My family is in the midst of wedding fever and one thing I am sick of hearing about weddings is women who 'get to be a princess for a day'. I'm sick of the whole princess thing full stop, it drives me mad. From little girls being marketed crap to grown women being marketed crap. Yet it's not the consumerist crap that bothers me so much it's the ideas behind this princess bullshit.
Why oh WHY is being a princess seen as something we should aspire to? Something that every girl and woman wants?
Why would I want to be someone who's elevated to a position of unfair privilege based only upon an accident of birth or marriage?
Why would I want to be judged upon my looks, my social ranking, who I'm married to and have my person achievements overlooked and ignored?
Why would I want to buy into some backwards misogynistic ideal that portrays women as docile, subservient, there to look pretty and shut up while the men do the important stuff?
The women in these fairy tales (the mass marketed stuff, not the gorier original Grimm's ones I developed a fondness for), they are all seen as 'the other'. Seen through the eyes of men and as relating to men. They are not real characters per se but a vague approximation of the 'ideal' woman; docile, subservient , dependent. It's the last one that got me as a kid and still gets me now. I was always wondering why there were no girls doing the stuff the male action heroes did, I used to love Indiana Jones (and still do) but always wondered why there wasn't a woman doing what he did (This may explain my guilty pleasure of the Tomb raider games despite the blatant sexist marketing of them). My independence is something I treasure above all else, and to buy into some ideal that seeks to lessen this, to treat it as something 'un- feminine' is not something I take lightly. Ever the history geek I am aware that having the right to vote, to my own property and even my own children should I choose to have any is one that was fought hard for. The idea of being depenendant upon anyone as a postitve trait is abhorrent to me.
These princesses; they just don't DO anything, they're boring, they are never shown as having any special skills (besides advanced doormat-ism) , no personality quirks or individuality. They are praised above all for their looks 'fairest in the land' and their subservience; the good girl who looks after everyone else and doesn't complain even tough she hates it and only gets 'rescued' from this dull life of servitude by marrying a rich, handsome man who is also seemingly devoid of any personality but occasionally gets to be 'brave' , 'wise' and actually do something vaugely active.
Yes they are only stories, but they are stories which embody so many ideals that have been cased in stone for centuries and that we are only beginning to chip away. So to all those who wish to be 'a princess' I say:
If you must but remember; behind the dress ans the glitter there are dangerous ideals being perpetrated and I feel as modern , liberated women we have a responsibility to look behind the glitz and see exactly what it is we are buying into. Listen to Ani DiFranco's 'Not a Pretty Girl' (an echo of what I felt growing up and what I still feel):
In short, think twice before buying into this. Think what this all means.
I never wanted to be a princess as a child and I sure as hell don't want to be one now!
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*cough* The Grimms' colections aren't original by any means. They are heavily edited for 'polite society'. If you're thinking of the gory originals the Grimms based their tales on, then it's another story, but please don't think the Grimms are original in any way.
You'll need to go much further back for that :)
I think you'd like the book The Meaning of Wife, if you haven't already read it or heard of it.
I agree with you 100%.
I admit as a kid, I wanted to be Snow White, but honestly, she (and most of the other princesses, for that matter) weren't particularly good role models. I found this a few years ago and almost vomited.
My brother-in-law just bought my daughter a "princess" shirt, and I had to explain to him why that was not okay. As a parent, the princess stuff not only conjures up all the stuff this article talked about, but to me it also screams "spoiled brat." When I see little girls with princess apparell, the message seems to be: "Look at me! I rule my parents and my household. I get everything I want! And not only that, but they allow me to announce it to the world!"
Okay, so maybe I'm taking it a bit far :-) And maybe all parents don't really let their children behave that way-- to them, the princess stuff is just something "cute" to wear. But I don't think it helps our epidemic of spoiled, materialistic children to go advertising that they are princesses.
