Princess-less

She stared. Slender face. Replete with round red and raised bumps. She lathered and rinsed, blemishes magically erased. Hair wshed and then twisted to the crown of the skull. A few brushes of make-up, a selection of various long and flowing hairstyles and then an array of sparkling dresses – above the knee or sweeping the floor with a thigh high split- sparkles and exposed shoulders.

My 10-year-old niece, just on the cusp of puberty, is brown with woolen hair twisted in dual strands. She resembles nothing of the “game” she plays on the ipad. She is not white, her hair not silky. She doesn’t wear makeup and has never been to a formal dance.

I’d watched a friend’s nieces enamored by the same pimpled face turned “prom queen’s” transformation just a few weeks before. (I had watched them toggle between the prom game and some Disney princess pet salon – the sole purpose was to cyber wash and preen imaginary pets and then adorn them in pink and sparkles.)

I groaned and my sister concurred.

“I hate that game. I delete it and they keep putting it back on.” She remarked.

My niece glanced at her mother and then over to me. 

“Why do you like that game,” I asked.

Her simple reply, “Because it’s fun.”

“What makes it fun?”

She shrugged and continued to wash face and hair and select sparkly gowns, although now with a little less zeal.

“What’s wrong with it?” she asked in a quieter voice than usual. 

“It puts all the emphasis on being pretty - and a certain kind of pretty,” I responded. “Do these prom queens look like you or your sisters? Do they have your hair?”

She shrugged. 

“They also only depict one kind of woman,” I continued. “A woman with long thin features and who wears sparkly dresses. That isn’t the only way to be beautiful and it isn’t the only way to be a woman. And besides, being pretty isn’t everything either.”

She shrugged again and then fell back to her cyber preening. 

I sighed. She is 10. The social politics of gender and identity and racially specific ideas of beauty are pretty heavy topics to broach when all she really wants to do is play a 21^st century version of dolls.

I had to try though. My sister is amused at how heavily I push back against the pink monster. Originally it was my own disdain for the color pink that prevented me, tongue in cheek, from buying my nieces anything in that color. In recent years it has evolved into all out resentment for the shorthand the color pink represents. 

Pink is girly. As I pay more attention to the way we socialize our children, what they are “supposed to do” or not, what colors belong where and even how they play, suddenly I’m preoccupied with the dearth of STEM toys and ideas pedaled at little girls and the surplus of beauty and shopping messages. Who knew I’d be angry that the capitalist machine isn’t pitching woo at little girls (at least not in any way I’d like it to). 

Last year I read a post urging people not to buy sexist toys. It resonated with me. Then I began reading comments and I was dismayed. Part of the piece talked about looking for a Lego set with a female character profiled and the difficulty she had in finding anything other than Princess Leia in the infamous gold bikini handcuffed to Jabba the Hutt. 

Aside from the comments calling the woman lazy for not searching better online for more options, there was the gem that explained, “Yes! And she literally uses his own greed and pro-slavery behavior against him when she *strangles him to death with her slave chain.* If that's not rejecting standard tropes and gender stereotypes, I'm not sure what is.”

Really?

The woman has a six-year-old daughter; while that explanation may be salient I’m not sure it is age appropriate for the cognitive skills of first grader. My conversation with my 10-year-old niece was only mildly more effective than the commenters and I didn’t have to show her a movie or explain a history of misogyny and sexism to her. 

I found myself equally frustrated that people didn’t seem to mind that a singular representation of woman is readily available but anything else requires searching and dedicated intent. They see nothing amiss that an alternative representation of woman – not all representations, simply one that is not devoted exclusively to shoes and shopping and how she looks- is an audacious expectation from anyone, including the mother of a 6-year-old girl.

Like the woman who wrote the original post, this isn’t about “slut shaming” or an insult to women who do have pale oval faces and slender bodies to match and wear makeup and slinky dresses. This is about the ones that don’t. This is about reminding the world that not all little girls want to be princesses-especially if we stop indoctrinating them from birth.