So, this has been running around the internet lately, and because even I have to have a limit on the amount of media I consume, I ignored it. Apparently it’s provocative that David McCullough told some high school graduates in a wealthy white Northeast suburb that they’re not special, and it caused a big hullabaloo. What no one seemed to notice, though, was the not so thinly veiled sexism in the first part of the speech. (Full disclosure-my extremely smart friend T pointed this out to me in an email earlier today.)
Shall we take a look? Let’s.
“So here we are… commencement… life’s great forward-looking ceremony. (And don’t say, “What about weddings?” Weddings are one-sided and insufficiently effective. Weddings are bride-centric pageantry. Other than conceding to a list of unreasonable demands, the groom just stands there. No stately, hey-everybody-look-at-me procession. No being given away. No identity-changing pronouncement. And can you imagine a television show dedicated to watching guys try on tuxedos? Their fathers sitting there misty-eyed with joy and disbelief, their brothers lurking in the corner muttering with envy. Left to men, weddings would be, after limits-testing procrastination, spontaneous, almost inadvertent… during halftime… on the way to the refrigerator. And then there’s the frequency of failure: statistics tell us half of you will get divorced. A winning percentage like that’ll get you last place in the American League East. The Baltimore Orioles do better than weddings.)”
The take away:
Weddings are only for ladies. Dudes do not care. You’re lucky if they show up wearing pants. Or at all. If we were to involve Dudes in wedding planning, they’d just mess everything up by being Dudes. It’s HILARIOUS to imagine Dudes expressing emotion, or enjoying something that might involve emotion or anything that’s not grilling, going to the bathroom or sports. They just refuse to engage with such things. This is how all men are, it’s part of being masculine. Flexibility in gender presentation doesn’t exist, at least not in heterosexual men. Who’s is foisting these “unreasonable demands” on the groom? I bet it’s ladies, with our materialism, insatiable baby-lust and all our unmanageable feelings. (Ladies: We Ruin Everything. )
