"Bridezilla" is a special kind of insult — too cute to mean anything serious, yet devastatingly demeaning. To call a woman "Bridezilla," even if her prima donna antics put Diana Ross to shame, categorizes her bad behavior as a comic "syndrome". Not wanting to press substandard candy tarted up with tulle on guests seemed reasonable, but calling herself Bridezilla was not. This bride-to-be perceived herself not as on the brink of becoming a married woman but on the verge of becoming a monster. The term's origins are obvious, its image vivid: Bridezilla is gigantic, ugly, and capable of leveling Tokyo — a compelling, if not attractive, talent.

Once alerted to the moniker, I started to hear it everywhere. Bridezilla seems to be a national phenomennon. Last summer saw the publication of Noe Spaemme's book of stories culled from the Etiquette Hell website: Bridezilla: True Tales From Etiquette Hell. And FOX recently aired a reality TV special featuring embarrassing footage of bridal bitchiness and hysteria — called, simply, Bridezillas. On the show, a blonde "Princess Bride" nags, coos, and whines that she wants a diamond necklace because "it sparkles so," and the "Obsessive Bride" is a hysteric, depicted as having one foot in the psycho ward just because she's upset that her dress isn't ready four hours before her wedding. What's so unreasonable about that? This last episode shows something that the word "Bridezilla" diminishes or ignores: brides actually do have to contend with formidable difficulties and setbacks. But even when they deal with them with a fair amount of composure, they are still seen as vicious lunatics. Why? We all love witnessing bad behavior and feeling the superior glow it gives us. None of us, of course, would behave that way.

Sure, brides can be as bad as all that, and worse. Everyone has learned, through experience or anecdote, about the ones who taunt tailors, demean relatives, and tell bridesmaids to lose weight. But bad behavior is not exclusive to the bridal set. Everyone practices it today. Dinner party guests pop up during dessert to race off to more important engagements, and wedding invitees put off RSVPing for as long as possible, in case a better offer comes their way. Good manners are barely even an afterthought, so why should brides be more vilified than anybody else? Are they really worse?

It's true that while planning my own wedding, I was often shocked by the rudeness and obsessive fussiness of certain brides, especially in Manhattan where any demand can be met for a price. At a gown sale, I tried on dresses beside a woman who had an entourage in tow. This was the 13th salon she had visited with her obviously exhausted family. I was surprised when she confessed that she had already found her "perfect" dress five stores back on Long Island but was just "making sure". Later, I learned from a florist about a bride-to-be who wanted to replicate an overhead view of flower arrangements she'd seen photographed in a wedding magazine — an impossibility, since to do so would have required nothing less than building a balcony and installing a skylight in her reception venue. She became hysterical, demanding the florist "fix" this problem. When I asked how she coped, the florist responded, "I told her to lay off the bridal magazines or find someone else to do her flowers."

While designing the invitations to my wedding, my printer was interrupted by a phone call from an "uptown" colleague, warning of a bride-to-be heading her way. This woman, the other stationer reported, fit the Bridezilla profile perfectly: rude, indecisive, impatient, and hostile. "Apparently, a high-maintenance bride is coming in," the printer told me as I squirmed. It turns out the uptown printer had spent two hours showing the woman his samples, Then, my printer exclaimed, "Right after her wedding planner showed up, this bride told him all of his work was tacky and she couldn't look at it anymore. She waited for the moment when she could most hurt his business." I was queasy, imagining Manhattan as a network of phone lines jangling like distressed nerves with the whispers of abused vendors. I even felt tainted by my own bride-to-be status — as if everyone was waiting for the Alien to burst from my body.

As awful as the brides might be, why should the word signifying Supreme Wedding Awfulness refer exclusively to them? Surely grooms, relatives, and vendors contribute their share in the wedding-misery racket. Bridezilla is comic, but it has an un-funny effect. It robs its object of the ability to protest. When I was younger and less prickly, my father could quickly terminate family debates by saying, "You're just being hysterical." Those words made me a teary ball of rage. For how do you respond without seeming, well, hysterical? It's hard to behave naturally when you suspect people are predisposed to snicker at and about you. And in New York, where bitchiness is currency, you can eat out for weeks on good wedding dish.

That's why when I first heard the term "Bridezilla," I became utterly self-conscious. Brides are, after all, easy targets. Unless they've put an Armani-draped wedding planner in charge or have a control-freak mother, these women are the untrained authors of their own ultra-important celebrations. Few know what they're doing. They are endowed with incredible authority, are pressured to please everyone and produce the effects of a dictatorship within the strictures of democracy.

Within the basically anonymous world of the Internet, one senses that becoming "Bridezilla" has come to be thought of as an inevitable phase in the wedding process. On web sites like The Knot and The Wedding Channel people preface hateful demands with: "I don't mean to be a Bridezilla, but..." The Going Bridal web site even has a bulletin board that encourages women to post their Bridezilla "confessions." Many of these postings are simple rants, but others belie a real feeling of entitlement. Many brides express outrage that their friends are getting engaged at the same time, thus "stealing" their limelight. But the most savage confessions involve bridesmaids. One bride comes right out and says that she is terrified that her beautiful friends will upstage her at her wedding, while another says she hopes her one plus-size bridesmaid will drop out of the wedding because the Chosen Dress won't fit her. Going Bridal also sells a full line of "Bridezilla" merchandise, featuring a surly bride logo. It is all sort of funny, but is it really helpful to encourage the notion that planning a wedding makes one insane?

It is almost tempting to blame everything on a kind of temporary insanity. For my own wedding, I wanted everyone to be satisfied. But I kept crashing. I worried over cake flavors, fretted about dietary restrictions, and got headaches after my mother told me the words "black tie" on the invitation were "intimidating" (months after the thing was sent out). I wanted to weep, or strangle someone, but I was no Bridezilla. But tagging ugly behavior with cute names makes people with small problems uncomfortable about reasonable requests and preferences, while the truly repellent contingent can take up the cute epithet and wield it as a weapon.

Will the legal professions someday institute a "Bridezilla Defense" when, for example, a bride murders a seamstress with her pinking sheers? Behind the humor and condescension, "Bridezilla" confirms a common suspicion: weddings turn women into monsters before they experience the ultimate conversion into wives. Unlike the traditional — if questionable — view of a woman moving happily and romantically from engagement into marriage, "Bridezilla" is a destroyer who enters her marriage only after damaging the life she had before and alienating her friends and family so she can start "fresh." "Bridezilla" makes a joke out of an insidious idea: that marriage turns women — and women alone — into something they weren't before.

All of which is not to recommend that brides should indeed tear up the streets of Tokyo with impunity. Ideally, there should be a handbook available to all engaged people and their families outlining basic rules of civility. It might even come in handy later, too. But forget the word "Bridezilla." It doesn't nearly do justice to truly terrible behavior. Brides are real people, who can be held accountable for their actions, and who — in anxious times — might be viewed with judicious sympathy. Speak of the Devil all you want, just call her by name.

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Elise Mac Adam is a writer and filmmaker in Manhattan. She has worked on everything from a horror film (Office Killer) to a wedding guide (City Wedding).