girls – SIMCHA FISHER

The secret life of Barbie and other cartel wives

Remember the sweet pretend games we used to play when we were kids? Remember baby dolls, and house, and school, and When Will My Husband Return From The War, and Tie Those Ropes Up Tighter, She’s Trying To Get Away?

No? Well, maybe you don’t want to let your kids play with mine, then.

Let me back up.

Maybe you remember when Barbie dolls were the toy that bad parents let their kids play with. I definitely do. Lipsticked, high-heeled Barbie, with her extreme bodily proportions and her cheap, trampy attire, was the wicked, modernist plaything that trained little girls in the ways of eating disorders and prostitution, according to the paranoid lore of the time.

I’m not really sure if my mother believed this, or if she only thought it might possibly be true; or possibly she just didn’t have the budget to buy us Barbies; but we definitely didn’t have any Barbies when I was growing up. And then when I grew up and had my own first several kids, who were all girls, I kept Barbies out of the house, because I was nervous about what would influence their ideas of the world and themselves.

The “Barbie is the devil” argument is extreme, but there’s some truth in it. Kids do internalize what they see, and if they’re constantly told that beauty looks like an impossibly tall, spindly waif who’s 90 percent hair and eyelashes, it certainly could contribute to feelings of inadequacy, and the desire to be thinner.

But it’s harder to make that argument against Barbie today, when today’s Barbies look downright wholesome compared to the vicious faces on so many of the other doll lines out there, which I can only describe as baby sex demons.

Barbie’s expression is a bit vacuous and her legs are still too damn long, but other than that, it’s hard to object. Even the clothes are made better than they used to be; and my kids would just as soon make their own doll gowns out of tissues and duct tape anyway. Anyway, one way or the other, we got worn down, and found less and less energy for worrying about certain things, and now we have eight daughters and something like 700 Barbies.

And this particular doll company really has been doing good things in the field of inclusiveness. Rather than denying the charge that kids are learning from their dolls, they’re embracing it, and a few years ago began producing a line of stylish dolls that sport prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs, hearing aids, and braces, and have bald heads or uneven skin tone, or otherwise appear in ways that would have scared me off when I was a kid, whether I saw these things on a doll or on a person — largely because I just didn’t have much exposure to it.

Kids learn to emotionally manage ideas through play, and playing with dolls who look different from them helps them become comfortable with people who look different from them. At least that’s the idea.

But the Mattel company has larger claims than that. They funded a study that says that doll play in general (not just dolls with disabilities or body differences) builds empathy (or at least, more empathy than playing games on a tablet). And this, too, seems like common sense to me.

In the study, they found that, when children spend time playing with dolls, together and singly, it activates regions of the brain associated with social activity, with behavioral control, and processing rewarding events.

The researchers concluded that pretend play — at least, more so than tablet play — supports social processing and empathic reasoning. Even when kids played with dolls solo, rather than with other children, it “allows the rehearsal of social interactions and social perspective taking [and] provides a unique outlet for practicing social and empathic skills.” In other words, playing with dolls teaches kids how to act with each other.

And I believe it. Really, I do. I just wonder where my particular kids fit in.

My kids never once, to my knowledge, acted out a happy domestic scene. If there was a mother with some children, she was always dashing around looking for someone to take the little brats off her hands so she could go out partying with her boyfriend, the crazed leader of a Mexican drug cartel.

Sometimes the father was involved, but he was usually a mute and grief-stricken warrior dealing with the affects of having been betrayed by his own men in the war. Or sometimes the children themselves would be wicked, and would invite each other over for picnics, only to lure their innocent playmates onto what turned out to be sacrificial altars, where they were quickly tied up and disemboweled, their squeaky cries rising up into the night air, their blood running in rivers as a libation for the hungry gods.

Who wants to come study my children? Who wants to figure out what, exactly they are learning with this rehearsal of social interactions? I’m having a hard time classifying it as “practicing empathetic skills” when the end result is that the Midge doll has been snatched bald after a particularly vicious cat fight with Anna of Arendelle, who is meaner than she looks, especially when someone gets between her and her man. And never mind that her man is Luke Skywalker, who is once again naked. Oh Luke.

I don’t know, maybe they really are learning empathy through this kind of play. Maybe if it weren’t for doll play, they’d be even less empathetic than they are now. Maybe the bitter feud that’s been raging between Ariel the mermaid and Princess Organa is all that’s been standing between my daughters and world domination. One never knows.

