Celia Walden
Last month, I took my fiveyear-old to the premiere of a new Nickelodeon TV show. They had my daughter at the unicorn with the candyfloss mane – but Nella the Princess Knight aspires to far more than My
Little Pony. You see Nella is both a princess and a knight.
She’s a self-empowered, boundary-pushing, bi-racial, pint-sized feminist juggernaut that both challenges the norm and – even more importantly – Disney, who can formulate as many black, Latina and gender-fluid characters as they want but will never quite make up for corrupting generations of young girls with antiheroines like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.
Princess politics is a vicious game.
Nella will undoubtedly be a star and as parents across the globe succumb to pleas of “just one more episode” they can feel smug in the knowledge that they are, at least, promoting tolerance and general badass femaleness.
Because it is all about “The Message”. And with kids, that’s just fine. We don’t actually mind hearing the leaden clunk of a point being driven home as we read our children bedtime stories. Nor do we mind the one-dimensional characters who exist solely as conduits – although modern-day children’s authors would do us all a favour if they were a little lighter with their pens in that regard. But I will tell you what I do mind and that is when the moralising doesn’t limit itself to children’s books and entertainment; worse still, when those morals become ideologies.
Thank God then for Gerard Lee – co-writer of the award-winning BBC drama
Top of the Lake with Jane Campion – who has come out and warned of the dangers of forcing a “feminist ideology” into films and TV shows (namely that they become monotonous and predictable bilge, with the woman always ending up on top, although he doesn’t quite put it that way).
Reacting to his comments last week, Campion (the only female director to win the Palme d’or in Cannes) said this was “complete rubbish” and that the industry would be transformed if 50 per cent of all public funding for film were given to women filmmakers. And she’s quite right. It would be transformed – into a zealotdriven sisterhood with a single politicised agenda. But hey, who doesn’t want to scroll down the film and TV categories tab on itunes, past “comedies” and “dramas” to “feminist ideologies”?
With plenty of male directors cynically cashing in on the faux feminist fad, we’re not exactly being denied an on-screen female perspective, are we? In fact when was the last time you saw anything other than a searingly smart female detective (always flanked by the same Pc-plod-style white male) or top female MI5 officer (dealing through gritted teeth with her intellectually inferior male counterparts)?
Even the superhero market is about to be taken over by XX chromosomes as Wonder
Woman propels things to a whole new ideological level.
Meanwhile, in the nonfiction world, we’ve mined the whole of history for empowered females and are now – as author Hilary Mantel rightly pointed out recently – in the curious position of superimposing modernday feminist attributes on century-old figures and generally “reworking history so that victims are the winners.”
There is no need to do this. As a woman, I’d like to assure Campion and the rest that I do not feel ignored. I am well aware that I can be both a princess and a knight – and if any more undue attention is paid to my female desires and motivations, I’ll be in danger of getting just a little bit sick of myself.
Screen heroines Do we have to have feminist plot lines on children’s TV, too?