Wedding Ritual

An interesting letter to Dear Abby stimulated a wonderful response. The writer laments the ritual at some weddings of the bride and groom stuffing cake into each other’s face. Abby then cites Curious Customs by Tad Tuleja and argues that this is a four-step ritual that “sustains masculine prerogatives in the very act of supposedly subverting them.” This ritual, Abby argues, “may be seen as a dramatization of the tensions in favor of the dominance of the male.” The letter and the response is likely to generate some great class discussion on rituals, weddings, and male-female relationships.