Whether the quinceanera experience makes girls less likely to marry early for the fairy pricess wedding or not is an empirical question I can't answer. (As with questions about the effect of pornography, violent video games, etc., I can see the hypotheses running either way.) But I admit that the whole thing is really icky to me. A religious ceremony that presents a 15 year old girl as a woman eligible for marriage and reaffirms a traditional, sexist view of a woman's place in the world, and all with girlish tiaras and whatnot, strikes me as a bad idea. Obviously this is not unique to Latin American culture, but I dislike it in other cultures, too, including our own (debutante season).
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ninetydegrees
Quinceanera
on 2007-02-21 05:31 pm (UTC)Whether the quinceanera experience makes girls less likely to marry early for the fairy pricess wedding or not is an empirical question I can't answer. (As with questions about the effect of pornography, violent video games, etc., I can see the hypotheses running either way.) But I admit that the whole thing is really icky to me. A religious ceremony that presents a 15 year old girl as a woman eligible for marriage and reaffirms a traditional, sexist view of a woman's place in the world, and all with girlish tiaras and whatnot, strikes me as a bad idea. Obviously this is not unique to Latin American culture, but I dislike it in other cultures, too, including our own (debutante season).