Friday, July 18, 2008

Daddy's Princess

I tried to write about the conditioning imposed upon young girls that whilst presented as an advantage may actually be one of the bigger disadvantages, but I felt I fucked it up (which is okay, my blog gets written in so much because I have appallingly low editorial standards) and never thought about it again.
But I was listening to Mark & Mike of manager tools fame today and Mike made the comment that his daughter was a princess. Now I'm sure the context was that she actually did get to tell him what to do and got special treatment, as opposed to how managers get treated in an organisational context.
This was the insight I needed, when I thought, that's the big disservice of the childhood fantasy modelling.
I will make a sweeping generalisation, but most childhood feudal age fantasies are divided along gender lines into the roles of knights/warriors for boys and princesses for girls.
But the image of the princess is that they get what they want, wear pretty dresses and ride ponies and shit all day and get to boss around a bunch of servants.
Knights presumably battle dragons and eachother and shit.
So straight up, I see again generally speaking the gender roles already have devisive characteristics of princesses defined as attractive because they get stuff given to them and knights are attractively defined because they do interesting stuff.
So if you think about it, boys are being encouraged in this game or characterisation to go off and have adventures and be self relient. Girls are encouraged to aspire to complete reliance.
Then I believe in subtle subconscious things as powerful apply to this impression a bit of historical context. What was a princess in reality?
A princess was a daughter of a royal house, they couldn't inherit stricktly speaking but they could be married off. In this sense cultivating attractive qualities such as beauty, cleanliness, nice flattering clothing and shit is infact the biproduct the fantasy focusses on whilst ignoring the harsh reality that produced it. A princess was for marrying off as political currency to form alliances in a time plagued by war and would eventually become a baby factory. In many cases princesses had to be sold to encourage other nobles to pick them up.
It is an utterly unempowered position. Sure there are notable exceptions to the rule like Queen Elizabeth for one. But that was more because the family or groups of advisors that held sway didn't want to dilute the power at all being more or less on the top of a politically isolated nation.
Hence hencely, you don't do yourself a favor by typecasting yourself as a princess, even for your esteem, because being someone who is told what to do, even if you are told to do quaint, pretty things for the rest of your useful life, will never be as promising as coming from an attitude where you get things for yourself and decide what you do with your life.
In this regard I recall being at a Malay party that Harvard took me to but forbid me from confronting the douche that cuckolded him, justifiably so because I was looking for amusement in a situation that was probably emotional to Harvard a malaysian robot somehow programmed to have feelings. But this party was one of those 'events everyone can enjoy' in that it had no alcohol, lots of food and plastic cups. And some girl had labelled her cup 'princess' where other people feel their names suffice.
SO either princess actually miraculously was a shorter word and thus easier to write than her actual name or she felt some empowerment was derived from casting herself this way.
I never connected name to face, but as a direct comparison, a girl that labels herself a 'bitch' may seem to be self depreciating but I actually think that label can be empowering in the sense that whilst it carries the negative 'unpleasant to deal with' has the positive 'sticks up for herself' whereas what does princess offer?
Nothing I respect certainly 'precious, picky, temperamental, arrogant, delicate, superficial, sheltered, reliant on parents' etc.
So I will not typecast my daughter this way. I will buy her a handgun for her first birthday.

No comments: