Section:GDN 12 PaGe:8 Edition Date:190815 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 14/8/2019 17:47 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian
8 Thursday 15 August 2019
Women
The bridezilla
has become as
much a fi xture
of weddings as
the monstrous
mother-in-law
It is wedding season,
and as surely as an Ed Sheeran-
soundtracked fi rst dance follows a
street-food-truck meal, stories of
brides behaving badly are keeping
the internet stoked. There is a whole
group on the forum Reddit devoted
to tales of so-called bridezillas.
Newspapers devour them like a
slice of naked wedding cake. Last
month, a screengrabbed picture
of a text conversation between a
bride trying to force her cousin to
be a bridesmaid before telling her
she was “too fat anyways” was
posted. Another post related how a
woman had tried to force her fi anc e
to get a second job to fund their
wedding. There was also the story
of a woman who posted the picture
of her engagement ring – which
once belonged to her partner’s
grandmother – complaining it
wasn’t what she had wanted, and
the woman who complained her
bridesmaids didn’t want to pay for
their dresses.
Earlier this year was the story of the
bride-to-be who asked her pregnant
bridesmaid to consider having an
abortion so as not to complicate
the dress fi ttings, and the bride
who forced her friends to take a
polygraph test. She wanted to fi nd
out which one of them had leaked
details of her planned dress code,
in which colours were allocated
according to weight. Whether or not
these tales – usually anonymous –
are true, in WhatsApp groups over
the country, women are prefacing
any request of their bridesmaids
with “not to be a bridezilla or
anything, but ...”
“I won’t stand for it,” says Mark
Niemierko, a wedding planner,
of outlandish demands. Only
recently, he says, he took a bride-
to-be to one side and asked her to
stop being so rude to his suppliers.
When he talks to other people in the
industry, they do share stories of
overly-demanding brides, though
he adds it has become such a well-
worn – and feared – stereotype that
the bridezilla has started to die out.Bridezilla:
summer’s
most sexist
trope
It’s the name
every engaged
woman fears,
mocked by the
press and guests
alike – but is
‘bridezilla’ just
a fear of female
assertiveness?
Emine Saner
fi nds out
It came about, he thinks, with the
advent of celebrity weddings. He
blames David and Victoria Beckham,
and their 1999 wedding – with its
golden thrones, outfi t changes,
balloon release and fi reworks –
for starting the modern trend for
wanting the biggest and fl ashiest
do, along with all the stressful
organisation and cost that entails.
The worst behaviour he has seen
from couples “comes from being
somewhat insecure and more so,
keeping up with the Joneses ”.
The term bridezilla, likening
brides to the fearsome Godzilla, the
giant lizard-like sea monster from
the 1954 Japanese fi lm, had emerged
four years before the Beckhams’
wedding in a newspaper article in
the Boston Globe about demanding
brides. It peaked around 2009, with
the fi lm Bride Wars, in which AnneHathaway and Kate Hudson try to
sabotage each other’s weddings.
And yet, 10 years on, the unhinged
bridezilla has become as much a
fi xture of the wedding picture as that
other monstrous female stereotype,
the hostile mother-in-law.
“We get a slew of news stories
about out-of-control brides
making ridiculous demands,” says
Jilly Kay, a lecturer in media and
communication at the University
of Leicester, “and I think what
it tells us more about is not that
there is an epidemic of hysterical
bridezillas, but that our culture is
really uncomfortable with the idea
of women having power and also
women being angry. It speaks to this
deep anxiety we seem to have with
women who assert themselves, want
to take control and have a voice.”
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