Lady Business: Love and death and birth control; Wedding costs and bridesmaid backstories

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the fifth issue, published November 2, 2017.
 

Wedding Critics and Bridesmaid Economics

It’s been a dark couple of days in New York City, with eight people killed in an attack that resonates on an especially personal level. My office is close to that bike path, where I sometimes cycle home after work. Listening to accounts of how the attacker drove his truck into pedestrians inevitably made me picture how I would try to react--if I had time to react--if I could out-cycle someone bent on trying to run me down. I’m very grateful I didn’t have to find out, but riding there again will be eerie.
 
More happily this week, I attended a delightful and heartfelt wedding, one with joyous friends and beautiful views and about 19 different desserts, including a smores bar near the fire pit. All of which made me wonder: We have restaurant critics and theater critics and fashion critics, all of whom often review one-time events. Why not professional wedding critics?
 
Yes, there are (always glowing) New York Times write-ups and there were the Gawker (RIP) parodies of same. And, as a fellow guest this weekend pointed out, we’re all kind of amateur critics of the weddings we attend. But given how much money can be spent on these parties, why isn’t there a Pete Wells or an Emily Nussbaum or a Cathy Horyn of weddings? (“The kitchen fumbled the salad course but recovered for the mains, including an exquisitely-plated crab cake that paired well with the lean, elegant house Pinot Gris.” “Ms. Jones and Mr. Smith inexplicably chose a copper-and-puce color scheme that looked magnificent along the refurbished barn’s walls, but failed to flatter the skin tones of three of their six attendants.”) I would read the shit out of those reviews.
 
And because I am a financial reporter by training, and inspired by both the just-married Jeanine and the soon-to-be-married Janine, I went looking for some numbers about just how much money is generally spent on these things.
 
It is, as you could guess, quite a lot! The average wedding costs $35,329, according to TheKnot (and honestly, given some weddings I’ve attended, that seems low. Possibly because it costs more than $78,000 to get married in Manhattan. Utah, on the other hand, wins the cheap-wedding auction.)

The average wedding dress costs $1,564; grooms, meanwhile, only spend $280 on average on their clothes. The average bridesmaid dress costs $234--and 86 percent of them are worn exactly once. Yup, if you have asked your friends to be bridesmaids and told them that really, really, they will re-wear this dress--they won’t. Accept this and change plans accordingly.
 
There’s much more in this fantastic Racked history of the ugly bridesmaid dress, including the revelation that brides once asked their friends to dress just like them, instead of like their backup dancers: 

Bridesmaid dresses, of course, are an expression of identity — just not the identity of the people actually required to wear them. They are an organza manifestation of the personality and taste of the happy couple, like the food, or the music, or the succulents-as-centerpieces. It can be infantilizing, says Doll, pointing out that the last time most of us were dressed as an extension of someone else's taste was when we were, well, actual children. "I don't think it's purposeful," she adds. "But it can feel like that."

Related, most people getting married in this country ask their bridesmaids to pay for the privilege of wearing a poorly-made, polyester gown that is essentially a single-use uniform. (In many Asian countries, the people getting married--or their families--buy the clothes they want their bridesmaids to wear, which makes way more sense to me.)

I also love that professional bridesmaids are a thing. Mostly in China (often in situations that sound not-fun to hazardous). But also in the U.S., here’s a woman who "offers several wedding packages ranging from $500 to over $2,000."

"Brides also hire me because they have five or six bridesmaids but they are looking for a professional to handle all the dirty work so their bridesmaids can get to the open bar a whole lot faster."

As a now-experienced non-professional bridesmaid, I heartily endorse this business idea.
 

The Birth-Death Venn Diagram

I love this:
 

In Pelletier's office hangs a quote from writer Rebecca West, which reads in part: "I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat." It's one of 15 feminist quotes displayed throughout the company's office, although building management made Pelletier remove most of the ones she'd put in the ladies' room on the grounds that they were too provocative for what is technically shared space.
 

That is from my colleague Kimberly Weisul’s excellent profile of Saundra Pelletier, a woman who is trying extremely hard to make a better contraceptive. It’s a detailed and dramatic story, involving plane crashes and sudden pregnancies, but it also highlights some very sobering facts about the birth-control market:
 

Since the introduction of the pill, many birth control advances have been new delivery methods for the same hormones that have been used for decades. But about 5.3 million women can't safely take those hormones, often because of previous sicknesses. Millions more simply don't want to be on hormones if they're only occasionally having sex. When a patient asks her doctor for a hormone holiday, says Kelly Culwell, a practicing gynecologist and Evofem's chief medical officer, "we just hand them a bunch of condoms and cross our fingers." 

This is important for a couple of reasons--especially as the current administration weakens Obamacare's coverage of birth control. First of all, as this detailed New York Times op-ed points out, the contraception options women currently have can be very expensive:
 

For individual women, this is certainly about their wallets. The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurance offer birth control without cost-sharing has resulted in an estimated 57.6 million American women getting contraception without a co-payment. That has saved them a huge amount of money: $1.4 billion in 2013 alone.

And access to contraception means that women finish their college degrees, keep their jobs, earn more, and--since we still do the vast majority of household spending--buy more, thus boosting the overall economy.

It also means we’re at less risk of dying as long as we’re on it. Because oh, yeah, the United States is pretty terrible at providing medical care to women who do get pregnant:

With an estimated 26.4 deaths for every 100,000 live births in 2015, America has the highest maternal mortality rate of all industrialized countries—by several times over. In Canada, the rate is 7.3; in Western Europe, the average is 7.2, with many countries including Italy, Norway, Sweden, and Austria showing rates around 4. More women die of childbirth-related causes in the US than they do in Iran (20.8), Lebanon (15.3), Turkey (15.8), Puerto Rico (15.1), China (17.7), and many more.

That’s from an extensive and sobering Quartz investigation, which considers everything from the lack of comprehensive data on pregnancy-related deaths, to the literal victim-blaming of women who die during pregnancy, to the high malpractice insurance premiums that OB-GYNs pay, to the increasing rate of C-Sections (which are more profitable for hospitals):

Whether they are pregnant or not, women are second-class citizens when it comes to health care. They wait longer to be seen by doctors than male counterparts, their pain is routinely minimized (by gynecologists, no less), and though they are less likely to seek medical attention than men, their symptoms are more frequently dismissed as superficial—for instance being attributed, mistakenly, to psychological rather than physiological causes. Serious health conditions, from heart attack to cancer, are often downplayed in female patients.

Also, racism is a real factor; black women in New Jersey, Quartz's Annalisa Merelli reports, are more likely to die in childbirth than women “living in some developing regions of the world.” 

So to recap: Our government wants to make birth control expensive again, making it more difficult to avoid unwanted pregnancies, which could kill even more of us. 

Lady Bits:

--I started working for free a week ago; if you’re a white woman, so did you. Such is the “wage gap," which this Washington Post article defines as the median full-time female worker earning 80 percent of what her male equivalent does. The statistics for women of color are worse, and not improving. On that note:

--“Look at me: I’m a white 10. I don’t get rejected, I get approved for loans.” The self-aware douchiness of My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Nathaniel might be my favorite thing this week. Except for:
 
--On the theme of women’s reproductive health, I tried really hard to find a gif of Rogelio de la Vega defending his beloved’s fallopian tubes on last week’s Jane the Virgin. Instead, please enjoy the classical Rogelio gif below, and join me in giving the show props for its extremely timely supervillain joke: “I’m dating an international crime lord who started a war in Ukraine with Paul Manafort.”
 

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