The moral of this story is, you can worry all you want about what’s going to happen to your kids; and you can do all the studies you like about what’s going to happen to your kids. But in the end, all children are a little bit insane, and many children are almost completely insane.

The things kids do when they’re in a lab and someone is listening in with a microphone and a clipboard is one thing; the things they do when they’re alone in their bedroom with a teeming host of plastic dolls, a head full of nonsense, and no rules whatsoever . . . well, that’s another story entirely. There’s probably nothing you can do about it, so you might as well enjoy the ride.

A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly on June 6, 2022.

Photo by form PxHere

Just how much of a menace is TURNING RED?

In my innocence, I sat down to watch Turning Red with my kids this weekend. I had no idea that, while we watched, my fellow moms were tapping out warnings about the lurid, perverse, and downright SEXIFIED themes and images Disney Pixar would foist on an unsuspecting audience.

I read the reviews after the movie, and I regret to inform you that everyone is nuts.

So even though I thought Turning Red was a fairly flawed movie, I’m going to review it because some of the reviews out there are unusually whackadoo. (Caveat: I only watched the movie once, so maybe I got some details wrong.) This review will include spoilers. I watched it with girls ages 7, 10, 13, 14, 16, and 20 and my son, 18, and my husband, and we all liked it, but had a lot to talk about afterwards. And I had one big complaint.

It’s a coming of age movie. It’s about a group of girls hitting puberty, noticing boys, starting to realize their parents don’t know everything, and figuring out what it means to grow up; and it’s about her mother dealing with all of these things. The target audience is not little kids. It won’t hurt them to watch it, but it wasn’t made for them.

Here’s the trailer:

The plot (again, spoilers): Mei and her loving but overbearing mother are caretakers for an ancestral temple. Suddenly, Mei suffers an abrupt transformation: Strong emotions turns her into a giant red panda. It turns out the gods bestowed the power to become a savage animal on one of her ancestors so she could defend her family, but subsequent women in her family have gone through a ritual where they fight down the inner animal and contain it in a talisman. Mei discovers she can control it by thinking calm thoughts about the love of her friends, but she agrees to do the ritual. Her mother calls the family but oh no! The ritual is on the same day as the concert she and her friends want to go to. Mei defies her parents and decides to trust her own powers to not turn into a red panda. Mei’s mom is so upset that she re-pandafies herself humongously and goes on a destructive but hilarious rampage, and can only be stopped when all the aunts also become pandas. They all then undergo the ritual again, but Mei decides not to go through with it, choosing instead to remain a person who is sometimes a panda. At the end, she uses this power to promote the temple where she works with her mom.

It was entertaining throughout, and the characters were appealing and had a little more depth and melancholy than you often see in children’s animated movies. The girls’ silliness and sorrows were presented with a good combination of comedy and compassion, so you could laugh with recognition at how ridiculous their problems are, but also feel deeply how deeply they felt them. The funny parts were really funny, and Mei and her friends came across as actual middle school weirdos, not with slick, pre-packaged quirks, but the kind of weirdness that makes them a little obnoxious and stupid sometimes, as well as endearing and unpredictable. Toward the end, Mei meets her mother as a girl, and realizes that she had the same doomed yearning to please her own mother, so, yeah, I cried.

I liked that it was really, truly about girls. Not an adventure story that they plugged a girl into; not a girl showing what she’s made of by cutting off her hair and kicking ass. Just girls acting like girls, and being good friends to each other. I liked that her friends loved and supported her when they thought she was being awesome and when they thought she was being a goody-goody. I didn’t like that they encouraged her to sneak around her parents, but it was realistic. The vibe was more Derry Girls than Girls Gone Wild.

I liked the dad. At first they played him as the goofy, ineffectual lesser partner, but then he sits down with his daughter and kindly teaches her that strong emotions are part of her, and that stuffing them into an amulet is not necessarily the best way to deal with them. This is pretty good advice, and it was good to see a quiet but wise dad with emotional intelligence, who had a good relationship with his daughter, and respects his wife but is maybe a little sad about the past. The parents clearly have interior lives, which you don’t often see in kid’s movies.

The reviewers complaining about hypersexualized scenes were disturbingly off the mark. The scene where Mei is taunting her mother and shaking her butt happens because her mother is literally a raging monster and has to be lured into the magic circle. The scenes where the girls say things like “now we’re women” or where they say they’re going to go in girls and come out women are played with a wink. This is clearly what the girls think, and it’s clearly untrue. The scene where Mei is under the bed sweating, and one reviewer said it showed her having her first orgasm? To those who are defiled, nothing is pure. These are just kids hitting puberty and noticing sexy thoughts in a very typical, slightly ridiculous way. My teen girls totally realized they were being teased, and they thought it was funny.

