Ultimately, Elsa does manage to break free, sort of. But the forces that hold her back are diffuse and insidious, and she never really embraces her desire. Apart from her PTSD reactions to her childhood abuse (after all, her parents all but chained the kid to a radiator), the questions remain: Who is Elsa? What does she want? Where do her magical powers come from, and why does nobody else in the family have them? Why do her parents fear and loathe her powers so much? Why, as Arendelle’s legitimate and uncontested sovereign but also, as we have established, a person possessed of superpowers, does Elsa abdicate her position so readily, with so little resistance? Why does she turn her back on everything that belongs to her? Why does she give up so easily, and why don’t we care that she never fights back?
“The idea of awakening,” Warner writes, “sometimes erotically, but not exclusively, goes to the heart of the fairy tale’s function. But Sleeping Beauty’s angle of vision, when she opens her eyes, is different from the point of view of the prince . . . The uses of enchantment are extremely powerful, what is expressed and what is denied, what is discovered, and what is rejected, form a picture of the possible world to which Sleeping Beauty will be waking up. Who tells the story, who recasts the characters and changes the tone becomes very important: no story stays the same as its source or model, the chemistry of audience and narrator changes it.”
Did you know that Jennifer Lee was the first woman to write and direct a Disney movie, not counting Brenda Chapman, who was fired from Brave even though it was based on her experiences as a mother?
Of course. Brave was basically Atalanta from Free to Be . . . You and Me. Her deal was that if she won the contest, she wouldn’t have to marry the guy who won her in a contest. I mean, look. Little girls love princess stories because princess stories are about coming of age, and wedding scenes mark the symbolic end of childhood. Also, girls love princesses for the same reason that boys (and girls) love superheroes—because they’re transcendent, peerless, righteous, and true; because they dwell in the supernatural. They’re consoling proof of a moral universe in which goodness defeats evil. They wear fancy costumes. Both the superhero and the princess are symbols operating in the realm of perfection. But superheroes vanquish evil before finding love, whereas princesses aren’t expected to fight their way out of situations. They aren’t expected to want things, or fight for them, or win.
Once, when I was a teenager, my mother said to me, “The problem with you is that you don’t know what you want. You only know what you don’t want.” This stung, and for a long time I held it within me like a secret flaw—proof of my fundamental inability to make the life I wanted for myself because of my inability to visualize it.
But it isn’t easy to visualize. There is no coherent narrative that’s generally regarded as the universal story line for women, in stories or in life. After a point, the plot just falls off a cliff.
17
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All the Bad Guys Are Girls
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first Disney princess movie Kira ever saw. It marked her lightning-bolt conversion to the cult of Disney princesses. A few months before her third birthday, she and her dad were at a friend’s house when he texted me a picture of her sitting on a couch in a nylon Snow White gown with a big red bow on her head. Her eyes were wide, her jaw slack, her face glowing. I’d later learn the come-to-princess moment was common among girls whose parents had tried, vainly, to shield them. My friend Dominique told me about the “Cinderella” sippy cup someone gave her daughter Simone when she was eighteen months old, and how from that moment on she refused any liquid that did not emanate from its magical spout.
