New Hampshire voters.)
Like everyone else, Ms. Sawyer likened the Deans' joint appearance to the Clintons' Super Bowl Sunday "stand by your man interview" on "60 Minutes." (Celebrate its 12th anniversary tonight.) But the Deans were not defending themselves against charges of marital turbulence and infidelity. Quite the contrary: they were defending themselves against charges of having a marriage that was if anything too deficient in the melodrama that might lend it entertainment value and too private to be repackaged as a circus. Now they found themselves damned if they defended their attempt to keep their marriage off the public stage and damned if they didn't. No sooner would they explain how they tried, as Judy Dean put it, to "balance" their careers with their personal lives than Ms. Sawyer would point out that the Clintons "had a young daughter at the time they campaigned" or that John Edwards's wife had "been out there" on the trail with her children. There were 20 questions about Judy Dean's absence from the campaign altogether, as clocked by the writer Alexander Stille in The Los Angeles Times.
The implication of the questions was clear: where do the Deans get off refusing to turn their marriage into a spectator sport? It was downright un-American. Why couldn't they display their marital bliss with the same polish as that other happy two-career political couple, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver?
As it happens, the Deans were not the only celebrity marriage that Ms. Sawyer covered for ABC News of late. Just two months ago she interviewed a couple far more famous, Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter. On Dec. 10, Trista and Ryan, as they are known, were married in prime time on ABC in the most-watched American wedding in history, second in audience by only a hair to that of Diana and Charles. God knows it was something to see, an epic display of everything that's gone wrong with American marriage, all packaged and sold as "the wedding of your dreams."
For those who had the good fortune to miss it, Trista is a physical therapist and former Miami Heat dancer who had previously tried and failed to snare a guy on the ABC reality show "The Bachelor." ABC brought her back for "The Bachelorette," a gender-reversed retread of the same series, and after much prime-time deliberation she chose Ryan, a firefighter, as the winner over 24 other men seeking her hand. The network turned the marriage into a four-hour extravaganza (over three nights) in which the couple gleefully surrendered their privacy. According to Trista's "Bachelorette" contract, published by the Smoking Gun Web site, only one activity was off-limits: the producers promised that no hidden cameras would be "positioned to intentionally capture images of you urinating or defecating in the bathroom." (The consummation of the marriage also went unseen, but you never know what might be auctioned off on eBay.)
The betrothed were paid $1 million for allowing the cameras to facilitate our voyeurism. The wedding itself cost nearly $4 million, also paid for by the show. Much of the endless televised foreplay that preceded the ceremony was therefore devoted to shopping, with Trista taking to the wares of Rodeo Drive as joyously as the hooker played by Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman," another Disney entertainment. This, too, is in keeping with the present marital culture. As Rebecca Mead reported in The New Yorker last year, Americans now spend $40 billion annually on weddings, a bigger business than McDonald's or PepsiCo. Marriage may be in decline, but its value as a brand lingers on.
Yet neither the $1 million cash nor the $4 million ceremony that sealed their marital contract were mentioned when Trista and Ryan were interviewed by Ms. Sawyer on "Good Morning America." While the Deans were treated like freaks, the stars of "The Bachelorette" were treated as a perfectly normal all-American couple. And perhaps these days they are. Trista and Ryan's wedding broadcast was the top-rated show in virtually every major television market, the one exception being Washington, where it was beaten by a rerun of "Law and Order." If only more of our politicians had tuned in, maybe someone would have figured out that it could be harder to restore the sanctity of marriage than to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Svenskaflicka
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$4.000.000 on a wedding... ehmmmm... I'm not American, so I'm not up to date with your latest statistics; perhaps one of you could inform me: how many homeless, unemployed people do you have in your country?
SlickTony
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I'd have to say that both times I fell somewhere in between. My mother, who used to be a crackerjack seamstress before she just gave up sewing, made my dress. Both times. She also made my bridesmaids' dresses (wedding #1) and my matron of honor's dress (wedding #2)
For the 2nd one, the one that's lasted, we had the bride's cake professionally done but my mother made the groom's cake. It was a made-from-scratch chocolate sheet cake with green frosting and seashells on the edges, and a wooden model sailboat sunk by the keel into the middle of the cake, because my husband was much more into sailing than he is now. Just as well. If she were making a cake to reflect his current interest, it would have to be a tennis court, and let's face it, most tennis courts, whether asphalt or clay, are kind of a yucky color. I mean, the color is fine for tennis courts, but scarcely imaginable on a cake.