You moms who think it’s sick and perverse and an emergency and heartbreaking that Disney would put puberty in a cartoon, YOU ARE GOING TO TURN UP IN SOMEONE’S CARTOON SOMEDAY. And you’re not going to like how they draw you.

It mentions Mei’s period, several times. It’s not gross or explicit; it just talks about it, because she’s 13. It deals with it in a way that is extremely familiar to girls and women; i.e.; it’s uncomfortable to talk about, but it happens anyway, and nobody asked for it, and mom tries to help and makes it worse, and ugh, but oh well, period. This is really not hair-on-fire stuff. It’s actually a gift for you, if you’ve had a hard time trying to get yourself to introduce the topic to your kids. This movie may make it a bit easier. (For the people who think boys shouldn’t know about periods: You’re making the world worse.)

It has some weird ritualistic magicalistic scenes. It’s not terribly scary except for some glowing eyes and bared teeth. If you were planning to show your kids a movie about a girl turning into a red panda and then you’re shocked that there’s magic, I don’t know what to tell you.

So, there was a lot to like about the movie. It’s very much about the things we do because of anxiety, and how to do better, and about not trying to be someone you’re not, but learning to work with who you are, and it’s about (or at least wants to be about) whether we just love each other, or if we have to earn each other’s love. It does show pretty egregious defiance without a lot of comeuppance, but a lot of shit went down over the course of the movie, and these are clearly people who are invested in having a good relationship with each other, so I feel pretty confident this family will work it out. This isn’t a “mommy knows best” movie, but it’s not a “kids know best” movie, either; it’s a “kids are their own people, and that’s how they learn” movie.

And it was yet another therapy movie. Which are fine as far as they go, but which I hope we can start getting past as a society soon, because writers are learning that, if you lean heavily enough on themes of working through family trauma, people will not notice giant gaping plot holes.

But I noticed.

Look, I’m sorry this is so long, but this is driving me crazy. And it’s something Old Good Pixar never would have put up with.

The entire plot hinges on Mei’s choice: Is she going to suppress her panda, or is she going to “keep it?” Is she going to go through the ritual to contain her explosive emotional power in a piece of jewelry like most of her ancestors, or will she be her own person?

But they never supply a real reason why it’s a dilemma. It takes Mei a few days to get used to occasionally poofing into a red panda, but apparently all she has to do is imagine being with her friends, and that calms her down enough so she can control it almost entirely. She thinks people in school will shun her, but in fact the other girls think she’s adorable (in a funny scene where their eyes become huge and sparkly). It not only makes her popular, she uses her power to quickly raise almost $800. So not only is there no real peril in this alleged dilemma, but she gets immediately rewarded in several ways for choosing one side, and that turns out to be the right choice for her, and her ancestor smiles at her. It’s like the opposite of Russian roulette: none of the chambers are loaded.

This is the very same shortcut they took in the movie Luca, which was another charming, beguiling movie that set up a conflict and then didn’t quite take the trouble to work through its implications. In Luca, sea monsters are hated and feared and reviled; and humans are viewed the same way by sea monsters. But when Luca transforms, it takes him about eleven seconds to realize that nobody is actually bad or evil or dangerous, and everyone is actually fine and cool and neat. And there is never any explanation for why Luca is able to reconcile himself to this idea so quickly, and no one else, in the history of ever, has been able to see the truth, but has always clung to their prejudices for no reason at all.

Both movies take for granted that the viewer is already thinking: People in the past didn’t understand things; but people nowadays do understand things. Okay? Okay. So now we do the plot.

This is lazy, lazy, lazy. The broad themes of both movies were that people (in Luca, it was some people; in Turning Red, it was all people, or all women, or maybe all women in this family? This, too, is sloppy) have some kind of weird, untamed, messy side to them, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But they skip over explaining to the audience why anyone would think it is a bad thing. It’s like going to a bakery where they offer two kinds of donuts, and there’s a big struggle, and in the end . . . you get donuts. Nothing wrong with donuts, but it’s not exactly a good story.

You may say that, in Turning Red, this is deliberate, because both choices (to keep the panda, or not) are valid. Mei’s father clearly kinda liked his wife’s wild side; and Mei told her mom it was okay to contain her panda again, because that’s what she wanted to do. Both choices are presented as okay, so that’s why there’s no clear right or wrong choice, and that’s why they didn’t present it as a perilous decision.

