You edit a magazine called "Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture." What messages do you think women receive about marriage from the pop culture and the media?

There are still huge assumptions made about women and their girlhood fantasies. The popular imagination is still really invested in the idea that all five year-old girls are obsessed with being brides. There are dress-up sets at Toys 'R Us for it. There are still plenty of ways the media finds to make you feel freaky and weird if you don't have the "normal" desires, and sadly the desire for a big huge white wedding that's supposed to be "the happiest day of your life" is still seen as the sine qua non of femininity in some ways. Take the TV show "Friends" as an example. If it wasn't a given that all women want to get married in a big expensive over-planned ceremony, entire segments of the show (including the bulk of last season) would not have been able to be written.

Are there any ways in which the pop culture /media has responded to new interpretations of marriage?

I think the media is really stuck in the past as far as weddings and marriage goes. There's nothing I've seen that resonates with how I feel as a married person or how I want my marriage to be. I identify way more with single characters on TV, in movies, etc. (To the extent that I identify at all, 'cause admittedly most of that stuff is so fake it's impossible to identify with it).

The wedding industry creates its own media, too, of course, and since it's all geared toward selling wedding products it's really powerful propaganda. A good analysis of this is in Jacklyn Geller's "Here Comes the Bride" (Four Walls Eight Windows) which is an excellent read (though I disagree with a lot of what she says, because she does not believe it's possible to transform marriage at all, which clearly I don't think or I would not have gotten married).

Do you think you can be a feminist andwear a poufy white dress, be given away by your father, throw the bouquet at your single friends, and change your last name?

I really don't want to get into judging who's a "real" feminist, especially since I feel a goal of the feminist movement should be to be as inclusive as possible. Sometimes talk about changing details of the wedding ceremony can displace serious consideration of the ways in which marriage itself needs to be changed. There's an essay in our book that makes the very important point that refiguring the traditions of the ceremony does not necessarily change anything about the way the relationship works. So while reworking those details is important to remake marriage as something that can be feminist, it's really the smallest part of the equation. Furthermore, any feminist getting married has to admit that there is a bow to tradition taking place here, that there are serious issues to be reconciled between being feminist and choosing to be a part of marriage as an institution. That said, I'm not going to say that if you do those things you can't ever be a feminist, but I don't think anyone who has given serious thought to wedding traditions from a feminist perspective would, in the end, make those very traditional choices. Certainly not all of them, anyway.

Can you specifically discuss your feelings about the traditions I mentioned?

The dress I think is the least important of all the traditions you mention. Sure, the symbolism of the white dress (virginity, purity, all that hoo-ha) is disturbing, but it can be worn without giving in to that. The question of who a bride walks down the aisle with is so emotionally fraught. I would love to see more women considering possibilities other than their fathers or even both their parents. How about your friends? Or how about walking alone? Bouquet-throwing is appalling, embarrassing, and insulting, and there is nothing to redeem it. It flat-out assumes that the goal of every unmarried woman is to get married ASAP, and there's really nothing more off base and unfeminist as that assumption.

Unlike all these other things, the name issue actually matters beyond the day of the ceremony, and affects your life in little ways (are you going to have to get used to introducing yourself differently?) and huge ones (if you are going to have kids, whose name will they take?). As far as the question of can you be feminist while taking a man's name, I actually think it's kind of moot, because how many people who identify as feminist make that choice? Very, very few.

I was willing to change my name, but not if my husband didn't also change his. I felt that in choosing to get married I was undergoing a change, and having that change reflected externally was a good thing-- and especially since my husband and I do not plan to have kids, I wanted us to share the same name as a gesture toward constructing the two of us as a family. I explained all of this to my man, and one night over dinner he announced that he was taking my name.

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Lisa Miya-Jervis is the co-editor with Jill Corral of "Young Wives' Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership." (Seal Press)