She also made most of the food, although she might have had her friends help her out, but my in-laws paid for a case of champagne. I think we all paid for something. My husband and I paid for more stuff than the first time, when it was all on my parents.
If there's anything you should not cheap out on, it's the photography. For wedding #1, I hired a relatively unknown hobby photographer--a guy I'd met at school who'd taken some good pictures of me and with whom I'd sort of fooled around with before I met husband #1. Something went wrong with the film, or maybe it was the camera--I don't know. For some reason, though, every single picture turned out to be dark on one side. A harbinger of the future, as it turned out to be.
For my second wedding, we hired Cheeseman's, which was one of the best photographers in Pasadena, TX. They did a kickass job, using techniques that are now SOP in wedding pictures but they were pioneering back then. They looked good then, and they still look good now.
And that was more wedding than either of my sisters had. I think both of them were married by judges--I know for a fact my youngest sister was, because I was there. I think my other sister did, too.
Personally, if my daughter elopes I'll be plotzing for joy all over Duval County--true, I did tell her to see to her education and career first, but she's still working on her Ph.D and will be 30 her next birthday.
For the 2nd one, the one that's lasted, we had the bride's cake professionally done but my mother made the groom's cake. It was a made-from-scratch chocolate sheet cake with green frosting and seashells on the edges, and a wooden model sailboat sunk by the keel into the middle of the cake, because my husband was much more into sailing than he is now. Just as well. If she were making a cake to reflect his current interest, it would have to be a tennis court, and let's face it, most tennis courts, whether asphalt or clay, are kind of a yucky color. I mean, the color is fine for tennis courts, but scarcely imaginable on a cake.
She also made most of the food, although she might have had her friends help her out, but my in-laws paid for a case of champagne. I think we all paid for something. My husband and I paid for more stuff than the first time, when it was all on my parents.
If there's anything you should not cheap out on, it's the photography. For wedding #1, I hired a relatively unknown hobby photographer--a guy I'd met at school who'd taken some good pictures of me and with whom I'd sort of fooled around with before I met husband #1. Something went wrong with the film, or maybe it was the camera--I don't know. For some reason, though, every single picture turned out to be dark on one side. A harbinger of the future, as it turned out to be.
For my second wedding, we hired Cheeseman's, which was one of the best photographers in Pasadena, TX. They did a kickass job, using techniques that are now SOP in wedding pictures but they were pioneering back then. They looked good then, and they still look good now.
And that was more wedding than either of my sisters had. I think both of them were married by judges--I know for a fact my youngest sister was, because I was there. I think my other sister did, too.
Personally, if my daughter elopes I'll be plotzing for joy all over Duval County--true, I did tell her to see to her education and career first, but she's still working on her Ph.D and will be 30 her next birthday.
shereads
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Dirt Man said:
In my family's experience (my sister had three formal weddings) you have to pay for the first two. The third time, she's on her own. As father of the bride, you will get away with rolling your eyes and making comments like, "Yes, I know the routine," during the rehearsal for the third one.
What are we celebrating?
I don't pretend to know the full history of formal weddings, but I think we're celebrating the union of two powerful families who are now symbolically pledged to use their combined resources to defeat their enemies.
Having been married and not married, I think the only reason for marriage that makes sense is to provide some stability for children. Unfortunately, there are legal and financial protections attached to marriage that couples can't have any other way.
shereads
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quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Svenskaflicka
$4.000.000 on a wedding... ehmmmm... I'm not American, so I'm not up to date with your latest statistics; perhaps one of you could inform me: how many homeless, unemployed people do you have in your country?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Three.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Svenskaflicka
$4.000.000 on a wedding... ehmmmm... I'm not American, so I'm not up to date with your latest statistics; perhaps one of you could inform me: how many homeless, unemployed people do you have in your country?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Three.
Svenskaflicka
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oggbashan said:
Up until you're cleaning up after the party, then it's all gone again.
It would be more clever to invest all those millions in building houses for the homeless or getting more teachers for those classes where 30 pupils have to share 1 teacher.
SlickTony
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Based on my experience, I think that purpose has been lost for the most part. I'm not citing my first marriage; that was a peculiar set of circumstances. But my parents and my second set of ILs got along about like cocktail sauce and chocolate ice cream.
Dirt Man
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Svenskaflicka said:
At $100,000.00USDollars/ house here in America that only takes care of 40 homeless families, and does not include food, water, and other utilities once they move in. It might however build one community center, depending on the architect, that could house twice as many people, and feed them without utilities for a year.
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