A few of you have asked for advice about talking to your preschooler about Princess Culture (PC). It’s not been thrust upon us as rapidly because I have boys (possibly problem #1 with PC!) but as A has more exposure to peers and mainstream drop-off classes like ballet, PC has begun to flicker on the horizon. Plus, A sometimes gets called a ‘princess’ by strangers because, well, he is a boy with long hair and non-grey clothing, so therefore equals Princess.
I have three main arguments about Princess Culture:
PC is a promotion of unearned privilege. Thus finding ‘empowering princesses’ instead of the Disney variety helps not at all to undo the idea in society that some people are born ‘lucky’ or ‘better’ than others - or that they can marry into privilege and escape into a ‘better’ situation. There is a social function to promoting PC to children.
In a white-dominant and sexist society, which ours is, PC culture reinforces the narrow band of ways a girl or woman can be powerful: being beautiful, being ugly; being clever or quirky; loving the underdog; being a doormat or overly kind and giving; being, somehow, in relation to a man. Disney PC specifically, and PC culture broadly, is only designed to sell objects, and by extension a specific mode of girlhood, to children.
‘Princess femininity’ can highlight the ‘empty’ nature of a certain type of femininity, and indeed the general socially constructed nature of gender.
I also have a disclaimer: I was a Princess Kid. I was really, really into princesses. Not Disney ones - never Disney ones, but Arthurian mythic princesses, the kind of icons and archetypes called up by Pre-Raphaelite paintings. I suspect what I was really looking for as a kid was something more like the Rejected Princesses that Jason Porath illustrates. I didn’t know about unearned privilege as a kid - I had it, so it wasn’t something I learned about - so I was able to craft for myself a quasi-feminist or at least liberating set of stories about princesses that resonated with my life. It’s most likely that had I not been born with unearned racial privilege, I would not have been as able to reshape princess narratives into something entertaining and somewhat empowering, but that’s not something I will ever know. My main argument against PC, as you’ll see, is a structural argument about power and privilege, not about the embodiment of one type or other of feminine ideals - although I do argue that the most usual of these ideals are quite toxic.
Part 1: Princess Culture as Promotion of Unearned Privilege
This is the most straightforward of my arguments against PC. Unearned privilege - whether that’s white privilege, male privilege, able-bodied privilege - is any kind of social mode where the dominant or more socially valued group gets unearned, unasked for benefits that less dominant groups don’t receive. As a cyclist I really like this comparison between white privilege and cycling. The classic article by Peggy McIntosh is also a great introduction to the concept of white privilege and by extension other kinds of privilege.
Princess culture values unearned privilege. What is a princess? Royalty of some fashion. What is royalty? A family or group who has unearned hereditary privilege. A princess is either born into power or marries into it. She is not elected, nominated, or promoted based on her hard work or discoveries. She is by virtue of her birth or marriage part of an elite group who, in most kids’ portrayals of princesses, are prettier, fancier, and sweeter (or meaner!) than other people. There is a clear us vs. them - this unearned power is precisely what draws kids to PC, because they are absorbing the unearned privilege bias in society, and it is a way for them to play with that power.
In our family, because we are feminists and ardent believers in peace education we try to spot unearned bias and reject it wherever possible. Instead of celebrating someone who has power because of her lineage, we seek out models of ‘girl power’ which represent true achievement: women who have been bold, stood up against oppression, made a difference in the world.
The Social Function of PC and its Underpinnings
I would argue that the notion of ‘archetypes’ like princess and knight that are promoted to children via traditional fairy tales, popular films and the corresponding toys do a great deal to instruct children in traditional divisions of power, hierarchy, and privilege. Children latch onto these powerful icons because the opposites - the peasant, the poor farmer, the commoner - have too many overtones of their daily lives as disempowered people in society. Also since our children are always absorbing the cultural values about unearned privilege and power in our society, these types of icons crystallize the message in a perfect package. Rather than give our children icons of social injustice - and a day-to-day world where their experience more closely mirrors the ‘helpless’ in these stories - why not give them actual power and control over their bodies and lives, and stories to match that sense of respect? The dignity of objects made to their scale, support and freedom to look after their bodily needs, and the skills and courage to work for an equitable world, instead of a world like that of PC where the gentle tyranny of ‘noblesse oblige’ is the highest good?
Part 2: What it means to be a Girl
Most of the gender-based critiques of PC aren’t new, so I’ll limit my thoughts in this area. You can find a good summary by searching about - there’s a good read in the Washington Post that hits on most of the arguments.
A complaint that even PC-approving people levy against PC is that it reinforces a narrow band of what it means to be a girl/woman. Princesses are pretty (except ‘bad princesses’ who are ugly, or ‘value princesses’ who are less pretty/oblivious to their beauty to show their ‘good hearts’), rich (except those who have been hidden from their destiny/wronged/not yet ‘discovered’ or married into wealth), slim (goes without saying), in relation to a man (even if that relationship is to defy the ‘normal order’ of things by rejecting marriage), and sweet. The small industry of ‘empowering princess’ books/toys/clothes attempts to be a foil to this message, but if anything reinforces the traditional PC values by exaggerating their opposites, and does nothing to disrupt the overvaluing of unearned privilege as a social good.
