I grow weary. My brain ticks slowly, my arms are too heavy, my hair needs a nap. Half-term hangover, and the question again of how to be a parent. Keira Knightley appeared on Ellen DeGeneres’s chat show and explained that there are certain films her three-year-old daughter isn’t allowed to watch including Cinderella, “Banned, because she waits around for a rich guy to rescue her,” and The Little Mermaid. “The songs are great, but do not give your voice up for a man. Hello.”
Over the last week, this has caused uproar on both sides of the political swamp, from those rasping that it’s PC gone mad (my Google alert for that phrase brings such joy) to those explaining the feminist credentials of princesses and their power.
But there’s more to this conversation, to this impulse, one which is familiar to me. I have been on the periphery of such chatter my entire life, my mother having edited our Peter and Jane books when I was a baby to ensure active and equal representation, and having gone to art school the year that burlesque, God help us, rose again, and then, as an adult giving birth to a girl baby in east London right at the moment feminism became fashionable.
I have engaged in it myself, sometimes thoughtlessly. Right now there is a Barbie doll on my desk, a gift that my subconscious keeps not taking home. I have no real problem with Barbie dolls – in fact, I think the feminist debates that link her to bad body image and sexualised beauty are the only thing keeping her vaguely relevant – and yet, there is something that has burrowed into the marrow of me that wants to protect my daughter from her strawberry-scented spell. Because it’s complicated. Not least because these conversations are usually focused on managing only our daughters’ cultures, rather than our sons’, or because implicit in the decision to ban such stuff is the suggestion that we are judging all parents that don’t, as if they are anti-vaxxers, spreading sickness through princess dresses and the colour pink.
As with so many modern parenting dilemmas, I’d argue that the decision to ban Cinderella has very little to do with the child and a huge amount to do with the parent. I will stop being coy here, and clarify: by parent, I mean mother, for we are the people already conflicted by such fairy tales, and carrying the pressure, not just to do parenting right, but to be seen to be doing so too. Despite all efforts to suggest otherwise, we do not hobble out of the maternity ward an entirely new person, but instead bring with us 30 years or so of womanhood, including conflicted politics, light bitchiness, a darkly competitive nature, a difficult relationship with our bodies and the feeling that we are always three minutes away from being completely and fatally found out.
Which is one of the reasons why mothers take actions like banning un-feminist films. Of course it’s partly because we find the victim princesses troublesome, and that’s an easier story to tell ourselves. But pick up this rock of reasoning and you will find scurrying beetles beneath, each one carrying a different female anxiety.
The urge to ban Cinderella comes from the same place as the urge to be thin – under that rock are all our attempts at perfection. To succeed at these things, as a middle-class woman anyway, is to pass. Except not only is perfection a myth, and one that keeps us hungry, but the itch to ban princesses is such a short-sighted solution to centuries of suppression that I’d advise Keira (I picture myself doing this over wine, in Paris, at the end of a quite marvellous weekend) that it’s not worth her time. Like flies, these stories will find their way inside the house whatever traps mothers set. Now I’m going to talk about porn.
The closest equivalent to parents of daughters fretting over the princess stories is parents of sons fretting over porn. And similarly, the impulse is to switch off the internet, to ban it altogether. But it’s impossible to detach either of these things from our modern lives – the answer is not to demonise porn, or to imbue princesses with dark exciting danger. Instead, surely, we should be offering a thousand other stories alongside them. With porn, the aim would be to ensure that three-minute clips on smashed up iPhones are not the beginning and end of a young person’s sexuality, by giving them a full and nuanced sex education. And with princesses, the aim would be to ensure the three-year-olds numbly absorbing The Little Mermaid are not seduced into passivity, but instead reassured that they’re watching just one of a million female role models in popular culture. Let our daughters take their heroines where they can find them.
One more thing
‘I started this just because I wanted to set the record straight and not be bullied,’ said Stormy Daniels this week. ‘I really just wanted to save my own ass. Now I’m in charge of saving the world.’
One of my heroes, the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, has released an album of musicians singing about her late cat, Souris. Pharrell Williams, Bono and the National have contributed, but my favourite is by Laurie Anderson: ‘A cat named mouse / is chasing himself around your house / He’ll never catch up / He’ll always fail / to close his mouth / around his tail.’
‘Sub-zero temperatures to bring end to warm UK weather,’ read this week’s headlines. ‘It will feel like a bit of a shock,’ said the Met Office. Will it? Or will it just feel like autumn, a season that has arrived at this time every year since we were born and possibly before, when conversations about the denier of tights drowns out all other chatter.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