Soon after she saw the movie, Kira’s grandparents gave her a beautiful pop-up book of the Brothers Grimm version of “Snow White,” in which the deranged Evil Queen tries to assassinate her stepdaughter three times for being prettier than she is—first with a lethal lace corset, then with a poisoned comb, and finally, taking a tip from Satan, with her pièce de résistance: the poisoned apple. In the movie, there’s just the apple. The fruit of knowledge knocks Snow White out cold, and the dwarves place her in a large display case until the prince comes along and rescues her with his reanimating Dr. Frankenstein kiss. Princesses were always getting into trouble for not doing as they were told, for touching and tasting forbidden things. Kira was used to this. Her favorite part of “Sleeping Beauty” was when a hypnotized Aurora touches the spindle. (“Touch the spindle, I say! TOUCH IT!” she bellowed as we read the book every night for nearly a year.) Yet she was amazed to discover that Snow White had fallen for the Queen’s tricks not once but three times in the original. “She’s the second-prettiest,” she observed matter-of-factly. “But she’s really dumb.” There was a lot more anguish in her voice when she asked me why all the bad guys in movies were girls. She meant Disney villains, which, with the exception of Prince Hans, are in fact almost exclusively women, and never young. Princesses suffer at the hands of evil stepmothers, wicked queens, and malevolent fairies consumed with envy and rage. Experience makes them powerful, but exile makes them mean. Princesses must retain their innocence and helplessness, must not accrue experience. They must rely instead on magical (possibly imaginary) friends and the kindness of princes for any hope of delivery. I told Kira it was a good question. A few months after her third birthday, she decided she wanted to dress up as Snow White’s Evil Queen for Halloween. I made her a flowing cape with a stiff, upright white felt collar. She wore a cowl over her hair and a crown on top of the cowl. We hung a mirror around her neck and gave her red lips and withering eyebrows. She stayed in character all night as she trick-or-treated, imperiously looking down her nose at every Snow White she passed.
The year before she was the Evil Queen at Halloween, Kira was a robot princess. I stayed up all night making the costume from scratch, using a gallon-size milk jug with a tiara glued to it and spray-painted silver as a helmet. The year after the Evil Queen, when she was four, she dressed as a bride. We got that one at Target, in the girls’-costume aisle. When she was five, she was a cat. When she was six, she was a pirate, with an eye patch and a fake parrot pinned to her shoulder. By the time she was seven, her intense communion with princesses was over. She had moved on.
I went to see Maleficent without her. I worried it would be too scary, and I told her I’d tell her what it was about and then she could decide whether she wanted to see it. Afterward, I said, look—it’s really sad. Maleficent lives in a fairy kingdom that borders a human kingdom ruled by a bad king. She is pure and strong and kind and good. She has huge wings. She becomes friends with an orphan boy named Stefan who lives on the other side, and they love each other for years. (“Stefan, Aurora’s dad?” she asked. In the story, Sleeping Beauty’s father has a name, but her mother doesn’t. “Yes, Stefan, Aurora’s dad.”) One day, the human king attacks the fairy kingdom, and Maleficent fights back and wins. The king wants Maleficent killed, so Stefan, who wants to be the next king after the old king dies, comes back to the fairy kingdom, drugs Maleficent, and cuts off her wings while she is sleeping to take back to the king. (“He’s the bad guy?!” “He’s the bad guy. I told you, it’s sad.”) Maleficent doesn’t die, but she can’t fly anymore, and it makes her sad and angry. She doesn’t understand why her friend did this to her, and she never trusts anyone again. When Stefan becomes king, he marries Aurora’s mother, and they have a baby. (“And Maleficent puts the curse on the baby because she is mad.” “Right.”) Then King Stefan gives the baby to the other fairies to hide her and take care of her, but the fairies are silly and careless, so Maleficent has to watch over Aurora to make sure she doesn’t die. She feels bad about the curse. Aurora grows up feeling like someone is looking out for her, and one day, she sees Maleficent, and says, “I know who you are. You’re my fairy godmother!” On Aurora’s sixteenth birthday, she is taken back to King Stefan’s castle, and he locks her up in a tower. He says it’s for her protection. But Aurora is still cursed, so on her sixteenth birth
day she pricks her finger on the spindle of a knitting needle, and not even Maleficent can undo the curse so that she doesn’t die. (“Only true love’s kiss.” “Yes.”) Then everybody tries to find Prince Philip, a cute guy Aurora met on her way to the castle, to give her true love’s kiss, but it doesn’t work. (“They just met the one time.” “Exactly.”) So everyone is really sad, because they think Aurora is going to die, especially Maleficent, because Aurora is like her daughter, so she sneaks into the castle and kisses her on the forehead because she loves her, and Aurora wakes up. (“True love’s kiss!”) And then, King Stefan’s men try to kill Maleficent, and Aurora tries to help her and discovers the wings in a glass case, because everybody is putting girls and their parts in glass cases all the time in these stories, and the wings go flapping off to the edge of the tower and reattach themselves to Maleficent, just as Stefan is about to kill her. She flies up, and he falls over the edge to his death.
