Today my daughter and I entered a dreary little shop that
sells everything from cereal to high price hairdryers. The upstairs is devoted
to toys. TOYS! They are of the dusty, oh-god-did-a-child-slave-laborer-make
this sort, but lately my child has fixated on this upstairs plaza as a
dream world that possesses the one thing she wants more than anything else in
life: a hula hoop.
Where do you want to go? I asked her. I want to
hula hoop! I sighed. I could think of no less enticing a location than the
dusty corner shop. But it was not a large request.
My daughter’s hair has grown a lot since last fall, when she
asked me to stop cutting it. It flops in her face like Cousin It’s if it isn’t
brushed back. We buy barrettes to keep it out of her eyes.
My daughter has a small box labeled Bows in her
closet. She loves them sometimes and is utterly indifferent to them at others.
The same could be said of every other toy or object or person in her life; she
is a two year old. This morning, she was indifferent, and as she finished
her cereal I took a comb and swept her locks out of her eyes, using those convenient
sliding bows to free her vision.
She had a blue bow on one side and a yellow on the other. We
walked into the shop and the manager, who knows her fairly well said hello.
Hello! I responded. I’m very nice. Ask anyone. I dislike people who
aren’t instantly warm. I don’t understand them. I love a good hello.
Then he smiled at my two year old approvingly.
She has bows in her hair today, he said. They look nice. She’s a little princess.
Oh my GOD, there is that FUCKING word again.
This isn’t about Disney. (That’s another bone to pick.) It
isn't about gender neutrality and letting my daughter have soccer balls but not
baby dolls (she has both.) This isn't about frills, even, or the word “girly.”
Here’s the trouble: we don’t know precisely what it is
about. I do know that I feel MURDEROUS when people call my child
“princess.” It may have something to do with its happening 800 times a day.
It may have something to do with there being no label that I've ever heard
attached to boys. (Not that any child deserves to have an adult label
them in any manner.) It may be that I am sick of people speaking mindlessly. What
is a princess, anyway?
Let’s investigate:
According to Merriam Webster, a princess is the eldest
daughter of a British sovereign —a title granted for life and used only after
it has been specifically conferred by the sovereign.
The word’s use
dates back to 1649.
It would be nice
to be British royalty. This morning the coffee maker was cranky, two of our
stove burners were broken and we had to leave a message for the super so my
husband can make his morning tea while I make the morning oatmeal
simultaneously. This morning I realized the paint on the radiator pole in my
daughter’s bedroom was badly chipped and cracking and needed to be sanded
before the heat comes on this fall.
I’d LOVE to ring
a bell or do whatever it is that British royalty do to solve these problems.
They don’t even know they have these problems, of course, as they are fixed
without their knowledge. I’d love to receive messages on silver trays in bed
and have the sheets washed before they get dirty and whatever else happens in
the life of a royal.
HOWEVER, my
daughter is not a British royal. Why, then are people calling her one?
Shoot, this is
about Disney. Some asshole at the
Disney Corporation decided a few years ago to capitalize on children’s natural
desires to dress up in their parents’ clothing and so he commodified it. He
sent out the Disney troops to make piles and miles of land-fill crap consisting
of costumes.
Why on earth
would you go to the trouble of crafting a costume from a necklace found here, a
hat found there, if you could just go to the bloody story and plunk down $24.99
for a piece of cheap fabric trimmed with chiffon and tulle and a cheap golden
crown and wand, entombed in more land-fill filling, off-gas producing vinyl?
It defies common sense to make a child work so hard at pulling an
outfit together when he or she can just buy it, for god’s sake.
Trillions of
dollars later, we have plates. We have cups. We have Little Golden Books. We
have the aforementioned costumes and their junky paraphernalia. And beyond the
damage to the planet, we have conformity, in greater numbers than ever
before. (Don’t fact-check me on this, I am an angry parent and it feels right.
It is intuitively right.)
If you are a princess,
in Disney speak, you are Arial, or Aurora
That is my
biggest problem with the label. You are some strange, undefined thing that apparently
every other girl is too, if you are to believe the words of strangers
who think they have a right to call you anything at all, which they do not. I
repeat: they do not.
I whirled on the
manager.
Do me a favor.
Do the world a favor. Stop calling girls “princesses.” You don’t know the
damage you may be doing. More importantly, I don’t know the damage you
may be doing. I don’t even know what you mean, and my daughter doesn’t know
what you mean except that somehow you approve of her more today because she is wearing
bows that culturally signify her as a girl, and that makes the world a more
controlled, defined place for you. Guess what? The world is not a neat and tidy
place. It is not a place where all girls are one way. I am so sorry to
make you anxious. But leave my daughter out of this society’s pathological
need to label girls anything, anything at all. Leave my fucking
daughter alone.
Anyone who knows
me personally knows this is not only exactly what I said, but it is the
abridged version. I had more. I told him he was free to ask her name, to tell her
that he hoped she had a nice day, or that we enjoy the toys upstairs. What
he was not free to do was call my daughter a fucking princess.
I am not waging
war against all gender stereotypes. It’s too much to take on. I have no idea if
the genders are different, and if so, to what extent it is biological. I just
bought a book called Why Gender Matters, actually. I certainly want to
know if there is science to help me understand and guide my daughter with any
problems that may arise from her brain chemistry.
The human heart
and mind is awash in riddles. Each person has a lifetime of dealing with her
own riddles and the riddles of those she encounters intimately and casually. It
is, to be trite, the human condition to be uncertain of another person’s
identity, which encompasses everything from taste in music and movies to
talents and dreams and whims, to kindnesses and cruelties.
We cannot
appease our society’s anxiety over complexity by allowing people to continually
address our daughters as “princesses.” We cannot allow our daughters to be confused by a
meaningless, vague, thorny and insidious label. We must yell at shopkeepers who
are brainwashed by a society that is pathologically terrified of letting girls
out of the box.
When my daughter
gets older, she will make lots of decisions that will reflect the light of the
prism we call identity. She may be a makeup-wearer. She may be a soccer
player or an introverted writer bent over notebooks in a research library. She
may be a dancer or a doctor or a restaurant critic. She may be a street clown.
She will work all sorts of odd jobs and stumble and fall and wonder who
she is, the way the rest of us do. I don’t intend to allow her private
ruminations to be short-circuited by meaningless, soul-gutting labels.
If she does,
however, become the eldest daughter of a British sovereign, I expect her to get
that heating pipe in our second bedroom fixed. And I’d love my tea on a tray by
7
am .
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