Let’s talk about marriage, baby.
By Lauren Pincente

Before Law class started bright and early last Wednesday morning, I was sitting in my usual spot (back row, corner), reading over Macchiavelli. The stereotypical front row girls (over-eager undergrads who think they’re already lawyers, always precise in their case analyses and studiously dressed) were discussing marriage.

One girl had known someone who had recently gotten engaged. Another piped in with a story she’d read recently in the New York Times or Time magazine (I was half-heartedly eavesdropping).

Girl #2 said that the rising divorce rates were now more common amongst the senior citizen age group while younger couples (20-30 year olds) were actually less likely to divorce. The reason? Viagra. Well, I thought to myself, at least there’s hope for my friends. Sorry, Nonna. The point isn’t that our generation’s marriages are stronger than our grandparents, though. My grandparents married six weeks after meeting and engagements nowadays seem to happen in just as little time. We have become almost as obsessed as their generation was, which could lead us down the same satin-covered aisle as this “statistic” is saying (I use quotations because I have no actual documentation to back this claim up). Are we heading back down the road that our grandparents are now trying to convince us to stray from? It seems so.

The topic of marriage has been a hot one recently. It seems like the second my 20th birthday passed, all I have been hearing about is my friends talking about marriage. This makes me angry so I feel the need to voice my opinions with others. We’ve barely accomplished anything in the world and we’re already feeling the pressure to marry, fresh into our 23rd year. This, in turn, brings on the topic of marriage again. It’s a cyclical topic that somehow creeps in to too many of my conversations. I don’t really care to marry anytime soon, if ever, but I can’t stop talking about. What’s the deal? Why is everyone so obsessed or worse, in such a rush to marry off?

I hate to sound like Carrie Bradshaw because, God knows, every girl that suddenly wants to be a writer thinks she’s living in an episode of “Sex and the City”. But why do I suddenly feel so much pressure? If we have to revert to my favourite analogous-to-real-life HBO show, then we need to skip over the annoying Carrie and Charlotte, bypass the amusement of Samantha and get to the real deal, the brains of the group, Miranda. Miranda is the only smart woman on the show. Before you ladies get all huffy-puffy on me, allow to me explain. Charlotte lives in a dream world because she is forcefully perfect, which naturally means everything collapses around her: her marriage ends in divorce due to Trey’s impotence, her second husband is a fat, bald Jewish man that she is, at first, disgusted by, and she is unable to get pregnant. With high expectations, Charlotte Yorke is the person that no woman wants to be. All the preconceived notions she has for her life have set her up to fail. When reality kicks in, nothing goes as planned.

Samantha, on the other hand, is the “testosterone woman”. Definitely sexually charged, Samantha is nothing more than a promiscuous woman, there to entertain as the comedic relief (but, naturally, she is reprimanded for her overt sexuality in the final few episodes by being diagnosed with breast cancer. Film theorists believe that this is part of a classic tendency to punish the promiscuous women of film/television).

Carrie is caught in a world of indecisiveness. She is what women should not want to be; she looks for a man to make her feel feminine and more petite than her yoga-toned body already is. Notice how her major relationships are with big, burly men who she fits neatly under the arm of? Apart from her literal meekness, she aims to be the figuratively smaller partner in her relationships. She wants to be submissive and dates men that make her feel that way. Nothing about her says to me “strong and independent woman”. And then there is Miranda. Smart, sophisticated, not-necessarily-good-looking-until-Season-6 Miranda. God bless Miranda’s presence in this show. Her voice of reason soothes me in a world of Carrie Bradshaws.

Miranda is a smart woman because Miranda knows what she wants. I think we can excuse her for getting married in the final season because she did it only after she realized she really wanted to be with Steve, a year after giving birth and without the reason that it was “time”. Miranda was always around to remind the girls, “If men can do it, so can we” but not in a way that made her look questionable (ie. Samantha and her sexual escapades). Miranda was cynical, sarcastic, sometimes bitter towards other women for being idiots and God, I loved every minute of it. Miranda’s marriage was more real than Charlotte’s ever aspired to be and, though I loved Big, better for her than any man ever was for Carrie. We know women are capable of being Miranda so why aren’t more women appropriately so?

Marriages, if Girl #2’s statements are true, should be getting stronger. If examples like Miranda are leading the pack, it’s difficult to imagine that they could be getting worse. Uunfortunately, though, this isn’t the case because we just can’t seem to learn from other people’s mistakes. There are so many hair-raising tales of just the opposite of Miranda still floating around. There are still women going from their father’s house to their husband’s house (something I would definitely advise anyone I knew not to do) which usually meets with disasterous ends or at least a visit to Oprah at the age of 40, saying, “I’ve lost myself”. Here is one example of someone just about to head down that route:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10VmJ-8XGA4&NR (Update 2007: Video No Longer Available)

My boyfriend shared that with me earlier this morning and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since. I don’t find it funny like he did because I was too scared that Jody might find me and eat me. Or worse, chop off my hair. I was so affected by this video that I’ve been thinking about it all day, having watched it a total of four times now. I don’t have a fear of haircuts despite the fact that I haven’t had one since September. And it’s not the fact that butchering your hair is a horrible thought to women. What I see is not the psychotic bride that everyone else sees—I honestly see a girl who is freaking out so much about her marriage that she’s willing to do anything to jeopardize her walk down the aisle. Even if it means that she’s going to make herself “look like a boy” by going to town on her hair just so she won’t have to face Kevin, forcing her bridesmaids to walk down the aisle to say, “Jody won’t be joining us today…” Jody is what would have become of Carrie Bradshaw had she worn that dress that gave her the rash and walked down the aisle with any of her Mr. Right-Nows. This video is the reason we should all be afraid of marriage and more importantly, why Miranda rules. It goes to show that too many young people are jumping into their wedding ceremonies heart first, brain last. Jody is young, unbalanced and obviously irresponsible with no grasp of what she wants in life-- and this is just when it comes to her hair. Imagine what will happen in the years after the ceremony? Good luck with that, Kevin.

