http://tv.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/arts/television/27bridal.html?ref=televisionThe Big Surprise Is Saved for the Groom
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Published: November 26, 2010
Last week Time magazine in association with the Pew Research Center released the results of a survey on the state of American marriage, which found what all but the purveyors of giddy popular culture already know: the institution is in decline. Among men and women in their 20s in 2008 only 26 percent were married (as opposed to 68 percent in 1960). Moreover, a full 39 percent of those questioned said they believed marriage was becoming obsolete, which in itself indicates that no one aspiring to a certain kind of reality-television stardom was even interrogated.
Using reality television as a barometer of our collective interest in marriage, any researcher would arrive at a very different conclusion, one that assumed that women were not only desperate to wed but also hungry to do so at an expense equal to the operating budget of a midsize biotech company. At first we merely had the Darwinian offenses of “The Bachelor” to contend with, but since it made its debut eight years ago, an entire sub-genre of reality TV has sprung up around wedding planning and the harridan manners it breeds. Perhaps it was inevitable that we would be attacked with something like “Bridalplasty,” a series that practically invites you to deposit your daughters in a time-travel machine and land them safely in the pages of a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel.
Beginning on Sunday on E!, the show convenes a bunch of engaged women in a mansion somewhere in reality-TV mansionland and pits them against one another in a battle for a grand prize of reconstructive surgery and the requisite “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” wedding itself.Just how distasteful is “Bridalplasty”? It is so distasteful that it has elicited criticism from the very profession it is meant to serve. Speaking about the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ code of ethics, Dr. Gayle Gordillo told ABC News in September that she found the implications of the show “frightening.” (Dr. Gordillo, an associate professor of surgery at Ohio State University, said at the time that technically plastic surgeons were “prohibited from giving procedures away as a prize for a contest. It totally undermines the doctor-patient relationship.”)
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