A recurring nightmare of my youth was getting hitched in a big white wedding. I still shudder to think of it.
The nightmare was that I had no tiffany heart ring say in the matter; it was just expected of me, and years later I wrote a runaway bride into a TV series because I still felt the same. Needless to say I've never had a formal wedding.
Seriously, is Chelsea Clinton off her rocker?
We live in strange times for women, on the receiving end of expert advice about every aspect of our lives: whether or not to marry; when to have kids, if at all, and whether to return to work afterwards; what shape our bodies should be, and what regimes of eating and exercise can make that happen; and how to compete with the sexual competitor in magazines and the movies, a skinny, athletic, supple fornicator of any age between 16 and 80 who lives mainly to service a bloke.
The major change for most women in the past 50 years, surely, is the expertise now needed to make a one-night stand respectable.
My working life began when the media defence of porn was wittily cutting edge - I was all for it - and now encompasses what one feminist aptly calls "raunch culture", a culture that makes a white wedding look more and more bizarre.
I've seen fashions change in depictions of sex just as it does in hairstyles; from straight to bisexual, gay and group sex; from girl underneath to girl on top or on all fours, and to the current preoccupation with oral sex.
What these depictions have to do with plot lines or character development eludes me and I cringe in embarrassment - to the hilarity of my kids.
When I backed the liberal push that enabled this visual largesse, the only real exposure I'd had to porn had shocked and sickened me, but I ignored that. You need only look at the movies of the early 1970s to see why.
Women are portrayed in them - in the era of supposedly aggressive feminism - as big-haired air- heads desperate for a shag and there's a covert undertow of hostility toward them. Weirdly, we thought random randiness was liberation.
So Chelsea Clinton's mega- wedding triggered my old nightmare.
christian audigier wholesale I marvelled that a white wedding could still be a dream come true for an educated woman in the 21st century, and so important that NZ$4 million was reportedly lavished on the event.
Could an intelligent woman really agree to spending as much on a spangly frock as many women earn in a year? And could her girly waistline have been pulled in any tighter?
Visiting Australian feminist Melinda Tankard Reist says the "raunch culture" (her term) we now live in has set Western women back 50 years - to the time of routine white weddings, in fact.
She's a founder of a collective that names and shames companies exploiting sexual images of girls, and has been brought here by Family First, which means, I guess, that nobody will take her seriously. The fact that she opposes abortion won't endear her to many people either, but she has a valid message.
"Women's liberation has now come to be seen as the ability to wrap your legs around a pole or flash your breast in public, or send a sexual image of yourself to your boyfriend so he can pass it round his mates," she said this week. "Girls think that empowerment lies in their ability to be hot and sexy." Her group has lobbied successfully
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