The recent appearance of a few non-white Disney princesses has only really put the whiteness at the heart of PC into sharper focus: the newest non-white princesses have more tenuous, precarious relationships with unearned privilege than their white counterparts - if they have access to that kind of privilege at all. This blog post does a great job of highlighting the elisions of privilege and power in The Princess and the Frog - namely that the story caricaturises anti-black bias in a way that suggests structural racism is no longer a problem, whereas in real life, it is very likely that a modern-day Tiana would have the exact same struggles as the Disney character supposedly set in the 1920s.
As I mentioned in the first section, the overall normalizing function of PC and the stories that go along with it is to reinforce our culture’s values to children. The archetypes are pleasing and intelligible to children because they fit in perfectly with the society they see around them - a society that values some people more than others, and rewards ‘correct’ gendered behaviour for both girls and boys. Most children play-act games which extend from stories they have heard or seen. Disney PC - and to a lesser degree other types of PC culture - exists in a loop of capitalism. The film sparks interest, which is bolstered by objects from the film (dolls, costumes, household paraphernalia), which then allows the child to engage more deeply with PC. Of course, there are kids who watch princess films and don’t get swept up in PC, but the intended and common outcome is that girls become submerged in PC and the role-play aspect of PC filters into nearly every aspect of daily life.
From a Montessori perspective, children in the first plane of development (under age 6) cannot easily distinguish between real and pretend. Young children are not usually exposed to fantastical stories in Montessori families. PC relies largely on fantasy elements - at the heart of most PC conflict resolution is some type of transformational magic, whether that’s people turning into animals or vice versa, fairies and witches, or talking animals and furniture. It is difficult for young children to understand that the princesses and other characters in these films are not real people, living real lives. Further, the type of ‘PC habitation’ that young girls often fall into shows how their imaginations are deeply affected by exposure to PC. What would have been possible for them to imagine before their inner worlds were populated by princesses designed sell material goods and reinforce social norms?
Part 3: Princesses, Drag Culture, and the General Emptiness at the Heart of Gender
This is an argument that Feminist Theory Friday (may it live again one day!) has prepared you for.
What is it about drag queens that makes cisgendered (non-trans, or in other words, at ease with the expected association between your sex and gender) women feel so alive? It’s unexplainable, a lot of the time - something electric about the power and confidence drag queens exude, the sass and character. I’d argue that it’s the act of performing exaggerated ideas about femininity makes us feel so excited, because we are seeing somebody ‘call bullshit’, to pardon my french, on all of these expectations and norms - what RuPaul calls ‘our culture’s synthetic idea of femininity.’ It is refreshing, to say the least, to see someone point out the ‘emptiness at the heart of the map’ (a la Baudrillard), or the lack of biological, innate, and inevitable connection between expressions of femininity and womanhood.
I would argue that since PC is based on similar hyper-feminine norms and archetypes (whether to enact them or to refute them), it too points to the unreal-ness of feminine character traits, and reinforces how these traits are not inborn, natural, or anything other that socially created and socially transmitted. I am not saying that there is no value in the feminine, or that any kind of feminine traits or characteristics should be rejected - take a look at Haslanger’s Social Construction of Gender for more information. I am, however, saying that it is clear how these traits are socially constructed and dispensed to children when you critically examine media like PC. And if we are to change society for our children and make it a place where they have a freer, more open, and more genuine space to develop their personalities, and where unearned privilege fades in favour of a more equitable society, then do we want to be delivering these messages about privilege and gender to them in such imagination-capturing ways?
Part 4: Practicalities
So if I’ve convinced you that PC is probably not good for your sons and definitely not good for your daughters, what do you do now? If your child hasn’t been exposed to PC yet, then great - try to keep it that way. If your child is already well-enmeshed in PC, the shift towards more positive and empowering imagery will happen more gradually. Start talking about the unfairness of the princess/commoner hierarchy, the gender stereotypes, and swap out old PC images with new, more empowering ones that fill the niche of fancy/powerful/kind - or whatever your child loves about PC. Try to avoid swapping princesses for princesses - for instance, replacing Disney princesses with ‘girl power’ princesses who slay their own dragons or rule their own kingdoms. On the surface these look more empower but they are still planted in problematic ground.
When princesses or any royalty comes up (or by extension, knights - although knights and pirates are another topic for another day!) I keep it brief. I might say something like, “Princesses are more important in an unfair way, but we believe that all people are equal.” Depending on the age of your child, and the general drift of conversation, I might push it a little further and draw parallels between the imbalance of princess/commoner and unearned privilege they are more familiar with - race privilege, age privilege, ability privilege. And I’d always try to give an example of someone who is really special that might fit the bill for play-acting, without needing to draw on princess themes. The Little People, Big Dreams series is a great place to start.