Heh. Another thing these stories gloss over is just how much responsibility actual princesses had. Noblewomen were expected to know statecraft and business along with the traditional "womanly arts" -- about the only thing they weren't expected to learn was warfare. After all, if a lady's husband were away (or died altogether) she'd be expected to run things in his stead. That tiara would become a crown, and heavy lies the head.
Me, I refused to let anyone apply the descriptive "fairy-tale" to my wedding because, as I put it, "To me that means someone would die or be cursed."
I've always been a fan of the whole princess thing, but I agree it's ridiculous how young girls are expected to aspire to that kind of life. It's just not going to happen to you. Very few women have some Prince come along and sweep them off their feet and live happily ever after. I'm a royal nut and the fact of the matter is that when commoners marry into royalty it doesn't always work out for the best. If you want to go back, you have Anne Boleyn and Kathryn Howard, who were branded sluts and executed for adultery once Henry VIII got tired of them. If you want to go more recent, you have Wallis Simpson, who was branded a slut and not allowed to be Queen, and Princess Diana who was shunned by the royal family once her husband started cheating on her and she refused to look the other way and ended up dying at age thirty-six in a horrible car accident caused by the paparazzi stalking her.
And as for people who are born into it, most real princesses wish more than anything else to be normal. Women need to aspire to something they can actually achieve through intelligence and effort, like being in politics or medicine. Not something you have to marry Prince William and give up all your privacy to achieve.
Funny. I never saw weddings as "being a princess for a day!" I see weddings as the day two people get married. I guess I'm just too literally minded.
Man, Zelda, I'm so sorry I clicked on the link- I'm nauseated enough, being preggers. When I got married, it wasn't about me. It was about all the people I loved. I did have a good time picking out a lovely, affordable dress, though. But much more important was the people I love, and of course, the cake.
I agree weddings should be about two people who love each other and families etc, but there seems to be this undercurrent of commercialised crap and 'princessism', I had two friends tell me the 'princess for a day' thing, I just rolled my eyes.
I shall look into books/older fairy tales recommended. Yeh Grimm aren't exactly original but my mum had a little book of them that was much more interesting than those kiddy disneyfied books I had!
I find it very interesting that the medieval princess ideal we have today is a Victorian distortion of what it was actually like (ie these women worked bloody hard as pointed out by Shiftercat)and became so neutred and feed into this insane passive do nothing ideal of 'womanlyness'.
I did want to be a princess when I grew up, admittedly. Not a Disney one though, my mom used to buy me the "Royal Diaries" series books, and I was more into learning many languages like Cleopatra, speaking to Portuguese Royalty on behalf of my people like Nzinga, and learning to fence like King Kristina of Sweden. The books often made a point to show princess life as boring, cloistered, and one where you had very little control over your own destiny, which really intrigued me as opposed to the Disney formula of pure happiness, which I plan to teach my future daughters some day. It's a good lesson in history as well!
Lydia Encyclopedia commented at September 1, 2008 11:16 AM: "I did want to be a princess when I grew up, admittedly. Not a Disney one though, my mom used to buy me the 'Royal Diaries' series books, and I was more into learning many languages like Cleopatra, speaking to Portuguese Royalty on behalf of my people like Nzinga, and learning to fence like King Kristina of Sweden. The books often made a point to show princess life as boring, cloistered, and one where you had very little control over your own destiny, which really intrigued me as opposed to the Disney formula of pure happiness, which I plan to teach my future daughters some day. It's a good lesson in history as well!"
Sounds interesting!
I always wanted to be a princess during "dress-ups"- but I wanted to be Princess Leia, circa A New Hope. You know, the princess who lives through torture to say fuck you another day, and tells men and wookies to get the hell out of her way. I thought princesses were kick ass, and my flowy white Leia costume allowed maximum freedom of movement for trying out Jedi moves around the living room. I sang along with Disney while the movies were on, then went back to thinking about kicking ass.
