On the surface, it doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal, right? I mean, you say bride, you think ‘bridesmaids’.  What wedding photographer doesn’t have a plethora of pictures of a girl in white, smiling, with five other women of varying ages in a terrifying shade of coral, looking less happy? If you’re the bride, you’re meant to be surrounded by loads of female extras being feminine and cooing about appearance and hair and The Dress and flowers – that’s what the media show. But I had a big issue when it came to my bridesmaids. I have a lot of friends and they are’t all female, and lots of them are in different groups and some are in different countries. In the end, I have a family member (stepsister), my best mate (who lives in South Korea) and a bridesman.

Yup, that’s right. I’ve known Dan since I was 18 and he knows me almost as well as my fiancé, so screw it, he’s in my bridal party. I have a bridesman.  There are actually some great sides to this. For one thing, like my fiancé, he doesn’t drink, so he’ll be very helpful in negotiating the family tensions on the day when it comes to the group photographs. For another, he’s great at calming me down and getting me to remember to have some perspective. And he’s funny and can cheer me up when I’m stressed and grumpy.

Needless to say, my mother does not approve. ‘Why can’t he be part of Future Husband’s party?’ she wailed. It is seemingly ‘not done’ to have men in your wedding entourage if you’re a woman, I imagine because of women not having male friends in the same way in the old days, because, tradition implies, that would surely lead to romance.  (Although I have in fact slept with him. I am not revealing this fact to my mother.) A couple of other people have joked ‘Oh, in a dress?’ and I’ve just stared at them until they stop with their gender stereotyping.

The idea of just having your female friends is a lovely one but a little outdated when you a) know what sex is and don’t need your married friends telling you before your wedding night, and b) regularly talk to men without the worry that someone will see you and call you a strumpet. We’ve moved on as a society, haven’t we? It’s nicely balanced by the fact that Future Husband chose his sister as his best man. I love that our wedding party is made up of a mix of men and women on both sides.

It’s also nice to have an additional excuse for extra parties. I’ve always said I would have a Cock Party as well as a Hen Do. Future Husband is having a Doe Night as well as a Stag Do. Fine, we’ll segregate by gender but by god we’ll have both. It shakes it up from the normal alternative of one single party we could throw, but also means that I’m not just hanging out in a female-only group.

It’s not even that I’ve set out to be ‘controversial’ (my mother, yet again), it’s just that I couldn’t see how I could organise my wedding and not be non-gender biased. We have too many friends, male and female, to simply be that abrupt and schismatic.

• Lizzie is getting married in 2013 and has already planned roughly 5,748 weddings in her head. You can find more of her musings, wedding-themed reviews and rantings at Wedding Belles UK.

• First up, if you spotted McSweeney’s the other week and saw the mashup of PG Wodehouse and (yes) Brett Easton Ellis, PG Wodehouse’s American Psycho, that was Team BadRep member Rhian. Jean, in the Jeeves role, is neatly recast as the brains behind Bateman literally getting away with murder. Nice one!
• Following on from that, Rhian blogs about gender and being a fan of American Psycho over on her own blog, Velvet Coalmine. (It’s been a busy week for Rhian; she’s already exploded VS Naipaul’s bizarre blathering without even trying, as several McSweeney readers immediately assumed she must be male on the basis of her writing…)
• Texas! Not a good place to be a feminist! Right? Or… is it? Andrea Grimes over on Reality Check asks and answers the question: Why Should Feminists Stay In The Lone Star State?
• Been up a couple of weeks now, but Michelle Dean at The Awl draws together the range of responses to Bridesmaids very well in a nice indictment of the sacred cows of Hollywood comedy.
• The F Word are on the hunt for music reviewers!
• Flippin’ ‘eck. The Empowering Girls blog pops to Hamleys. I knew they had floors for “GIRLS” and “BOYS”, but sometimes you need a pictorial tour to really get the reality of what that means. Christ. When I take random detours into Hamleys of an afternoon (and I do, because I like seeing what kids are into, PLUS I refuse to grow up), I stick to the ground floor, with all the gadgets and the 15-foot plush giraffe. And… well, I just remembered why. Also notable: why are all the art materials apparently on the “Girls” floor? I mean, seriously?
• That Wikipedia gender gap debate: Nine Reasons Why Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words), from Sue Gardner (Exec Director of the Wikimedia Foundation).