Gender-bender: Here comes the Flower Fella!

Soon-to-weds welcome the newest member of their wedding entourage, and the role is not for the faint-hearted.  Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times:

For her otherwise traditional Filipino Catholic wedding last October in Mountain View, Calif., Jen Fernando chose her friend Sean Hopkins, 37, to be the “flower fella.” “She thought it was the perfect way to represent our friendship because it was totally our sense of humor,” Mr. Hopkins said. “When it had to be approved by the priest, I thought that would be it, but he was tickled by the idea.”

The crowd at St. Joseph, a Roman Catholic church, cheered as Mr. Hopkins tossed silk rose petals onto the carpeted path from an onion-shaped basket wrapped in silver ribbon. “I was nervous,” he said. “When I took the first petals out, I saw my hand shaking and I heard whispers, but then everyone started laughing so I could let go.”

As gender roles in weddings have gradually blurred, it is less rare for the bride and bridegroom to have opposite-sex attendants or so-called honor attendants.  The gendered wedding is breaking down, which is allowing heterosexuals to play with the stereotypes in a way they didn’t have permission to do before. Although flower men might bring on waves of laughter, they did not undermine the ritual.

You can play with the traditional mold, but in the end, you’ve had a wedding, Whether you do it on the back of a motorcycle or underwater, it’s the same thing.

Weddings were one of the last institutions to hold on to strict roles for the sexes, but that they were changing.  We continue to have the marriage ceremony, but we’re slowly changing it to represent the greater balance of the genders. It’s a significant shift to have the male be the flower girl because it introduces a male who represents gentility, flowers and femininity. It’s just another step toward the dismantling of the patriarchal formation of the marriage.

Typically, the flower girl settles for a few compliments in the bride’s shadow, so it can be tricky for a man to manage the task without upstaging the bride. [READ FULL STORY]