Why I’m Not Planning Your Wedding

Jun 13, 2013 • Lifestyle •

the urban cynic's wedding

Wedding season kicked off at the beginning of this month and has every intention of ruling my life long into autumn (not entirely unlike fire season in Los Angeles). This is not because I’m getting married, mind you, but because I write about sex. Sexual aids of wide variety are following kink into the mainstream and the side effect has been a line of adult brands gleefully nosediving into the wedding industrial complex.

I don’t love the wedding industrial complex, but I like the normalization of sexual aids, so when I received a message from LELO about their most recent giveaway, I decided to bite.

LELO, one of the biggest manufacturers of luxury sex toys at the forefront of crowdsourcing, recently made a call to creatives to get some help invigorating the existing LELO lines. Now, they’re using social media to strengthen their marketing arm by creating a Pinterest-based contest and giveaway to accompany the launch of their honeymoon sex toy set, the (rather one-sided-sounding) Bridal Pleasure Set.

To win a Bridal Pleasure Set, Pinterest users are asked to create boards reflecting their ideas of a dream wedding — along with a few other requirements, including using their hashtags and repinning some of their pins. Brilliant marketing, congratulations. Of course, I couldn’t resist having some fun with it.

It’s incredible how difficult it is to create a visual representation of wedding concepts that don’t abide by the cultural cookie-cutter of what a wedding should look like. And has no one ever created a xenomorph wedding cake — really? I’m sufficiently disappointed that I will seriously consider getting married again some day just to fix that.

UPDATE: On June 26, LELO wrote me to inform me that my Pinterest board had been selected as one of its contest winners and congratulations on your nuptials! I hope they don’t mind that I plan to skip the ceremony and reception and get straight to the honeymoon. Thanks, LELO, for having a sense of humor.

  • DoctorM

    Every time I’ve been in a wedding, the groom’s party were all given high-end pocketknives as gifts. Is this just a Deepest South thing, or is it nationwide? I’m guessing it goes back to some archaic tradition where the groom’s party needed to be armed to fend off the bride’s relatives during bride-capture or to show that the groom was wealthy enough to have armed retainers, but I’ve not read anything on that. As much as I like the pocketknives, why can’t I still get a good sword out of the whole thing?