I think it's ok to let and even encourage girls (AND boys) to dress up and be pretty once in a while. I think it's a problem,though, when you consistently teach only girls that they aren't allowed to leave the house without looking immaculate, which does seem to be part of the mystique played up by the current Disney princess crap marketing scheme. But I don't know that it's princess-ness per se that's the problem. We just need to keep the feminist children's lit coming to counteract the Disney effect.
But Grace Kelly seemed to live the princess life without any major problems.
I made my 4-yr-old stepdaughter and 9-month-old daughter shirts that have this printed on them in an old typewriter style font:
princess (prin'ses) n.
1) a political pawn used for strategic marriages with foreigners and the production of royal heirs
2) a self-centered, spoiled, materialistic person who lacks empathy and an understanding of the real world.
They get a lot of strange responses from the other parents at daycare/preschool, where most of them unreflectively buy their girls all the princess crap their little hearts could desire. I'm thinking my next shirt design will say
"My dad will never marry me off to a stranger in a foreign land, and my value will never be based on the number of kids I produce, because I am not a princess."
I already downloaded a totally princessy font to put the word "princess" in, and I'm going to put the rest in a kid font. A friend of mine just got ahold of a screen printing machine, so I'm thinking about making a bunch of shirts like this and selling them online. There's gotta be other parents like us that would buy them, right?
Looks like I'm in the minority with this one. I don't think there's anything wrong with pretending to be a princess when you're growing up.
Now, before I get yelled at for perpetuating stereotypes, let me state that I think there's a BIG difference between being a princess in the realistic sense and being a fantasy princess. As has been discussed above, royalty's not all its cracked up to be. What children perceive as being a "princess" is not necessarily what the reality is. This is... uh, pretty much par for the course for kids. A child's understanding of a concept rarely exactly parallels the flesh-and-blood equivalent.
So what does imagining being a princess entail? Well, when I did it, I always imagined I was powerful and wealthy and yes, beautiful. There was sometimes a handsome prince involved, sometimes not. The problem in the "princess" fantasy is of course when that fantasy bleeds into every day life, such as feeling entitled to certain desires and believing that others take care of you.
I just think it's a shame that we're recently embraced an extremely nurturing take on adult fantasy (ie: fantasies are good and healthy sexual expressions), and yet children aren't allowed to enjoy their extremely simplified, nonsexual expressions thanks to adult concepts and social quagmires that they're only beginning to grasp.
In short, I don't think dressing up and watching Disney movies and pretending to be a princess is going to emotionally damage your kid as long as you make a clear distinction between playtime and reality.
All that said, the next time I see a little girl wearing a shirt that says "brat" on it, I'm going to have a fit.
It may be true, Whit, that this is what being a princess meant to you. But the implicit message that girls are inundated with by the princess crap and a lot of other stuff that's aimed at/marketed to them is that their appearance is the most important thing about them, that they will be rescued by a prince based on this, and that they can be lazy, materialistic, and demanding as long as they're beautiful.
And if you don't believe this, come to the university and teach a few freshman classes. You'll soon get to the point where you can recognize the princesses within the first 5 minutes of class. These are the girls who sit in class putting on makeup, texting their friends, and snapping their gum. Then after the first exam or paper, they come to your office to whine about why you "gave" them a D, or to tell you why they couldn't show up for the exam or turn in the paper on time. When you tell them that they need to do the assigned reading and complete the assignments in order to earn a good grade they act like you've just made a completely unreasonable demand, roll their eyes, whine some more, claim that you just don't like them, and then end by saying "this is just, like, so unfair." No amount of explaining that this is what's required of all the students in the class will change their minds. These are also the girls who hold up the entire line at the coffee shop because they're so busy talking on the phone that they can't place their order, and they're so self-absorbed that they don't even realize that there are 8 people waiting behind them. They're the ones who take up two parting spots with their one car in areas where parking is scarce around campus. Once again, it's because they just have no fucking clue that there are other people in the world who need to park. They're not being vindictive - they're just completely and utterly clueless and self-centered. So yeah, I really don't want my girls to be princesses. Fuck that bullshit. =)