“Well-meaning members of your own families may have even called you
young ladies “princess” and never realized how deeply problematic that sort of
thing is for moral, conscientious people.”
--My Professor, Winter Term 2012
Is it? Is it really,
though? Because trust me, I understand
how problematic the focus on princess toys for young girls and the exclusion of
other types of toys can be, and I understand how the gender gap is expanded when
“girly” toys are relegated exclusively to girls and “boyish” toys exclusively
to boys from infancy to adulthood. I
understand how problematic it is to teach a young girl that the ideal woman is
a damsel-in-distress type, thus setting a precedent for the thought/expectation
that a woman should put aside her own abilities, confidence, and even
individuality in favor of relying on a man to create her happiness. I understand that the sort of mentality set
up by such thoughts and expectations provides what is essentially a blueprint
for abusive relationships, dangerously dependent relationships, negative
stereotypes, and, of course, a situation which is ultimately
self-perpetuating. I’m one class away
from a Women and Gender Studies minor, so trust me, I understand this.
But my parents called me princess. In fact, my mother still calls me
princess. My parents called me
babydoll. My parents painted my room
pink and gave me Barbies and American Girl dolls and princess dresses and let
me play at cooking and cleaning and never questioned the way, when my brother
and I played house, that my brother would go off to work in his “inventor’s
workshop” under the piano bench while I stayed in the blanket fort with our
large brood of dolls and stuffed animals and played housewife. They let me pick all the petals off all our geraniums so I could make ink because I was playing princess and needed to keep up correspondence with the royal families of nearby countries. My parents enrolled me in dance lessons and
piano lessons and the most pointless Girl Scout troop ever and let me read
princess books and watch Disney movies and thought my obsession with fairies
was cute. They humored me. They attended
my tea parties. My mother taught me to
sew and my grandmother taught me to make biscuits from scratch. My brothers were taught to change a car’s oil
and whittle while I burned my fingers with a hot iron and polished the
candlesticks with harsh-smelling Brasso and experimented with scrapbooking and
planned sleepovers. And my parents put
me in dresses and hair ribbons and twisted up my straight hair into foam
rollers from time to time when I asked.
They let me have a terrifically messy kiddie makeup set. Oh yes, I was the princess. My bed had a canopy and my grandfather built
my dolls a wardrobe, and, as the only girl in the family (for twenty years,
anyway, although that’s no longer the case) I was thoroughly spoiled. On the surface, it sounds like a feminist’s
nightmare.
But you know what?
This princess has done all right.
This princess loved learning
how to clean and cook and sew, and she appreciates those skills today when her
friends (who were tomboys as children) are squicked out by cleaning the drains
and scrubbing the showers and carting out the trash, and she appreciates those
skills when they come to her for such simple questions as “how do I know if
I’ve overcooked the pasta?” and “how much water should I boil for rice?” and
she appreciates those skills when they sheepishly approach her with popped-off
buttons and torn-out seams and a sort of desperate plea for help, because, for
all of their drive and intelligence, she has this weird practical advantage
sometimes. This princess? Yeah, she learned how to sew and not how to
fix tires. But the patience and
persistence she used teaching herself how to crochet, how to knit, how to
embroider, how to spin, how to weave, how to follow a pattern, and how to sew without a pattern have served her well in figuring out the instructions for the Fix-a-Flat, in figuring out
the road system in central North Carolina, in figuring out how to plan and
enjoy a two-week solo expedition around the UK.
Know who babysat for ten years and is more comfortable with little
children than any of her friends? Yeah,
that’s this girl. There’s definitely a
relationship to be drawn there between being comfortable with girly childhood activities and taking care of little girls. Know who
learned a tremendous amount of American History from her dolls? Yep, you guessed who.
And this princess, the one whose mama called her babydoll, yeah, she
played for hours and hours with baby dolls and Barbies and AG dolls and Polly
Pockets. For the record, though, although there were plenty of marriages and
births among my Barbie colony, my dolls were all smart and strong and adventurous,
and liked fairytale adventures in which they carried swords and wielded magic
and pioneering tales in which they dealt with hunger and illness and social
problems every bit as much as they liked the galas and tea parties I also
routinely threw.
