Style File: Bigger and Badder

Godzilla was a boy, right? It’s hard to say because he didn’t wear pants, but according to the first law of Big Bird, it’s a generally accepted truth that any creature without a bow on its head is probably a dude. In any case, the characteristics of Godzilla—big, stompy, destructive—are stereotypically male, and therefore stereotypically hilarious when applied to us harmless, winsome female types. Hence Bridezilla: the bride so mad with power that she stomps all over her husband-to-be, her family, and the big day. But what happens when Bridezilla is a he? In this week’s Modern Love, Craig Bridger writes about his obsession with planning his wedding. With his fiancée to busy to do much work, he’s the one who became power-mad: “I skulked around our apartment, dragging my tail across the wooden floor, bellowing about everything from gift registries to whether the groomsmen should escort the bridesmaids down the aisle.” He became, in other words, Groomzilla. Here’s the thing, though: “Bridezilla” is an insult because it suggests that the bride is somehow unfeminine. “Groomzilla,” on the other hand, suggests that there’s nothing more chest-poundingly masculine than freaking out about your wedding. Bridger’s essay is pretty smart and sensitive—see Broadsheet’s take for more on that—but I wish the “-zilla” suffix, and maybe the entire materialistic wedding-industrial complex for that matter, would, as Bridger puts it, stomp on out to sea. And speaking of the entire materialistic wedding-industrial complex (um, and also zillas), Gawker picked up on the best part of this Sunday’s Vows section: watching the Times oh-so-tastefully cover the marriage of a Big & Tall gentleman. The question this begs: Is this guy somehow the first larger fellow to get his wedding listed in the Time? Ever? Or are we just living in a post-trans-fats, post-anorexic models era in which the Style section is required to comment on the body size of every single person who appears with in its pages?