Are They Real?

(https://disneyland.disney.go.com/entertainment/disneyland/fantasy-faire/)

A few weeks ago, my eight-year-old daughter was at a drama camp where the kids acted out the movie Frozen. At the end of the week, the "real" Elsa came! My daughter kept asking me if she was really real. What could I say? I kept asking her what she thought. When "Elsa" showed up, I could tell that my daughter was really looking closely and trying to reconcile the differences she saw between the movie character and this real life princess. She concluded that this was, indeed, the real Elsa who lives in Disneyland, with all the other real princesses. They don't look like their cartoon-selves, for some reason she can't quite articulate, but they are really real.

I'm not sure what to say to all this. I know kids need a little magic now and then, but where do I draw the line? So far, I've tried to hedge: "Yes, there are people in Disneyland who get to be princesses while they're there...for a little while...at least, they get to look like princesses..."

My daughter insists they're real. They live there. And now she is determined for us to move to Florida to be close to the princesses.

I admit I'm very inconsistent about on the princess issue. One day I'm belting out "Let It Go" in the car, one day I'm refusing to buy Princess band-aids because "they're not dressed appropriately". And my daughter has, unfortunately, gotten more and more obsessed with them.

The Princess Question continues to confound me. I wonder how popular the Disney Princesses are in the Philippines? As we prepare to move there, I find myself wanting to stock up on Princess movies to ease the transition for my daughter. But my husband, like many fathers (I'm guessing), has had it.

My comfort is that my daughter has not asked to wear makeup, is not boy crazy, still won't let me wash or brush her hair without a fight, and wants to grow up to be not a princess, but "an ice-cream maker and seller". Which is its own issue...

Mommy, you need hair...

Is bald pretty? Can a mommy be bald?

My 7-year-old daughter was playing with her doll collection the other day--a few Disney Princesses, a Skipper and her horse, and a couple Polly Pockets. 

 The dolls were having a party. Naturally, I hinted that I would like to be invited. The response was: "It's just for people who are pretty."  Ouch. "I'm not pretty?", I asked her. "Well, I mean you're not pretty like they are, because they have pink and purple...(voice trailing off)". 

I actually did have pink and purple on. I was in my pajamas, granted, but I had the required colors. 

A few weeks later, my daughter decided to draw a picture of our family sliding down a rainbow. 

I was at the stove, and all of a sudden she asks me, "Do you want me to draw you with or without hair?" Wow. I had never been asked that before! I told her to draw me without hair, since that's really what I look like. She ended up drawing me with hair (I'm up in the top left corner--can you see the curls on either side that look like short arms?) because "otherwise you wouldn't look like a mommy". 

I know my daughter loves me just the way I am and thinks I'm beautiful. She tells me that all the time. I know she meant no offense. But it hurts to hear those things, nonetheless. 

Still, I'm grateful (I think) for opportunities to challenge the "types" and the values we have absorbed from our culture. I'm glad my daughter will have to struggle with this concept of defining feminine beauty. I just hope Barbie doesn't win. 

Princess Overload

The obsession with Disney Princesses in our society is becoming more and more evident to me as I look for topics to write about on my blog. They are ubiquitous, both on the web and on store shelves. I get it. I mean, who wouldn’t want to wear extravagant, colorful gowns and have adventures with talking animals and roguish men all the time?!

What is really fascinating about the Princesses is how many people have tried to reimagine them. By that, I suppose I really mean “re-image” them. As in, give them a new image. I have seen the Princesses bald. Fat. Old. Bespectacled. Depicted as suburban moms. Dressed in historically accurate costumes. Placed in dark settings of human suffering.

Why are so many people spending so much time trying to insert the Princesses into so many different contexts?


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(Dina Goldstein)

No wonder it's so hard to get my daughter to think about something else--anything else--besides Princesses. They are no longer one-dimensional, fairy tale characters. Now, they have walked in our shoes. Or at least we like to think so. We like to imagine the Princesses in less-than-perfect situations--maybe because we so desperately want to believe that the perfection they exude in their original context is really unattainable. If we could see from all other angles, maybe we would realize that we don't have to keep hoping to escape into the world of a Disney Princess.

We want them to step into our lives for awhile, if we can't step into theirs.

Are these re-imaginings helpful? I don't think so. I think they only serve to keep us fixated on these "characters". I appreciate the idea behind all these efforts to humanize the Princesses. Just as I appreciate how the latest Princesses have starred in stories which are about more than just love and marriage. Still, these stories and these new images are all pointing to a particular definition of "beauty"--whether by modeling it or depicting its antithesis.

Lately, I have heard some words coming out of my seven-year-old daughter's mouth that disgust me. I'll just be honest. And I have threatened to take Princesses completely out of the picture for her if I feel they are distorting her perception of others around her. I have allowed Princesses to be part of her life to a certain extent, but I'm discovering how quickly they can become an obsession. An obsession promoted and capitalized on by our culture.

Instead of reimagining the Princesses, I would like to refocus the lens on women (men too, but women in particular) who need to feel a little more brave, beautiful, deserving, talented, adventurous, and all the wonderful qualities celebrated in the Princess archetype. Let's get over the Princesses and the efforts to give them more and more "original" or "realistic" looks, and let's focus on actual reality.

I want my daughter to spend her time appreciating what she sees in real people, not surfing the web to see how many different kinds of Princesses she can see.

I want my daughter to see different body shapes, sizes, colors and ages as equally beautiful parts of a spectrum, not as novelty affectations on a Princesses body that make her giggle and/or sneer.

Most of all, I want my daughter to believe that life is valuable because it is given by God, not because the Princesses have endorsed certain aspects of it.