Maleficent is more than a retelling, it’s a corrective. It changes the story completely by looking at it another way, from another perspective. Suddenly, it makes sense. The princess was never expected to succeed the king, or live her own adventures, or explore new lands. She was expected to disappear into her happy ending, where she would remain happily ever after, never to be heard from again. In exchange for obedience and playing her role, she would get love, praise, attention, support, and protection—all of which would be immediately withdrawn at the slightest hint of transgression or rebellion, at which point she would realize that the king was only ever protecting her against himself. That king wasn’t a dad, he was a mob boss.
Say the princess plays the girl all her life but finds herself grown rich, experienced, wise, and powerful, with no male authority to lord over her—then what? What does she become, a wise ruler? a benevolent leader? a beloved queen? or an old witch? Will she be vilified, persecuted, and shunned? Will all the young princesses be told scary stories of her evil, wicked ways, and warned against following in her footsteps? Will they be denied their subjectivity and gaslighted into confusion? Will they be systematically taught to fear and loathe their future selves, the evil hag, the wicked witch, and then soothed by the promise of the benevolent protection of the paternalistic king? Is that what we want for them? Is that what they want?
“The fairy tales we have come to revere as classical are not ageless, universal, and beautiful in and of themselves,” Jack Zipes writes in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, “and they are not the best therapy in the world for children. They are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over our lives by mystifying them.”1 Sleeping Beauty is a mystification demystified by Maleficent. Maleficent allows the princess to reclaim her mother. It repairs the bond that the culture works so hard to sever. Still, the idea of Kira’s beloved Sleeping Beauty losing the father she’d been so happy to return to—maybe it was too much. Maybe it would scare her. I braced for Kira to be upset, to be angry. But she thought about it. She considered the story from another angle. She got some critical distance. She understood how the story shaped the story, and how it might be reshaped. Then she said:
“That’s sad. But he was mean.”
18
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Girls Love Math
1. Nobody disputes the fact that age is crueler to women than men. But why? Facebook, that tireless corroborator of the relentless march of time and its startling effect on people you knew in high school, backs me up on this. The girls don’t transform in the same way. They hang on to their hair. They cycle from the soul. They can moisturize without inspiring someone to make a documentary about it.
We expect women to submit to this self-evident truth and for men to be gracious about it and try not to gloat. Mostly, we expect nobody to notice or question the different ways in which “primeness” is constructed for each gender; it is not based on the same criteria at all. If, as Hegel suggested, ideas are not just ideas but come wrapped in all flavors of attitudes, then this particular idea is a giant, gorgonzola-stuffed, bacon-wrapped fig of a notion—decadent, cloying, aged in a barrel of bullshit, warmed over, and served up again and again.
2. “Epigenetics means that our physical and mental tendencies were not set in stone during the Pleistocene age,” Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times. “Rather, they’re shaped by the life we lead and the world we live in right now. Epigenetics proves that we are the products of history, public as well as private, in parts of us that are so intimately ours that few people ever imagined that history could reach them.” Stories sink in and hybridize us, in other words.
I read another article about how older men are more likely than young ones to father autistic or schizophrenic kids because of random mutations that increase with age. “The age of mothers had no bearing on the risk for these disorders, the study found.”1
And then there was this: scientists in Kyoto had successfully created fertile eggs from mouse stem cells, which, if or when the science is ever applied to humans, could mean the end of the biological clock. Will stories change to conform to reality? Or will we hold on?