But this theory doesn’t hold up, because Mei’s grandmother makes a point of telling Mei that the more she lets her panda out, the harder it will be to contain during the ritual. I may be remembering wrong, but I think she even said that it can only be done once, and must be done perfectly. But as it turns out, if there is an emergency, you can just go ahead and smash your talisman and let your panda out to fight for a while, and then draw another circle and do another ritual and calmly step back through the mystical mirror and – schloop! – your panda just goes back where she belongs, no harm, no foul. So in fact, the choice that all the women made was meaningless, because you can apparently go back on it at any time.

And in fact, you cannot even argue that both choices are valid, because Mei’s mom, as a red panda, completely demolished the Sky Dome. It’s never explained whether she will be sent a bill, or what. I know this is a commonly excused plot hole in superhero movies, but the movie explicitly asked us to consider whether or not Mei ought to allow herself to become a giant monstrous creature. I feel like “will she sometimes wreck half the city?” should be part of the conversation. (Insert “now who’s turning red, communism/captitalism” joke here; I’m too tired.)
EDIT: A few folks have pointed out that, in fact, Mei and her mom are shown raising money to rebuild the Sky Dome at the end, so I just whiffed this part. Sorry!

I have one other complaint, and that is how it looked. I believe they were going for a style that would appeal to the kids who were 13 in the year 2002, and that makes sense. But in practice, it came across as Dreamworks-trashy.

Bottom line: Not a must-see, by any means, but watchable, and will probably be important to some people for emotional reasons. It’s an interesting movie, and no doubt will influence others. I reviewed it mainly to counteract all the bananas reviews that were out there. For my money, The Little Mermaid has a far more insidious message for little girls than this movie, so everyone needs to be cool.

In real life, they are so big

Here is a little child sitting in the gondola of a Ferris wheel, nervously crushing fistfuls of cotton candy into nuggets as they wait for the ride to start. She and her mother are in number 16.

Her mother says that she may need to hold hands so she doesn’t get too scared. It’s not a trick, like something Grandfather Bear would say to give courage to Little Bear. The mother is some form of scared all the time. Most of the time, the mother’s fear gets crushed down into manageable handfuls. But not always.

She has found herself in charge of her youngest child on the final fun trip of the final week of vacation. The oldest kids are too busy to go on a day trip; the tweens band up and run off together, being cool; the dad is bonding with big sister who desperately needs to be treated like a little kid for once. So it’s the mother and her youngest, navigating the world of the amusement park alone together. It was a long ride to get there, and now there are long lines for everything.

There are rides that are out of the question. Some of them drag you up to ludicrous heights, turn you upside down, shake you very hard, drop you, shove you backwards, put you in the dark. Why would you pay someone to do this to you, when it happens to you anyway on some random Tuesday, just in the course of ordinary living?

But the rides with no lines are all the same: Around and around and around. It’s hard to know what to do. So the mother and kid alternate: Rides that are too boring, and rides that are too scary.

Here are all the moms, draped along the fence, watching their baffled little toddlers swoop up and down, up and down inside metal dragons that beep and flash and whine. “WHEE! WHEE! WHEE!” shout the moms, grinning.

Here’s a little cluster of blonde cousins rushing and tumbling into the serpentine line barrier at the double decker carousel. One child wants desperately to ride the only giraffe, but there are many other people in line. “Whyn’t we just duck under the fence?” a woman rasps.

“We all have to wait our turn,” her sister answers mildly.

“Aunty will make sure you git that giraffe,” the first woman insists. “You’ve ben such a pretty girl all day. Aunty will make sure you git that giraffe. Pretty girl.”

The mother, shriveling a bit inside as she imagines meeting these pretty girls in fifteen years, is relieved to hear that her own daughter wants to ride the panda, instead.

She finds a horse next to the panda, and surprises herself by heavily climbing up on it. Her legs are the right length for the stirrups, so maybe it’s a normal thing to do. The horse’s tail looks like a real tail, and someone has taken so many pains painting scenes from Venice on the ceiling and brushing in little yellow and pink bouquets in between the mirrors.

A chubby hispanic man gives his shell-shaped bench a spin, and it twirls, and he beams like a baby. It is a beautiful carousel. There has never been such a beautiful carousel. It’s two stories high, and everyone on it is smiling. But the ride is very short.

