The Tawdry Bride

Since the attack on the dignity of women continues apace and is being helped by our total lack of resistance I suppose this is the next logical step.

Brides as porn stars on their special day. Makes me long for the days of Bridezilla.

From the article entitled: "Brides who don't blush" in the Sunday Times:

WEDDING photography, once a restrained art, is becoming a risqué business. A growing number of American brides are marking their big day by commissioning portraits of themselves in raunchy poses and lingerie, writes John Harlow.

The American wedding is changing fast. Traditionalists have already lamented a switch to homemade vows, such as “to stay together so long as we make each other laugh”, and a large-scale abandonment of white since Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of Sex and the City, got married in black.

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“She wants to remind her spouse why he married her. It was not just because she looked radiant in white — underneath she was downright dirty and dangerous in a black garter or red-sequinned bra.

“It’s more Las Vegas showgirl than blushing bride.”

Well, then and just in case we believe this is a strange, anomalous event here is another article on the same topic.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The multibillion-dollar wedding industry is offering a revealing new twist on the old bridal portrait. Catering to older and more independent brides -- and reflecting popular culture's turn toward the risque and voyeuristic -- more photographers are setting up in dressing rooms to immortalize unguarded, preceremony moments. Wedding albums and public photographer Web sites alike are filling up with a different view of the bride -- daddy's little girl cavorting in lingerie, adjusting a bra or hiking her gown for a bathroom break.

Established wedding photographers say they're taking racy photos at events of all price levels. At a $250,000 affair at the Chicago Four Seasons, photographer Steven Gross -- he charges $10,000 and up a day -- took nearly 8,000 shots, but one that made it into the bride's wedding album was a close-up of her waist and prominent cleavage. Southern California photographer Brian Kramer's portfolio includes black-and-white photos of darling children, classic portraits -- plus an underwear-clad bride chatting on her cellphone in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Chris and Mary Jo Prinos of Lancaster, Mass., whose packages start at $3,000, recently captured a bride discussing last-minute details with her officiant while wearing a camisole, sheer boy shorts and a garter belt. (It's not just women: Grooms, too, are caught brushing their teeth or having their necks shaved.)

Brides are revealing themselves at a time when popular culture has pushed the limits of privacy with boundary-blurring reality TV shows and dating sites that let users swap revealing photos. Some of the relaxed vibe had already seeped into wedding culture, of course, as brides started hitting Vegas on raucous bachelorette parties and, more recently, began choosing minimal-coverage gowns from designers like Vera Wang and Monique Lhuillier.
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Brides and photographers point out that the pictures almost never depict full nudity, and say they're rarely any more salacious than those in a Victoria's Secret catalog. Still, they may be the wedding-day equivalent of a tattoo -- something that seemed like a good idea at the time but has the potential to haunt later. And in some families, the images can create awkward moments between generations.

Hours before her son's wedding in New York City two years ago, Lisa Brettschneider was a little taken aback by the scene in the suite of her daughter-in-law-to-be at the Mandarin Oriental hotel. A twentysomething male photographer was snapping photos of the bride, Alison, and her 12 bridesmaids in their underwear. At one point, the bride-to-be posed on the bed in a silky robe. "It was like a Playboy shoot," says Mrs. Brettschneider, who lives in Larchmont, N.Y.

When the family got the proofs, Mrs. Brettschneider deemed a few images inappropriate for public consumption, including one of Alison's favorite shots, which showed her G-string and back tattoo. "My in-laws weren't too happy about that," says the bride, now 29, who owns a women's clothing showroom in Manhattan. "But it was such a cool shot." Adds her mother-in-law: "I kept saying, 'You're going to have to show them to your kids one day. She didn't put any of those pictures in my album."

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But at the same time, many independent-minded brides are poking fun at so many white bouquets and demure poses. "Being like a virgin is very different than being a virgin," says Julie Albright, a marriage therapist and sociology professor at the University of Southern California. For the many brides who have been living with their fiances for years before taking the leap, mugging for risque shots can be a way of playing up the irony of donning a traditional dress. "The white gown and veil is a kind of performance or drag -- like Madonna in her video for 'Like a Virgin.'"

It all makes posed bride-and-groom portraits seem like a sepia-toned memory. In the early days of cameras, fin-de-siecle couples would pose stiffly in studios. The post-World War II wedding boom created a cottage industry for bridal photographers, and the prevailing style -- staged eye-gazing, the cake-cutting shot -- remained the standard for decades. While Hollywood and royal weddings provided tabloid material, candid shots didn't start taking off until the late 1990s. Many credit Atlanta photographer Denis Reggie with coining the term wedding photojournalism, and his black-and-white images of the 1996 John F. Kennedy Jr.-Carolyn Bessette wedding are often cited as the style's signature shots.

For older women, boudoir shots may also represent something of a declaration of independence. Through the early 1970s, the average age for a college-educated woman's first marriage was about 22. Now it's a shade over 26, according to Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard who has studied social indicators related to marriage. As a result, she says, today's brides -- and their fiances -- have usually lived away from the parents for some time, they're making many of the decisions about the ceremony and, often, they're footing the bill.

As the mother of five sons I can only redouble my prayers for their vocations to the priesthood and religious life. The women's movement? liberation? Women have never been more demoted to slavery. We're embracing a powerful message that women are only of use when we are "sexy" and that is our only source of power and influence.