When I attended a cakesitting party, I theorized that perhaps the spark of lust some people feel from destroying a cake materializes because we put so much time and effort and emotional energy into cakes. Not just the making of them, but also the planning for them, presenting them, eating them. They’re the centerpiece of a traditional birthday party, and to destroy something so precious and so highly celebrated is an almost unfathomable taboo. It’s why, you’ll note, many big showy “Oh no!!” moments in movies culminate in a cake being tragically (and comically) destroyed.
Around the same time, I started wondering whether this taboo of destroying highly celebrated objects could extend to other types of celebrations. So, naturally, I typed “wedding dress fetish” into Google, thinking: what could be a more celebrated object than that?
Currently, that phrase brings up 41 results. In those results, you’ve got your brides merely expressing extreme enthusiasm about their dresses, sure, but you’ve also got an Experience Project page of men professing their lust for wedding dresses, porn clips of women giving blowjobs in floofy white frocks, and a review of a mystery novel about a serial killer who dresses all his victims in wedding gowns. It’s often said that humans can and will fetishize anything and everything you can think of, and this is no exception. One fetishist writes that a wedding dress is “the ultimate in femininity and the most ultimate dress anyone can own.” I can’t argue with that, except to add that the femininity being referred to here is, of course, a capitalist and conventional form of that gender expression, tied up in many different axes of historical oppression.
More broadly, some people have a “bride fetish” or a “bridal fetish,” which might focus on the dress but also might focus on the other trappings of a woman being wed: the white lingerie under the dress, the flawless makeup, the veil, the unattainability, the supposed virginity, or any number of other things. I’m most interested in the dress as a fetish object, though, especially after having read Laurie Essig’s book Love, Inc. where she dissects the vast psychological baggage we’ve placed on the wedding dress as a symbol. It’s right up there with crosses and the human heart in terms of the importance we heap onto it.
I spent some time in a bridal shop a couple years ago when I joined my friend’s wedding party. While I was trying on bridesmaid dresses – which are pretty much designed to make the wearer look unremarkable and plain, but in a pretty way – my friend kept swanning in and out of the dressing room in one gorgeous gown after another, commanding the room. I teared up almost every time she emerged in a new dress, because the effect of seeing someone you love – or even someone you hardly know! – in a dress that culturally weighted is powerful.
I didn’t experience that feeling as sexual, but I can easily see how someone could. Swathing yourself or a loved one in white tulle and satin could be a way of accessing what’s supposed to be the best day of your life, a day when you look and feel gorgeous, a day that we all winkingly acknowledge will probably end in romantic sex. It’s a day when everyone stares at you, when you’re the center of attention but no one gets mad at you for it, when you make promises that are supposed to be binding. There’s a lot in there that overlaps psychologically with concepts like exhibitionism and voyeurism, dominance and submission, and (especially when you factor in the corsets and high heels) sadism and masochism. It’s no wonder some people fixate on weddings and their trappings in a distinctly sexual way.
Apparently sometimes bridesmaids try on wedding gowns when the bride-to-be does, because “When in Rome” and all that – but I didn’t, when I was in that bridal boutique with my pal. It would’ve felt inappropriate to steal her thunder, but also there was something powerfully sacred about these dresses in my mind. I didn’t want to try one on until I had “earned” the right by getting engaged and actually being a bride-to-be, rather than just playacting as one. I knew seeing myself in a white gown would unleash a torrent of feelings I wasn’t ready to feel. So I zipped myself into my meek blue cocktail dress and tucked that desire away for another day.
I hope someday I have sex in a wedding gown, whether or not I actually got married that day, because I imagine there’s just nothing else quite like it. What else could be as decadent – besides sitting on a beautiful chocolate cake?
This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.