Here are a set of tiny twins, dressed to the nines in identical new sneakers, athletic shorts, and patriotic tank tops, strapped carefully into a blinking helicopter. All the other kids are yanking on the bar, jerking and swooping and clanking up and down, but the boys are staring solemnly ahead and moving smoothly on their appointed rounds, around and around.

“Pull on the bar! Pull it toward your belly! Make it go up! Don’t you wanna fly?” the operator screams. They do not. Their father comes to collect them when the ride is over. God willing, he will understand that they did what seemed right to them. They are extremely small and the world is very big…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Skip the semantics.The Jeffrey Epstein case is about victimizing girls, not “young women”

Cui bono? Who benefits from squeezing language until it bleeds jargon? The guilty, of course.

But another important question is: Cui plagalis? Who stands to lose? Whose suffering is likely to be minimized if normally careless people suddenly become very careful about their word choice?

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

Image: by Linnaea Mallette CC0 Public Domain

Please tell your daughter she’s pretty.

Powerful Ad Shows What a Little Girl Hears When You Tell Her She’s Pretty” runs the headline on the Huffington Post, describing a new ad by Verizon.

Before we even watch the video or form an opinion, let’s remember one thing. The real, true, deep down message of this ad is that you, the viewer, should like Verizon. Whatever societal goals it may have, it’s an ad. It is trying to sell something, and so it’s a given that the message it’s sending is calculated to stroke the egos of the viewer. So there’s that.

Now for the actual message. The Huffiington Post sums it up like this:

The video depicts one girl’s development from toddler to teenager. She wanders curiously through nature, examines the plants and animals around her, creates an astronomy project, and builds a rocket with her older brother. But all along the way, she hears many all-too-common refrains from her parents: “Who’s my pretty girl?” “Don’t get your dress dirty,” “You don’t want to mess with that,” and “Be careful with that. Why don’t you hand that to your brother?” These statements are subtle, but the ad suggests that they can ultimately discourage girls from pursuing traditionally male-dominated STEM subjects in school.

Sure. If someone followed me around telling me “Knock it off!” every time I got interested in math or science, I would probably stop pursuing math and science. It’s a bad idea to thwart kids (boys and girls) and to discourage their curiosity and intelligence; and it’s especially absurd to tell girls, overtly or by omission, that their main job is to be pretty. I’m fairly sure Thomas More, Edith Stein, and Gianna Molla already knew that, without any help from Verizon.

But the ad ends this way: “Isn’t it time we told her she’s pretty brilliant, too?”*

Is that what we’re doing when we do say, “You’re so pretty”? When girls hear, “You’re pretty,” does that automatically mean they can’t hear anything else we say? Not that I’ve noticed. Here is what I have noticed:

When girls never hear their parents — especially their fathers — say that they are pretty, many of them will go find someone who will say it to them. And sometimes that turns out to be someone who wants to hurt or use them, and uses “pretty” as a hook.

When girls get no attention for dressing prettily and looking nice, they find other ways of getting attention with the way they look. A lot of those girls whose entire style is super sexy sexy sex all the time? They’re just trying to be pretty, and no one has taught them to recognize any other form of appeal besides sexiness.

If they want to be admired by men, but have been taught that that this desire is a sign of pettiness and lack of character, then many women will become so twisted inside that even marital sex is pure anxiety and guilt.

Why? Because women were made beautiful. They were designed that way. No, not every woman; no, not all the time; and no, not beauty above all other things. But the world is a machine, and one of its driving forces is the attraction between the sexes, where men delight in women and women delight in showing their beauty to men. This is not oppression; this is not sexism; this is not some manipulative societal construct — or at least it doesn’t have to be. It’s a gift from God that girls and women can cultivate and delight in beauty — the beauty around them, and the beauty in themselves. Yes, even their physical beauty. Yes, even from a very young age.

So no, don’t tell your daughters that they must be pretty because they can’t be anything else. But don’t make them think that beauty is petty, either. Beauty is one of the transcendentals, which means that beauty it is one of the paths to God. Even when that beauty resides in a little girl.

And one more thing: it is good for us, the beholders, to praise beauty when we see it. It is a good thing to see something beautiful and to let ourselves murmur, “Oh, how lovely you are!” We are made to receive it and to enjoy it. We are not made to quash and rein in everything that brings us delight. There is not much beautiful in the world. Why deny yourself what little there is? Parents, let yourself tell your girls they’re beautiful. She needs it, and so do you.

