Glamorization of Marriage/Children

I have a big problem with mainstream media, mainly in the sense that they are brainwashing women to want to marry and have children with the recent glamorization of weddings and pregnancy and the way they portray it as if it’s wrong not to want these things, or how they make you feel as if you’re a failure if you haven’t achieved these things by the time you’re a certain age, like you’re late 20’s.  It seems almost reminiscent with the 1950’s and how the women were considered spinsters if they hadn’t married by the time they were 23.

Let me start by saying I’m 31, and will soon be 32.  I was married and divorced two years later and have been living with my current boyfriend and his son for two years now.  It’s been wonderful!  We have your typical best friend/lovers type of relationship that a lot of people envy, and I personally have never been happier.  We live like we’re a family yet according to society and our laws, we’re not a family yet since we’re not married yet.  Yet, there’s been this uneasiness within me.

With the current glamorization of marriage I feel inadequate as a woman simply because I was divorced in my late 20’s and have not had children yet and am in my early 30’s, which is leading me down a cycle of depression, anxiety and an almost obsession with marriage and kids.  I know I shouldn’t pay any attention to the media (I should just turn the freaking T.V. off and read!) but it’s everywhere!  I can’t walk down the street and look at the newspaper racks because someone is talking about who’s pregnant, who’s engaged, who’s adopting, etc.  I go on the internet, and BLAMO!  There it is.  It’s as if there is this crazy obsession in the media with family and procreation and it’s creating a lot of uneasiness within me.  

So why don’t we simply get married?  Well, it’s not that easy, and frankly it’s a bit personal, but what it comes down to is that we’re simply not ready right now.  As for the kids portion, same thing, but why do I have to be made to feel as if I’m inadequate as a woman because I feel my children and my relationship will benefit if we were to just wait a little while longer?

I have to wonder though, is it just me or do other women feel the same way about this?  I’d love some input on this.

Edit:  This is a good reference to what I’m talking about.  

Sex & the City review

I went to watch Sex and the City Sunday, and I’ve needed a couple of days to absorb this. The movie is great, as far as entertainment value goes, but I had some issues. Firstly, the movie is incredibly stereotypical. The Latin boy in the movie was the typical hot, sexy, Latino, and I have serious issues with how they totally objectified this guy. It was about the pieces of him, not the whole of him that they were focusing on and I feel that if it shouldn’t be done to women, than why do that to men? Equal treatment is just that and neither side should complain about being objectified. I understand that this characters main focus was his sex appeal and it was all about Samantha wanting him, but lusting after him and “wanting” him the way they portrayed him was just not copacetic.

On to another topic…The only black girl on this film had a strong resemblance to your typical “Mammy” persona, but not as asexual as a Mammy would be. It seems to me that when it came to typical race roles, those were all in place in this movie. The Latino was over-sexualized, the black girl played a “Mammy” role taking care of Carrie and getting her life in order as her “assistant”, which that term to me on it’s own speaks of being a servant -I should be one to talk since my job title holds the same term in it and I swear I’m treated like a servant on a daily basis with just as little pay.

What I found seriously flawed in the movie was how they portrayed the “victims” in the movie. I’m going to try really hard not to give anything away while I explain this, but I don’t know that I’ll be able to. The roles that took place in the movie where forgiveness had to be rationed I though was completely biased. In true life people would not be as forgiving, and it almost seemed as if they had this “you have to forgive me because I’m the man” attitude about the whole thing that I just didn’t appreciate. Even after everything that had been done to the girls it seems as if the “make-up” was a little too much like Snow White where her Prince had finally come to rescue her.

At the end of the movie, I knew what was going to happen but I was hoping that Carrie would stick to her independent guns and tell him to fuck off. She’d been burned by Big so many times that it was about time she told him to go screw himself and yet she didn’t and he came and swept her off her feet again without much effort on his part and they lived “happily ever after”.

Ring a bell?

These girls are supposed to portray the strong, independent, I-don’t-need-shit-from-guys New York Girls, and yet they all get swept off their feet by these Prince Charming personas where the men themselves were really flawed in what they did to them from the get go that it really just didn’t seem right to me that they should even come close to playing a Prince Charming role or that this role even existed at all in this movie. If it had been the women that had wronged these guys the men wouldn’t have been as forgiving. One good example was from the HBO episodes where Carrie cheated on Aiden with Big and he never forgave her for it. That was basically the downfall of that relationship. Why then does Miranda have to forgive Steve for doing the same thing? Why is she pushed by all her friends to forgive him and go back to him? Was there really more at stake in that relationship than with Carrie’s?

In the end though, it honestly was a pretty entertaining movie. I just wish that women weren’t always victims and weren’t always expected to forgive men of their indiscretions and mistakes when the same wouldn’t be true if it were the other way around.

Any thoughts??