This reminds me of Sarah Haskins' video on Wedding Shows! http://current.com/shows/infomania/88988193_sarah-haskins-in-target-women-wedding-shows.htm

I'm flummoxed by the watch. Are watches part of a bride's traditional gear?

"So maybe it isn’t on the X chromosome."

I didn't know anyone ever said it was.

The promotion of weddings to little girls has always freaked me out. It always made me feel like I was expected to get married (as if it was a fundamental part of the life cycle).

Also, why do we promote marriage to little girls, but not to little boys?

Is this not also a form of adolescent sexualization? Sure, it's not overt in the Hustler sense of it, but isn't "traditional" marriage also about enforcing sexual mores, too?

I walked by David's Bridal a few weeks ago and the window pic was of some very, very young girls in bridal outfits. I should go take a picture.

That is so creepy. Makes me more pleased that I never thought about marriage when I was young (and actually I didn't up until I met the person I wanted to marry, at age 26).

And it's not just that you're expected to get married, but you MUST have the traditional white wedding with all the various trappings. It's funny, my husband and I were married nearly 14 years ago at the justice of the peace. We weren't into the whole giant ceremony thing and we certainly could not have afforded it anyway, and so we just had a small party with close friends afterward. And I've never regretted it. But to this day, whenever someone finds out about how we married, without fail they fret over our (my) assumed deprivation: "You didn't get to wear a lavish dress? No walk down the aisle? No wedding album or video? Weren't your parents upset?" And then they tell my husband that he *owes* me a "proper wedding."

I agree with all of the above statements, but at least in the packaging shown above there is no man in the picture. It shouldn't be promoting marriage, but at least it is just promoting marriage and not exclusively marriage to a man.

(This is no way a justification!)

A friend of mine told me that the last time her 4-year old daughter, 3 and 6 year old nephews and a little 4-year old neighbor girl played 'wedding', it ended up with one of the little girls naked in bed. I don't know exactly what that might mean, but I think it's pretty interesting that the play went beyond dress-up and aisle-walking.

"Choking hazard" says it all.

My little brother and I would play wedding as kids. He always wanted to be the bride, so as the older one, I had to be the groom. We both wanted to wear the pretty dress. My mother did not care.

Well, when you live in a "culture" in which commercial media has such larger effect on what being a woman stands for I do not wonder if it turns out to be like this. You could claim that such fictional portray has no real effect on people but the reality is that kids cannot escape it and these awful role models stick to lots of people especially when gendered behaviour of such sort is being enforce in the norms of society.

But who really bothers to care? These companies are out there to make a buck out of raping the minds of children and rightfully so. It is a completely legal and valid thing. I mean, unless you cannot change the legislation there is truly nothing to complain about. Let us not pretend that some corporation really cares about morality of well-being of people.

I actually didn't realise that there was this cliche of little girls playing weddings and dreaming of their wedding day until a couple of years ago. I think I was watching Scrubs and there was a line in one episode that said all little girls dream of/plan their wedding day, while guys only start thinking about it once they're engaged. And I was sort of like, '...what?'. Because I've never played weddings or even cared about it that much. When I was a kid my favourite games to play were Superman and The Lion King. I don't know of any friends who played weddings.

http://i31.tinypic.com/v2qpa1.jpg

I saw this Barbie a couple months ago and took a picture of it. The doll was part of a series of others, including a veterinarian and another career. I couldn't believe that being a bride was put on par with careers. Stay-at-home mom, sure. Stay-at-home bride? That's a bit odd.

Disclaimer: English is not my first language.

Men do not appear in these images because this celebration is "all about the bride". Simply as that. In the weddings the groom is little more than another accessory for the bride, just like the princes are in most Disney movies.

As a man* I have to say that the marriage ceremony is often an imposition from our partners that we have to put up with in order to live with the woman we love. We would like to get married, but planning a full year for just one day and expending an exorbitant sum of money is for many of us just ridiculous. Not to talk about the huge amount of unnecessary stress (what if it rains? what if something else fails?).

I say this because I am just not sure how men benefit from the tyranny that modern weddings have become. If promoting lavish ceremonies among young girls is sexist, I am don't know who benefits (other than the company), but it is not us.

*I am not talking for all men here, but there are many that feel this way.

I run a website for non-traditional brides, and I will admit to being disturbed when I receive emails from teen girls who read the site.

"I'm dreaming of planning my own offbeat wedding someday!" they tell me, and I get concerned ... because whether the wedding being fantasizing about is a big poofy white dress wedding or a sleek black dress goth wedding, I still get worried when a 15-year-old girl tells me that the thing they're most looking forward to in their adult life is planning a wedding.

Maybe the wedding of Victoria and Albert--rather than, say, the wedding of Queen Anne or Tsarina Elizabeth--set the pattern because it happened near the beginning of the period of mass retail marketing? Does the bridal department co-evolve with the department store, the brides' magazine with the popular magazine, the commercialized imaginary rite with the commercialized imaginary worlds of movies and TV? If so, we're into the complicated issue of how "the domestic sphere" was constructed as a gendered institution that could be directly, and exclusively, reached by targeted marketing practices.