___

*Actually, recent studies show that kids do worse when you praise them for being smart. If you want

Like a lark who is learning to pray

Yesterday, we went to another lovely concert at the public high school that my oldest two kids attend. As usual, I was stunned at the variety of music presented: old and new vocal and instrumental jazz, medieval hymns, funny arrangements of secular Christmas songs, even a Sephardic song about the sighting of a star at the birth of Abraham. And they were good. They opened with the entire band playing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and then the various choirs filed in, singing, from both sides.

When I was tried to sneak quietly back into the auditorium after taking the little guys for a bathroom break, the choir director, who was taking a break too, grinned and whispered, “Bless you!” I don’t even know why. For dragging little kids out at night in the freezing cold, I guess, just so they could hear some good music.

For the second song on the program, the stage cleared and six high school girls tottered out to the mics — every one of them wearing black or red dresses, some skin tight, some buttcheek-high, some of them constructed of evil-looking lace, straps, and bands. One girl wore black booties with a stacked wedge, but the others were balancing atop black or red heels so high, it looked like a novelty act when they started to sing: look, this girl can sustain a high C without breaking an ankle!

There’s no other word for it: they looked awful. Too young to look sexy, too sexy to look young. You know what I mean.

PIC Bratz doll face

And what were they singing? “The Sound of Music.” They sounded good, sweet, young. God help me, I cried. Of course everything makes me cry, but I was just so glad, so glad that someone was teaching these girls music. You could see what else they had learned about beauty.

To the choir director: bless you, too.

Tweaking Sleeping Beauty

Here’s an enlightening though spoilerific commentary on the new Disney princess movie, Frozen. Gina Dalfonzo liked the movie well enough (not everyone did), but thought the denouement of Prince Hans was unnecessarily cynical and harsh. She says (REMEMBER, I SAID SPOLERS):

The naïve and lonely Anna has fallen in love with and become engaged to Hans in the course of just one day. As her other love interest, Kristoff, tells her, this is not exactly indicative of good judgment.

However, there is something uniquely horrifying about finding out that a person—even a fictional person—who’s won you over is, in fact, rotten to the core. And it’s that much more traumatizing when you’re six or seven years old. Children will, in their lifetimes, necessarily learn that not everyone who looks or seems trustworthy is trustworthy—but Frozen’s big twist is a needlessly upsetting way to teach that lesson.

I haven’t seen the movie, but this article caught my interest because it’s about something that niggles at me: how to tell lovely, romantic stories to the kids, without giving them dangerously stupid ideas about love?

Disney is doing penance for decades of promoting the idea that a kiss between a strange man and a vacant, helpless young woman can signify true love — and that is a worthy effort. Maybe once upon a time, it was okay to show a princess who liked being macked on by strangers in her sleep, because everyone knew it was just a story, la di dah.

But today? Listen, I’m no “rape here, rape there, rapey-rapey everywhere” anti-princess zealot, but people today are so clueless, so utterly innocent of a basic understanding of virtue, that we have to be really careful. We can’t assume that mom and dad are teaching kids what love and marriage are really about. I recently read an article by a teacher after the Steubenville rape. She said that her students had learned that you’re not supposed to have sex with someone who says “no.” But a sleeping girl isn’t saying no. To them, this was a dilemma. How are they supposed to know if she consents or not, if she’s not even conscious? No one had told them (probably out of fear of imposing outmoded standards of morality) why it was important to gain consent. Consent, to them, was just a secret password to gain sex, and in its absence, that had no idea what they were supposed to think.

Anyway, you read enough things like this, and you can’t quite bring yourself to tell your four-year-old that a stranger and a sleeping girl just enjoyed “true love’s kiss.”

PIC Sleeping Beauty figurine with prince under skirt

But I think it’s stupid to tell girls, “Prettiness is slavery! Romance is for suckers! Love will always let you down! Don’t you dare put on a sparkly crown!” So I tell my daughters stories about beauty and love and caroling birds and shimmering gowns — but I tweak them. Here is how I adjusted Sleeping Beauty:

The bad fairy, the curse, the spinning wheel, the 100 year’s sleep, blah blah blah.

Here’s the part where I started to improvise: the prince is wandering around in the woods because all the princesses in his territory are boring, and just want to talk about shoes and hair and parties. He sees the castle overgrown with roses, with no sound but the humming of bees, and hacks his way through out of sheer curiosity. When he makes his way through the sleeping castle, he finds the princess at its center, fast asleep, and she is lovely.