3. I was about ten when I first discovered fashion magazines. My mom didn’t buy them, but she did subscribe to ¡Hola!, the Spanish version of the TV presenter and royalty-obsessed English tabloid Hello!, which produced a couple of fashion supplements a year. The way I remember them, they were mostly made up of row after row of small photos from designers’ collections. There was something incredibly fierce about the monastic severity of the models and the cultured hauteur of the designers. (Saint Laurent! Lagerfeld! So strict and mean!) I was looking at a kind of abstracted ideal of adult womanhood in its most fully realized state. The models looked so deadly, deadly serious, these steely-eyed soldiers in their exquisite, artful, status-conferring garments (signaling discretionary income, power, and leisure to burn). I would have been shocked to learn they were not much older than I was at the time.
There’s been much debate about the fact that runway models have been getting younger and younger. How young is too young for a girl to trudge down a glorified auction block in thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes, impersonating a grown woman on her way to the fashion abattoir? I had honestly never given the question much thought until recently, when I stopped to read a series of op-eds weighing in on a proposal by the Council of Fashion Designers of America that a minimum age limit of sixteen be set for runway models. Some designers already adhere to it, and some don’t. Even if they do, the girls they hire are rarely much more than kids, which is worth pausing to consider for many obvious reasons but also some not so obvious. In the not-so-obvious category, one comment in particular jumped out at me.
“Note that the gender-neutral models that need protecting here are implicitly girls, not boys,” wrote Ashley Mears, a pop-culture and gender-sociology professor and the author of a book about the economics of modeling, in her op-ed. “Partly this stems from the entrenched celebration of women, not men, on display, and partly because male models in fashion tend to be older than their female counterparts. A 16-year-old boy on the catwalk would be as rare a sighting as a 35-year-old woman.”
4. Of course I already knew this. Everybody knows. But we acclimate to weird things. The comment might not have caught my attention had I not also just been flipping through the September issue of Harper’s Bazaar. I’d been looking at one of those seasonal roundups that tell you—“you” being the lucky possessor of tens of thousands of dollars in disposable income earmarked for your fall “must-haves”—what to wear in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies and beyond. Mostly, the guide was made up of pictures of garments laid flat against a background, unviolated by the imperfection of the human form. Each decade was also accompanied by a large photo of a professional modeling the look, and a small insert of a woman representative of the particular age group. (All but one of these were former models, but, OK, whatever.) Indeed, the whole thing seemed fairly inclusive
and democratic (they went all the way to seventies and beyond!). But the discrepancy between the models and the “real people” grew more jarring as the ages advanced, so that by the time we arrived at the seventies (plus!), a small photo of Barbara Walters was dwarfed by a picture of a girl who could easily have been her thirteen-year-old great-granddaughter looking sad in her dowager costume.
Pairing pictures of adolescent girls with adult men, or of young women with middle-aged men, to suggest age parity produces a kind of cognitive dissonance on a mass scale. So does constantly reinforcing the idea that a thirty-three-year-old woman is somehow “older” than a man seven years older than her. (What’s being referred to, though not in so many words, is her use-value in the sexual marketplace.) Cognitive dissonance, which is the condition of holding two or more conflicting cognitions at the same time, causes psychological discomfort, which is what makes toddlers in beauty pageants so creepy. (Two words that just don’t go together: sexy baby.) The other thing that makes them creepy is that they call attention to how little we question this practice of systematically barring images of women over thirty-nine and replacing them with images of kids in grown-up drag. The narrative that is repeated again and again, visually and in stories, is that a woman’s physical prime can never coincide with her intellectual, professional, or artistic prime. In this way, the aspirational ideal is placed in the past, where it can never be accessed. Youth and experience are once again pitted against each other; youth wins. As one commenter on the Room for Debate series said, however, “Looking at children as examples of my adulthood feels wrong.”
You Play the Girl Page 24