My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding

This is a tv show that, seeing the title on your guide, you might assume to be one of the currently popular wedding shows featuring spoiled brides, money drama, the perfect dress, and the rest of it. However, this show is actually a fascinating glimpse into the gypsy, or traveler, culture of the U.K.

Each episode of course features at least one wedding and some of the preparation that goes into that, but it is a show more about the life of an average traveler girl. Weddings just happen to be the most important day in their lives, and the most frequent, or only, time they will make contact with a person who is not a member of the traveling community, the dress maker. The weddings are events of ridiculously impractical extravagance. Thousands upon thousands of dollars are spent on dresses and transportation and venues, but that's just one part of the show.

A more significant aspect of the program is allowing the audience into their very fascinating world. They have episodes dealing with how boys live and interact with each other, the lesser but still extremely ostentatious event of the first communion, that marriage is expected of each and every young girl, and what every day life is like. They show these strange juxtapositions, like how the girls dress very scandalously and scantly, but are in fact very pious and will not even spend time alone with a boy if there is no one else around, and how they spend most of their day cleaning and doing chores. The whole community seems to be fixated on appearance, and what other people will think of them, that they should be impressed. That also plays a role in the extravagance of their celebrations.

If you're looking for another wedding dress show, this one may not be for you (as their dresses are completely ridiculous) but as a study of a people that we don't really hear or know a lot about, this is a really interesting show.

Also, they made an American version of this show, and I recommend that you not watch it, it's a rip off of the original, and not a very good rip off. The people in the show almost seem like they're just average Americans who say gypsy a lot. I didn't commit to watching the American version of the show, but the episodes I did watch seemed to place more importance on the drama and the dresses. The original is more about the people and their culture and less about their tempers and greed. And it's better.

Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations by Serena Nanda

This was a very readable book about the idea of gender and how it's not as black and white as some would love to make it. It basically takes a look at different cultures and documents how they view gender. When we think gender, in the Westernized society we live in (that I am sometimes not that happy about being a part of) we think of only two possibilities, male and female. Homosexuals are still men or women if they like someone of the same gender, they're just weird *dripping with sarcasm*. However, what we fail to realize (when I say we I mean main stream society, the mob, the collective) is that the concept of gender is a mental construction. What we see as fact and set in stone, is about as whimsically held together as a kite made out of feathers, it can fall apart at any time. As nature doesn't provide only two types of human beings, society must come to see that more than two types of human beings exist. Some cultures take this better than others and that is the point of this book. In some cultures there are three or four genders, and in some cultures other manifestations of sexual preference or gender are revered.

This book looks at various cultures around the world and how they deal with the issue of gender. It's a short read, but a fun one.