Worn out from all that hacking, he sits down, and before he knows it, he starts to talk. He talks and talks and talks, about all the things that he’s interested in, but nobody in his kingdom wants to hear about. He pours his heart out to her, because he know she’s not going to spill the beans, because she’s asleep. Then he goes back outside and, unable to make himself go home quite yet, he camps in the courtyard.

The next morning, he comes back, and talks some more. At first, he was just thrilled to talk to someone who didn’t laugh at him or interrupt. But gradually, he begins to wish with all his heart that she could answer back. Her face is so intersting, even in sleep, that he wants to know what she thinks.

That night, when he lies down in the courtyard again, he dreams that she is awake, and tells him everything on her mind — and it is marvelous. The next day, he comes back again, and so on and so on.

After a few weeks of this, he shakes himself and decides he can’t pursue this fantasy any longer. Back to real life; time to face the petty and puerile girls in his own kingdom, and settle for one of them so he can further the royal line. Facts are facts: better a third-rate reality than a gorgeous fantasy. So he goes back one last time to say goodbye to her. He leans over to take one final look at her lovely face, and her breath smells so nice that he can’t help himself: he plants a chaste little kiss on her rosy lips.

And she wakes up. And says, “Oh, were you going somewhere? We were having such a nice conversation!” Bafflement ensues, and gradually it turns out that, just as he has been dreaming of her, she has been dreaming of him. His words found their way past the enchantment and into her subconscious mind, and, in her dream, she answered him back. They feel like they know each other, and they do — because they are so perfectly suited for each other that their dreams conversations were identical.

So then they get married. The princess wears a shimmering wedding gown, and then they have eleven children. The end.

Now, I realize this is more or less the naked fantasy of a 38-year-old woman: True love is someone who will sit there and listen to me talk! So sue me. I still think it’s better than “And as soon as their eyes met, they knew they were in love, and got married the next day.” Bah. I fell in love like that once, and it took me two years to realize that the guy just found me convenient, and treated me like poo. I like my version because there is a romantic dream that really does come true — but they have to work their way up to it. It preserves the idea that the kiss is a magical turning point, but the fellow has to earn it, and she has to have some reason to return his affections.

So, to sum up, I don’t shriek and turn blue at the very mention of the word “princess,” and I am so done with the edgy new takes on princess culture.

PIC Snow White kids house husband nightmare

I think little girls need to hear about silvery ballgowns and falling in love while birds sing overhead, especially when the world tells them that you can either be pretty like this:

PIC Monster high dolls

or accomplished like this:

PIC Nancy Pelosi face

but nothing in between. But I can’t quite swallow the “strangers–>kiss–>happily ever after” line, either.

How do you handle it in your house? Does the whole princess thing bother you? Do you make it work somehow? Or what?

Barbie alternatives!

We are doing some Christmas shopping today, and I just discovered that Melissa and Doug make what look like very nice dolls for girls. We’ve always had good luck with Melissa and Doug products. They are sturdy and pleasant. (Not a paid endorsement or anything. We just like Melissa and Doug.)

These dolls are 14″, so a few inches taller than Barbie – but Barbie clothes wouldn’t fit anyway, because the M&D dolls aren’t rail thin with giraffe legs. Don’t get me wrong. With seven daughters and steadily declining standards, we have collected approximately 3,487 Barbies, including mermaid Barbie, fairy Barbie, chef Barbie, vet Barbie, surfer Barbie, miscellaneous fashion Barbie, and of course several incarnations of that perennial favorite, Soulless Streetwalker Barbie.

So, no judging. I would just rather see my kids playing with this:

Lindsay Bride Doll

instead of this:

Barbie 2013 Collector Doll

Melissa and Doug have several 14″ dolls besides the bride: ballerinas, princesses, etc.

Are you buying dolls this year? Come across anything nice?

Don’t forget, if you shop Amazon, please consider going through my links above. There is also a blue Amazon ad on the right sidebar, and if you can’t see that, I’ve added a page called “Shop Amazon Here!” at the top of the blog. Thanks so much!

Girls Cannot Give Consent

Even if she puts on lipstick and arches her eyebrow.

In the third world, they stone a girl to death for being raped. In the United States, we just give her rapist and de facto murderer a slap on the wrist, and reassure the world that she was asking for it.

Think I’m exaggerating? Cherice Morales was fourteen when her 49-year-old teacher began to rape her. Three years later, she killed herself. The reason her story is in the news is because her rapist, Stacey Rambold, got 30 days in jail for the rapes.

