That problem is way deeper than the princess thing. I have a girlfriend who has always seen herself as attractive and sexy (and she is and always will be) and she was raised by hippies - (on a commune!), doesn’t shave her legs, and has a minor in women’s studies. But when she was thirteen or fourteen she started to get a lot of male attention, and it felt good, and now she is 45 and the male attention isn’t what it was, and she has gone through a little bit of a crisis of self esteem.
But the opposite isn’t necessarily better. My mother said recently “I never told you girls you were pretty, because I didn’t want you to think it was important.” My mother told us we were smart, strong, interesting…but never pretty. (My mother was a beautician when we were little, so it must have meant something to her. She was also so pretty that I remember her walking into my sixth grade classroom (we had recently moved) and having all the kids whisper “that’s your mom?! She is SO pretty.”) My two sisters and I are all attractive (my baby sister is gorgeous), but we never really knew it - and that made us much easier targets as young adults - we didn’t have that little puzzle of self esteem filled in, so when some guy came along and filled it, we fell - regardless of how healthy the relationship was. I was in my late 20s before I figured out that I really was pretty, that being pretty did give me some power - not take it away, and that I could be pretty AND all those other things my mother told me I was.
Yep, we probably would have had that as one of our sayings if the Keep Calm and _______ had been popular a few years earlier. What appealed to my nieces about being a princess was their potential for power. The stories they liked were about princesses that did stuff: Elizabeth I, Isabella of Castile, Tamara of Georgia, etc.
Oh, it does not. Ariel was *always *fascinated by humans and the world on land. Becoming human was her dream long before she knew Eric existed. There was a whole musical number about it!
"What would I give if I could live
Out of these waters?
What would I pay to spend a day
Warm on the sand?
Bet’cha on land, they understand
Bet they don’t reprimand their daughters
Bright young women, sick of swimming
Ready to stand!"
That’s similar to what Sara Crewe said in A Little Princess – the book by Frances Hodgson Burnett. “If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside.” Which is why I despise the 1995 movie version, where Sara comes off as an entitled brat with no integrity. When she says, or rather spits out, “All girls are princesses!” she sounds like Veruca Salt. And we all know what happened to her.
On this topic: I never wanted to be a princess when I was little. I was a tomboy.
That said, my favourite “princess” characters are Áslaug from The Saga Of Ragnar Lodbrok, who’s a shieldmaiden also known as Randalín and Kráka, and Lúthien Tinúviel from The Silmarillion.
Yup, both toys and stories are becoming more gender-segregated instead of less as they did for a while. Dora was a hit but some exec with craneorectal inversion decided that hey, being a little girl, she wasn’t appropriate for boys - Manny had to be created. Meanwhile, most kids that age loved and love Dora.
As a kid, only one of my favourite fairy tales involved a princess, and it was Piel de Asno (Peau d’Ane in French, I don’t remember its English name): a princess escapes her father’s advances, fleeing the country wearing a wise donkey’s hide as a cape and carrying several wonderful dresses her father has given her. She becomes a scullery maid and, during a holiday, meets the local prince… tru wuv ensues, but not without a lot of give and take on both parts (in some versions, the prince has seen her wearing a fancy dress no servant should have and decided to find out what is going on). Definitely not that freaking Mermaid that made me want to scream!
Attempted degree, though, as she succesfully manages to first stave it off by her wit and later escape it. Definitely not a passive girl, nor someone afraid of hard work (she’s a perfectly fine serving girl, albeit one who her masters wish would wash more often).
Which she did absolutely nothing about until after she rescued Eric from the sea and she got legs from Ursula specifically to find him rather than to simply be human.
Beauty and the Beast is more of a tangle. The Beast is a dick who keeps her locked in his castle but it’s apparently a very loose sort of lock as she’s wandering all over the place and if we’re allowing sequels, jaunting off into the middle of the woods for christmas trees and crap. Belle is very standoffish and cold to the beast until he starts treating her nicely so it’s not like she has no backbone at all and when he tells her she can leave to find her father, she leaves immediately which doesn’t really jive with stockholm syndrome. But by the end we’re firmly back in icky territory with the climax that seems to say, “Love enough and even a horrible person will become the perfect partner.”
Here is the most thoughtful thing I’ve read about the influence of pop-culture:
If the only culture that a little girl gets is from modern Disney movies and from parents raised on older Disney movies, then she’s going to have problems.
There is nothing wrong about children playing with princesses so long as someone teaches them about unrealistic expectations. I think the same logic applies to men and porn.
I’m arriving in this thread rather late, but I wanted to respond to this. There’s been scientific research on this issue, and based on what I’ve read, it’s been firmly established that small children do not distinguish between fantasy and reality. Obviously we would hope that children who are immersed in a certain fantasy when they’re children will be able to distinguish it as a fantasy when they’re grown up, but during the time when they are children, they can’t.
How little are you talking about? We are talking about “little girls”, I assumed around 7 or 8. To me that’s “vey young”. but obviously it isn’t true if we are talking about toddlers.
My 8 year old boy can definitely tell the difference between fantasy and reality, in my opinion. If you claim he can’t, all I can say is - cite?
I hope that you and your nieces regularly say “I have the body of a weak, feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of X” as appropriate.
[QUOTE=Elizabeth I, Queen of England, Defender of the Faith]
… I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.
I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms…
After Disney’s acquisition of several additional media franchises late last year, there’s now a Disney princess who chokes giant slugs to death and almost slept with her own brother.
Your son can presumably distinguish between obvious fantasy (e.g. Harry Potter flying on his broom) and reality, but even adults do not possess a foolproof ability to distinguish between truth and fiction. That’s why people fall for urban legends. There are plenty of adults who believe all kinds of inaccurate things about law enforcement and the justice system based on what they’ve seen in movies and on TV, and that’s an area where it could potentially be very important to know the truth about how things work in real life.
The research that I’ve read focuses on children ages 6 and under. I’d agree that at more advanced ages, children start distinguishing between fantasy and reality, but it’s a process that goes on for a long time, and as Lamia said, even adults aren’t perfect in this regard.
When I was in second or third grade, I read a number of books on UFOs, alien abductions, the Bermuda Triangle, and stuff of that sort. At the time it never occurred to me to question that what was in the books was true. I might, by that time, have been fully aware that something like The Hobbit was fantasy, but plainly I still had a long way to go before thinking critically about all the material I encountered.
