Princess Wars
Stop demanding all the right lessons
LAST week actresses Keira Knightley and Kristen Bell separately took on the biggest scourge of our times: Disney princesses, and the lessons they teach children.
Knightley bans her daughter from watching “Cinderella,” she told Ellen DeGeneres, “because she waits around for a rich guy to rescue her.” She tells her daughter to “Rescue yourself, obviously.”
Knightley might want to, ahem, check her privilege. The Cinderella tale dates back centuries, to when women didn’t have quite as many opportunities as Knightley’s daughter.
Anyway, Cinderella is really saved by another woman — it’s the Fairy Godmother who opens the door for her to, well, rescue herself. Women helping women is still an acceptable message, right?
Beyond that, Cinderella is a fairy tale. It shouldn’t be a manual for living. Just as parents shouldn’t have to tell their children that they can’t actually go chasing after famous pirates, as Knightley does in the (Disney!) “Pirates of the Caribbean” series.
That is, parents should draw the stark line between pretend and real life in all films. Don’t count on movies to parent your children.
Bell, meanwhile, said she asks her kids, “Don’t you think that it’s weird that the prince kisses Snow White without her permission? Because you cannot kiss someone if they’re sleeping!” Of course, the kiss breaks the evil spell that Snow White was under, and she would never wake up without it, but the priority is consent.
Wait: Bell voiced the character of Anna in the megahit “Frozen.” And while that, like many of the newer Disney princess movies, had a girl-power theme, Anna got engaged to a man she just met and needed a man to help her throughout the movie.
Presumably Bell’s kids don’t get a lecture about “Frozen.”
It’s hard to miss the irony of women who work in Hollywood, which holds women to a size-double-zero and never-getold standard, having a problem with the message that the fictional princesses send to girls. But the Disney princesses have been a target for feminists for some time.
In a 2006 piece in The New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein complained about her 3-year-old daughter’s obses- sion with the princesses. It irked her that her girl was drawn to sparkly dresses and fancy hair.
But when she talked to Andy Mooney, a former Disney exec who was key to developing the princess products, he explained: “We simply gave girls what they wanted, although I don’t think any of us grasped how much they wanted this.”
As for any plot to subjugate women, he noted that it’s the men, the princes in the stories, who are actually minor characters: “Although they keep him around for the climactic kiss, he is otherwise relegated to the bottom of the toy box, which is why you don’t see him promi- nently displayed in stores.”
Girls are central to the story. Isn’t that what feminists say they want?
But that’s not enough. Everything has to come with a full-on leftist narrative, even pretend characters in cartoon movies.
There’s something, yes, sexist about claiming that what girls like is always wrong. Where’s the outrage about the silly things boys enjoy?
When little girls like Disney princesses or women watch the Kardashians, we’re lectured about how this vacuous entertainment sends a bad message. But when little boys watch ridiculous, unrealistic superheroes, and their dads watch grown men they don’t know chase a ball around a court or a field, there’s no hand-wringing about the various bad messages they might be getting.
What does it mean that your daughter loves princesses? Will she grow up to be dependent on men and waiting for a tiny mouse to sew ballgowns for her? Unlikely.
Instead, she’s liable to grow up with an “everything is problematic” chip on her shoulder, inherited from a mother who insisted that everything she likes is always wrong.
Don’t do that to your daughters. Leave the Disney princesses alone.