Snow White v. Superman

I've written a lot about gender roles, I realize. I've written controversial pieces based on my own childhood experiences, talked about the craziness of buying clothes for boys and girls, written about sex and rape, and yes, even ventured into the territory of talking about Disney Princess movies, though apparently I'm not good at that because that post degenerated into a long missive about the importance of using condoms. And that's not to mention all the posts about hair and breasts and body image and femininity and everything else inherent in KatyDidCancer.

However, I think it's time for me to give a little bit of my take on the whole Princess phenomenon.

It really doesn't bother me at all.

If you think of yourself as a feminist (and yes, I do, because I don't think that's a dirty word and I don't like how people have tried to take history and manipulate it), this is almost a sacrilegious statement. After all, princesses are only valued for their sex appeal! They are sitting around waiting for Prince Charming! (Ever notice how no one ever focuses on the princes? They are usually some pretty ineffectual dolts) They have to give up their talents and get threatened with death and they are abused and have no lives of their own! They are literal prisoners! What does this say to our daughters?

Um, well, I don't know. That's all bad stuff. I just think our kids can figure that out. Look, I could be dead wrong about this. I didn't grow up playing with princesses. I didn't play with dolls in general, except for Barbies (read this for my mom's perspective on mothering a girl like me). I think the princess stories are disturbing, especially in their dark, depressing, original Grimm form. However, my daughter has never seemed to care about princesses (my son went through a Princess-obsession phase; he thought Snow White was SO PRETTY). Lenny used to dress up in the outfits if her friends wanted to do that, but she never chose to do that on her own. She doesn't have princess dolls and never talks about being a princess. So, perhaps I've been lucky. But I can honestly say that it wouldn't bother me if she was into all that stuff.

Why the collective obsession with princesses? I think we give advertisers too much credit, and our kids too little.

Does anyone wring their hands over the assumption everyone seems to make about boys looking up to superheroes? No--quite the opposite. The trend seems to be to encourage girls to look up to those characters too.

But think about what that means.

Who are superheroes? Well, on the one hand, they are people who help others, fight crime, and do things for the greater good.

On the other hand, they have a pretty bum rap, if you ask me. In order to be a superhero, it's pretty much guaranteed that you have no family. You are an orphan (Spiderman, Superman, Batman), led into the path of greatness by the suffering and death of the people you love most. Even that is not enough. Once you begin your life of crime-fighting, you still don't get to have a family. It is accepted that anyone who loves you--women, parental figures--will be a target of the bad guys in order to get back at you.

So, it's back to a life of solitude for you. Back to a life where you hide your true face and lie to everyone every day.

There's more. Sometimes, you can't be a superhero without literally being a freak of nature, an aberration (Hulk, Spiderman). Sometimes you bring this on yourself or it's done to you against your will (Iron Man, Wolverine). So you can look forward to being this dude who is tormented, either by others or by his own misgivings with his body, or both. Your life is filled with excessive danger and physical pain. You will die young or come close to death over and over again. People will hate you and misunderstand you. You will be expected to represent entire nations and save society from extinction (Captain America, every other superhero).

Now you're saying, Jesus Katy, way to ruin all the fun! And that's exactly my point. No one points out how unrealistic and damaging the actual messages of Superheroes are--they are too busy focusing on the cool special effects and gadgets and the flying and the stuff blowing up. We don't actually want our boys to be isolated, cold, violent, without friends or love, incapable of telling the truth about themselves, doomed to lives of heroism tinged with the knowledge of a painful and early death. I think it's accurate to say that there are aspects of those messages that do get lodged in boys' brains, and those can be damaging, but no one is wringing their hands over the completely effed-up messages behind these dudes (yeah, I said dudes--Wonder Woman is kind of on her own).

And I say that's fine.

Kids get interested in this stuff for their own reasons, and they do different things with it. Sure, there's too much product placement for little kids, too much pressure for every kid to like the same things, too much merchandising of the message. However, our kids do deserve a little more credit than for us to just think they are mindless drones swallowing every piece of junk message that's given out.

When I was a kid, I had a favorite Barbie. I named her Joanne and called her Jo. I dressed her in the pedal pushers and other awesome 50s-era pants I had handed down from my mom, and she often wore Ken's sweaters. She drove to her job (she was 17--my idea of the absolute perfect age in the world when I was 9) and did well in school and hung out with her friends and got to have sex with the one Ken doll, who never cheated on her. She was a tomboy. I never gave a thought to the unnaturally large tits or the weird curve of her feet or whatever other porn-based messages Barbie was supposed to impart to me. Playing with that doll did not cause me problems in my life, my relationships, or my career. It never affected my body image. She was a 12 inch plastic doll. There wasn't a single part of her that looked like a real person. I was smart enough to know that.



And when my brother played with his thousands of little green plastic army men, arranging complex war scenarios, it did not make him a violent person. I remember him making a diorama about World War II or something, and to make it realistic, he cut off some of the army men's limbs and painted them red. I kind of love that fact. But the point is, he didn't grow up to cut people's arms off or inflict harm on other people or think that's what a man should do.

In fact, there are so few kids who ever grow up to do anything remotely resembling the messages behind princesses or superheroes that I don't know why we've all got our undies in a bunch over it. Sure, there are some trophy wives and gangbangers, some Navy seals and supermodels (or whatever the real life parallels are), but not very many. Most kids grow up to do something, hopefully something they like, but not usually, not for most kids. They do something to pay the bills. And they learn how to do that, how to cope and survive, in part by how they play.

The other day, Gabe and I were treated to a "movie" that our kids put together with the stuffed animals. The plot was that the two Beluga whales had a baby (a cow), who was subsequently rocked to sleep by a Latina American Girl doll, and then treated to a birthday party complete with cake until Augie started throwing everything around. There was singing involved in the movie--Lenny singing softly to the baby, Augie making up some pretty creative lyrics of his own. In order to do that movie, they had to work together, plan, build the set, use their imaginations, and generally laugh a lot and make a huge mess. It didn't turn out exactly how either of them expected. Gabe videotaped it for a minute but then his phone died. I made them cut it short because it was past their bedtime. We forced them to clean up.

There's more to real life in those games than all this other stuff we worry about, and I see them play like that all the time.

I started thinking about all this the other day, when Lenny said something very insightful to Gabe about her birthday. Her words made me realize that kids do internalize messages they see and hear about men and women, though not necessarily in the ways we imagine. Girls might not see the superheroes and toughness and world-beating out there that's stuffed down boys' throats and feel left out or lesser. They might see something else--something more insidious, something that they don't want for themselves--something kind of sad.

Lenny was due to be born on St. Patrick's day. She knows this. She was born 9 days early, on International Women's day. She complained to Gabe a few days ago that she wished she had been born on St. Patrick's day because that would be so fun (we are a family of redheahds living in a neighborhood filled with a lot of Irish Catholics; we are neither Irish nor Catholic, but the shamrock culture is ubiquitous here--an alien concept to me). Gabe said "well, don't you think the day you were born is better? I mean, which is more important?" Lenny said "women, I guess." Gabe told her that if there were no women, there would be no babies. And she said this:

Yeah, and then there would be only men. And then there would be no people. Because all they would do is have wars and everyone would die.

I'm thinking that a cow born to whales that like cake and music is a better bet. But maybe that's just me.