What bridal magazines can do to ANYONE
How does this video only have 75 views? We don’t normally share sketch videos, but this one is about about how, sometimes, guys can get way more sentimental about wedding planning than girls. Give the video two minutes, and behold the full-frontal mind-fuck that bridal magazines can pull on ANYONE. “Ooh, this one looks like a grotto! Like a magical fairy mermaid grotto…”
Reconciling marriage as a feminist: Does everything about the wedding have to be a feminist battle?
I feel that each of the choices we make for our wedding need to be conscious choices. We need to weigh the comfort of tradition against the statement (overt or otherwise) that it may make. Not every feminist wedding is going to look the same — and certainly one can be a feminist and have a more “traditional” wedding. I don’t decide who is a feminist and who is not — I only get to determine how my feminism manifests itself.
Wedding junk mail: When life gives you garbage, make confetti!
With my marketing and public relations background, I really should have known that once I started calling vendors, my name would wind up on someone’s mailing list. For the last several weeks, I have been receiving regular junk mail from my area’s WIC staple vendors. So I’ve come up with several solutions of what to do with all that gross junk mail…
A sticky WIC-ket: Offbeat Bride is part of the Wedding Industrial Complex
There’s a lot of talk in the alt-wedding world about the “wedding industrial complex,” that runaway freight train of wedding industry grossness that’s always pressuring you to do things a certain way because supposedly that’s how things are done.
Lots of us hate the Wedding Industrial Complex, which some people abbreviate as “The WIC.” I feel y’all on the loathing of an industry that can be insidious and damaging. I think it’s also important, however, to reiterate something I’ve written about several times before: Offbeat Bride is absolutely part of the wedding industry.
Ditch the wedding propaganda: tv shows, magazines, and (gasp!) even Pinterest
I have sworn off all wedding-related things. Or, at least, things not related directly to my wedding. This includes TV shows, magazines, The Knot, and any other website that makes me have unrealistic expectations of my nuptials. This “wedding propaganda,” as I have so lovingly been calling it, has only overwhelmed me, smothered my own voice inside my head, and made me feel inadequate in the planning and execution of my own wedding. This is unacceptable.
My concerns with styled shoots, and why I publish them anyway
Are you familiar with this concept of styled shoots? It’s when wedding vendors team up together to create a fantasy weddings, showing off what they can do. I totally get why styled shoots are great for vendors — it gives folks a chance to show off the kind of work they WANT to do — but we have a clear policy to never ever feature them on Offbeat Bride, and here’s why…