There is a lot to be said for true love. It’s nice to think you’ll be like your grandparents who still hold hands, it’s exciting to think of your name combined with his and what your children will look like and it’s a natural step to want to plan a big party where you get to be the centre of attention once you get bored of just being a girlfriend. But can we please start thinking with our heads? We all have the capacity to get bored and cheat and our partners are subject to alteration after a couple years of wear and tear regardless of how much we think we love or how much we think we know. There is a lot to be said for time, especially since throughout its course, things change drastically. Look at Jody, my example from earlier. Do you really think Kevin would’ve proposed to Jody knowing she was that much of a sociopath? Please start thinking like a Miranda—use your heads, ladies!

Killer Kondoms!
By Lauren Pincente

I started writing an article for the Innis Herald about an experience my friends and I had and recently found it on my computer, a year later, unfinished. Now completed, I've decided to publish it for the facebook viewers. Keep in mind, all facts are true in this article-- you can check imdb.com yourself!

Killer Kondoms Attack!

Who says Germans can't be funny?

Everyone has ‘those’ kinds of nights. It starts off as a movie night with your pals and then one guy says, “hey, let’s watch some porn” and it quickly takes a turn for the worse. Sometimes, though, it takes a turn for the more titillating as my friends and I discovered on one of ‘those’ nights last year.

It happened the first time because we couldn’t agree on a movie. We ended up watching space porn and really got into the evaluation of its feasibility, plot line, characters and, of course, choice in music. It was starting to get late and one female friend remarked, upon others putting on their jackets, that, “I am not leaving until I see someone cum on someone else’s face.” Pornography has the tendency, though, to get old very fast. Once you pass through the guy on girl, then the girl on girl, then the guy on girl on girl, you’ve seen it all. But, like Facebook, it’s an addiction that you can’t stop going back to, checking to see what’s new and updated. This is where trouble begins to brew.

Second round. My friends and I settle in for another night, huddling in around the TV to watch porn. Only this time, all the rules had been changed. Yes, that’s right, we actually sought it out. We didn’t turn to porn in boredom like other nights. This night, we sat down and pushed aside the idea of watching a Hollywood movie. We were choosing porn. While my friend, “George” (name has been changed to protect the innocent), was fumbling through the pay per view channels (you know you’ve all read the titles and show information on your Rogers cable boxes), he found a movie called “Killer Condom”. Sold! The name alone had us laughing so we knew this would be some quality pornography. Little did we know…

Apparantly, the movie we stumbled upon was a 1996 German sub-titled flick actually named “Kondom des Grauens”—a big hit in its motherland (those crazy Germans, huh!). After viewing it, though, it’s easy to understand why. Imagine this: Detective Macaroni must set out to find out why so many penises are being bitten off in room 309 of the Hotel Quickie. Week after week, reports of male castration and injury flood police stations. The hotel must close the room off to all patrons in order to get to the bottom of the case. For awhile, the attacks stop until (!) penises are being bitten off in all rooms of the Hotel Quickie and no one knows why. It is then left to Det. Macaroni to stop the problem of the penis-biting culprits which he discovers are actually the condoms the hotel provides.

Initially, I couldn’t believe this plot had even been dreamed up, let alone was brought into fruition. Who would ever think of condoms biting off penises as a good pornographic film? If anything, it’s the opposite of pornography, it’s de-boner-ography. I doubt any guy sitting watching “Killer Condom” is able to maintain an erection either because the plot is just too funny or the imagery scary enough to send him into turtle mode (which I am not about to explain to any ladies reading this). And don’t even get me started on the messages of morality in the film: a hotel used by prostitutes and their clientele is leaving the clientele castrated? The underlying messages are obvious but where does the director of THIS film, commonly mistaken for porn, get off (apart from his mother’s bathroom)?

I had to investigate this matter further after viewing the film. According to imdb.com, “Kondom des Grauens” isn’t even classified as porn! “Killer Condom” is just your regular trashy comedy that somehow never made it to North American movie theatres. Gee, I wonder why. But who am I to judge such a fine piece of cinematic artistry? North Americans, after all, are prudent in comparison to Europeans. Of all the films I have seen this past year, “Killer Condom” is the most memorable, ranking high in a list of foreign films like “Camera Paradiso” and “Ladri di Biciclette”. If German theatre is anything like “Kondom des Grauens”, maybe I will consider taking a course in Weimar Cinema, so long as it promises to be just as interesting. Take it from this Cinema Studies major, ladies and gentlemen, despite the lewd factor of “Kondom des Grauens”, it definitely is still a sight to see. The laughable scene when Det. Macaroni is attacked by the unwrapped (and unsanitary) condom he finds in the Hotel Quickie during his rendez-vous with his gay lover? Wunderbar!