For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about the final sentence in the standard English-language wedding ceremony

“...you may now kiss the bride”

It’s is probably the shortest, purest distillation of the two rules of the No-Sex Class paradigm.

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The two rules, you may recall, are

#1: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire. #2: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.

Saying it any other way than “You may now kiss the bride” would violate the rules #1 and #2 in a number of obvious ways. It also commits the double slight of a) sexualizing the woman (who only gets to be kissable) and b) objectifying her (whatever her name is she’s always reduced to “the bride.”)

But actually what popped awake this morning wasn’t the “...kiss the bride” part, it was “you may now…” part because it speaks to the question (asked in comments by RemittanceGirl, here) of who benefits from the rules… who benefits from the paradigm… who, really, benefits from patriarchy.

The pat answer is usually “men.”

The more traditional answer though, and I think more accurate, is “their families.” Because for all the power we ascribe to men, the message we’re given is that (as our English teachers might put it) whatever they can do before marriage they may not.

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I write a lot about feminism aware of the ambiguities of doing so as a man. And I reconcile the ambiguity by trying to understand the impact anti-feminism a.k.a. the patriarchy a.k.a. the dominant paradigm has on men. And I feel it’s more accurate to say I’m thinking from a feminist perspective rather than one of the more traditional avenues of men’s studies or men’s rights because… well, it’s not just about helplessly flapping about how “patriarchy hurts men too so that’s why women don’t deserve this or that sovereignty.” Instead I’m trying to understand not that men are hurt too but how we’re hurt, and to explore how our perception of that hurt either adds to or distracts us from how to get it to stop hurting anybody.

It just seems like identifying how men are hurt, and trying to find the exits in a way that doesn’t involve stepping over anybody else to get there, is or ought to be a pretty crucial.

One of the more enduring problems is that it’s pretty clear that compared to women society privileges men way more than women… and yet when you talk to us it’s pretty clear that for all our very real privilege we don’t perceive it ourselves!

Since there’s probably nothing more dangerous than a powerful human being who thinks he or she is powerless that’s not good. At all.

Quick question: Given the weight of the institutions telling the groom “you may now kiss the bride,” who do you think it makes the most sense for men to fulminate about: women (either individually or collectively) or patriarchy?