Maybe this princess here is just special because, sure, her
parents treated her like a princess, but they also gave her every educational
opportunity and nurtured her interests and encouraged her to read and write so
that it was years before she realized
that not everyone considered the translation of words on a page into beautiful
images in a mind to be an effortless miracle. So that she thought tests were fun and loved projects and assumed that everyone was horrified by anything less
than a 95% on a paper and took getting into college as a junior with a
scholarship as a simple matter of fact.
Maybe. This girl’s parents, after
all, gave her the gift of intelligence and, more importantly, the gift of
loving to learn.
Additionally, she was blessed with two younger brothers who
taught her how difficult it can be to live with other people but also how very
worth it compromise can be. Those
brothers of hers used to play house with her and dress up with her and bring
her fairy-spy-princess-warrior-house-castle games to life. They wrestled with her. They cheated at games and called her out when
she cheated and messed with the stuff in her room and told on her even when
they’d made deals to not tattle. They
whined about attending her dance recitals, but they came anyway, and gave her
flowers. They didn’t hate her even
though she sometimes beat them up, and she brought them their stuffed dogs and
bears and lions when they cried. And, in
fact, they still do these same things, just dressed up in more adult disguises.
So these brothers and she, they’re close.
That counts for a lot in a woman’s
positive self-image and all, I know.
I’ve read the books and the articles that talk about how it’s important
for male family members to have solid relationships with their sisters and
mothers.
Have I lost my train of thought here? Because what I’m trying to say is that yes,
maybe this princess wasn’t harmed too badly by her pink-and-purple upbringing
because the upbringing also included a loving family and an emphasis on
education and imagination. (The complete
aversion to sexuality when she was in her formative years probably helped
too. No popular television, Bratz dolls,
PG-13 movies until the age of sixteen, R-rated movies until college,
understanding of makeup extending beyond the concept of mascara, negative body
image based on anything beyond ballet capabilities, revealing clothes, or any interest
at all in grinding on other people at school dances. In fact, the majority of these disinterests
hold true today despite the prevailing opinion that she is technically an adult
and that the formative years are more or less over. She has
figured out eyeliner and television.) Perhaps
that’s true. But really, I don’t think
it’s the pink and the girly toys and the dressing up that messes girls up and has to be negated with other things. It’s when parents teach that you can’t be
anything but the glittery supermodel,
that your worth is based on looks, and that your interests aren’t worthwhile. That’s when girls get messed up. It does a lot more damage to tell your child
she can’t read something she picked out because it’s “above her reading level”
or “too long” (heard both of those before while babysitting, and they broke my
heart) than to forbid her reading a book about sparkly unicorns or writing
stories about the Disney princesses meeting each other (not that I ever did
that. *Cough.* Early fanfiction experience for the win?) because
they’re “too girly.” I believe that
firmly. Yet I know a lot of people who
would hate for their daughter to do such things because it “sets them on the
wrong track” towards a big slap in the face of feminism.
It doesn’t set them on the wrong track. Deciding that that’s not the track for them—that
you know the right track for them—is
what sets them on the wrong track.
And yeah, sure, this princess has spent the past three weeks
in a terrible funk of sleep, internet surfing, homework, and pacing fretfully
while panicking about the future, but I can guarantee that none of that is related to her parents’ decision to call her a
princess when she was growing up. If
they’d called me grasshopper or cupcake or slugger or, heck, anything else, I
would still be pacing fretfully and chipping the polish off my nails because
graduation is approaching so rapidly and it freaks me out.
So people? Lay off
the pink-bashing. It’s just a color, and
nobody’s freaking out about blue. Quit
acting like Barbies are responsible for every eating disorder in the
world. That’s ridiculous. Call your
daughters whatever you want, including princess, so long as they like it. I promise, it’s not going to ruin them any
more than it ruined me.
And I'm not very ruined.
