Two weddings and a bottom
Faux royal buffoonery makes me feel like an alien
I’ve been married once. We got married in a registry office with a random nurse and a man who worked at Bunnings (strangers to us, and to each other) as our witnesses. A romantic atmos was not helped by the number of would-be immigrants waiting for their visas or some other kind of bureaucratic red tape — I think the registry office was part of Internal Affairs. I wore a recycled bridesmaid dress. I’m now divorced.
It’s fair to say I am not very sentimental about weddings. I don’t even understand them. They always seem to have the contrived awkwardness of a school play.
So maybe that is one reason why it peeves me to find my newsfeed being infested by pictures of the latest royaltyrelated nuptials. As far as I can tell it is noteworthy because the bride has global recognition for her bottom.
Oops, Pippa Middleton is also an author of Celebrate: A Year of Festivities for Families and Friends, a book about the lives of a bunch of twentysomething, prosperous white people with interiordesigned lives. It included these instructions about how to have a sack race: “Everyone stands along a starting line and on Go players start jumping in their sacks toward the finish line. The first person to cross the finish line is declared the winner.”
But Pippa Middleton has a pretty smile and doesn’t drown kittens. So why am I so irked?
I actually find watching this sort of wedding uncomfortable, in the same way I find Mad Men disturbing. The Pippa Middleton wedding even looks a bit like it could come straight from the era of Mad Men but the women have more defined biceps.
There are flower girls and page boys — it’s all just seems so unreconstructed and to me, oppressive.
Seeing the reverence with which Pippa Middleton’s wedding is reported, by any measure a shallow pageant of snobbery and privilege, it’s hard to believe it’s 2017. It’s like watching a sort of nuptial Miss World for Hooray Henries.
I think the bit the bit that bothers me the most is the crazy-making levels of denial.
The rigid social norms around the royal family seem almost comical, so far-fetched from a real world in which the environment is being degraded, desperate immigrants are drowning and a dangerous lunatic is in the White House.
But never mind all that. Pippa Middleton chose to wear a — plot spoiler — white lace dress!
And look! Here is a parade of heteronormative, white, thin couples in silly hats. I find myself watching it as if I was an alien looking at the strange mating habits of this odd species, humans, after touching down from Mars. Flower girls, ugh! And page boys. Have we really made so little progress?
I guess you could say that there is nothing wrong with a bit of harmless escapism, holding up this Marie Antoinette-ish fairytale like OxyContin for the masses who are standing at the checkout queue in Countdown and reading glossy magazines as a distraction from long commutes and overdue bills.
But it is more insidious than that. There is an implicit admiration in the treatment of the wedding that I find disconcerting.
By giving this amount of attention to the wedding of a socialite, it implies this is something we should all aspire to. That every girl longs to be a princess, her sister or a prince’s girlfriend: like Meghan Markle, an actress famous for playing the world’s most unfeasibly tight-skirted lawyer. (She managed to win all her cases without being able to reach for any law texts for fear of a wardrobe malfunction.)
I don’t want my daughter to grow up thinking that success is being Tatler’s Number One Singleton and then marrying a hedge fund toff.
We need to be careful what we pay attention to, what we value. This matters. And we can decide.
In Small Pleasures, Alain de Botton’s School of Life says that our culture continues to adopt an attitude to enjoyment which was developed mainly between 1750 and 1900 in Europe and America by poets, artists and novelists who can be grouped together as Romantics. The Romantic idea of enjoyment is deeply impressed by things that are rare, hard to access and which are often connected to travelling far from where one normally lives. They prized the exotic and the unique moment.
By this measure, a grandiose royal wedding would be a pleasure to be savoured. But there are other kinds of pleasures. A small pleasure can be defined as a pleasure that doesn’t fit the Romantic template and therefore seems unimportant.
You can feel enjoyment from all sorts of small things: a favourite old jumper, holding hands with a small child, having a crush.
So while weddings leave me cold, I find myself strangely moved to tears by the 50th wedding anniversary of an ordinary non-royal couple who still delight in each other despite being weathered by wrinkles and time and troubles. But I guess you have to have a wedding to get to that bit, don’t you?