After Morales killed herself, Rambold was supposed to complete a sex offender treatment program, but he didn’t. His case was revived when it was revealed that he was, among other offenses, having unsupervised visits with minors. His sentencing judge, Judge G. Todd Baugh, who never met the victim, said that she was “as much in control of the situation” as Rambold was, and that she was “older than her chronological age.” “It was not a violent, forcible, beat-the-victim rape like you see in movies,” he said. (What kind of movies are you watching, your honor?)

Yesterday, after there was an outcry, the judge apologized for his statements about Morales. He says that he doesn’t know what he was trying to say, and that his statements are not relevant to the sentencing. But he isn’t rescinding the sentencing, either. Thirty days is what the man gets, minus one day already served.

In this raw and profane piece in xo jane, a woman who suffered repeated statutory rape starting at age 13, reminds us why there are laws about statutory rape in the first place:

The fact is, a 14-year-old girl may be capable of agreeing to sex with a 49-year-old man, but she doesn’t have the emotional and mental maturity to consent. I was 25 before I realized that every man I’d slept with as a teenager was a pedophile. It seemed to me that since I’d courted the attention, that I was fully culpable. What teenager believes she is not mentally or emotionally capable of full consent? I thought I was an adult, although when I look at the picture of myself from the time period above, I see a child.

I thought I was the exception for these men, the girl so precocious and advanced that it superseded social norms. I thought that I was “older than my chronological age.”

Well, what do you expect from the modern, secular world, right? What do you expect from a culture that simultaneously glorifies and degrades human sexuality? Of course you’re going to have needy girls and lecherous men. Of course there will be suffering and heartache, and innocents will suffer and predators will go free.

But surely we Catholics know better than that, yes? Surely the Church on earth, imperfect as she is, is a safe haven for the young and vulnerable.

Well, just yesterday I ran afoul of a prominent Catholic writer, a professor who often works with college students. The last time I talked to him when he said in public that the way to deal with a teen mom who’d given birth at age fourteen is to tell the “slut” to “keep her legs closed.”

No long ago, I was speaking to a Catholic priest about how difficult life seemed when I was a teenager, and he went into a long reverie about the teenage girls that cross his path. “Those short skirts, that heavy eye makeup—” he said . . . “Ohh, they know exactly what they’re doing.”

Think rapists come from nowhere? Think they would dare to do what they do, if it were not for men like these? You don’t have to be a rapist to be part of the problem. All you have to do is make sure we all remember that the girl is to blame. No matter how young she is, the girl is always to blame.

It’s her fault because she knows how to look like a woman (even though she’s not).
It’s her fault because she wears padded bras and skanky clothing (even though her body is tender and unfinished on the inside).
It’s her fault because she knows all the moves (because she’s been trained since toddlerhood to writhe to a beat, because that’s what makes the adults in the house point the camera at them).
It’s her fault because she works hard to look sexy (even though she really only wants to look pretty, and sexy is the only pretty she’s ever been shown).
It’s her fault because she’s loud and dirty because she knows it gets her something (and she knows that something is better than nothing).

It’s her fault because she’s learned that she has power, and she does wield it (because the only time men speak to her is to say two things, “Do what I tell you to do” and “I want you.” If you were a lonely girl, which would you rather hear?).

The xojane writer tells us,

[I]t doesn’t matter if a young girl is saying yes, it’s an adult man’s job to say no.

And she’s not just talking to Rambold and other men who happen to have a thing for young girls. She’s talking to all adults who should know better: the judge, the defense attorney, the professors, the priests, the therapists, the school principles, the combox snipers, men and women. She’s speaking to us. To me.

What do I say when I meet a young girl in trouble? What do I see when a teenage girl sashays by in skintight jeans, made up like a porn star? Do I see a girl? Or do I grimace and avert my eyes from just another young slut who’s out to ruin the world?

What do we tell girls, besides, “Do what I tell you to do?” Do we tell them, “You are still young”? Do we tell them, “Stand behind me, and I will protect you”? Do we tell them that there is still hope, there is a way to get love and attention without being used? Or do we tell the girls that it’s their fault, always their fault?

I don’t want to be the background music for the song and dance of the likes of Rambold and Judge Baugh, who say that there is no such thing as innocence. Keep on saying it, and it will come true.

***
photo credit: Cat Eyes via photopin (license)

This post originally ran in 2013. I’m reposting it in light of recent conversations about Maria Goretti.