Women in fantasy

[Devor]

Precisely why they should not be taken off the table as others have suggested. Young girls are still told they should consider these characters role models. They're arguably the three most popular Disney princesses in the pantheon.

It's not that I want them taken off the table, it's that I personally think people should target the problem more narrowly. It's more accurate in my mind to say the movies themselves were fine, even great for their time, but that the ongoing merchandising surrounding them sucks, and skews the importance of what should just be another movie. There's nothing wrong with Cinderella, but there's something wrong when you isolate her and hold her up as the standard, and create a caricature of her that's somewhat even detached from being just a story.

I mean, I totally get all of that, but I just want to separate it for the millions of people who actually do view Cinderella as just another movie they liked for whatever reason growing up. There wouldn't be anything wrong with Cinderella, or any of the princesses even as a whole, if they had just run the normal course for movies.

Just doing some quick searching online, it looks like Snow White, Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), and Cinderella all remain among the most popular princesses. One site I saw had Ariel fourth after them. I don't see any hard figures from Disney (sales of merchandise among various princesses).

If Aurora and Snow White are popular, it's not something I understand, unless that represents more of a nostalgia by older women who may not have followed the newer releases, and still make decisions for their daughters. If Ariel is listed fourth, though, that might just be the order of release. I believe Aladdin was tops at the box office, but I don't know how that echoes with the merchandising.

Yeah... that's really freaking sexist. Thanks for admitting it, I guess?

I wish I knew what to say here. For me, I sometimes have to be careful with feminist literature because there are just a couple of feminist issues which as a Catholic I just don't want to read about. But I make that determination by reading pages, or reviews, or by knowing the person who's recommending it. I've never skipped a book just because a woman wrote it - that seems unjust, to me.

Growing up, the only fantasy novels to make any impression on me were Narnia, Tolkein and the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, followed in college with Harry Potter. That's not a great selection of fantasy, but it's a pretty good split for both female writers and female protagonists, and not a background that would give me any reason to avoid anything written by anyone.

 

[Steerpike]

How about Belle? She seems pretty popular. She has agency, and rejects the idea that it is her lot to just be married to some provincial boor. She gives herself up to save her father, but doesn't take any guff from "the beast." Ultimately her story does become one where "true love" is the end game, but that seems to be a staple of the genre. Insofar as she and "the beast" are both pursuing that same goal, she does not seem to play second fiddle to him.

 

[Mindfire]

Just doing some quick searching online, it looks like Snow White, Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), and Cinderella all remain among the most popular princesses. One site I saw had Ariel fourth after them. I don't see any hard figures from Disney (sales of merchandise among various princesses).

EDIT: It is worth noting that Disney actively promotes all of the princesses in its Disney Princess line, and in some ways the older, classic princesses are still a cornerstone. Disney Princess merchandise outsells Star Wars merchandise (and that's just the Disney Princess line, not Disney merchandise as a whole). So they're all very popular and well known among girls of today, even the ones that came out in movies long ago.

But how are we judging popular? By lists on websites or by what people actually like? How many kids nowadays have even seen Snow White or Sleeping Beauty? But their parents, who grew up with the Disney Renaissance, will certainly show them those films.

 

[Mindfire]

Ariel and Jasmine? I'll grant that Ariel is really popular because what little girl doesn't love to dress up as a mermaid, but I'd put Jasmine near the bottom of the pantheon in terms of how many girls buy her merchandise. (Possibly in part because her costume involves a bare midriff and I don't know a lot of parents who would be cool with that; Disney's official Ariel costumes are modified for tasteful coverage).

Jasmine was one of the most positive depictions in any Disney film, even though she's not in the title; she had a personality and wants of her own, saw through Aladdin's disguise, and flat out told a room full of dudes that she was not there to be married off at their whims. Ended up enslaved by the villain and rescued by the hero, of course, but up until then everything went really well. And still her stuff doesn't sell. She was the go-to Disney princess for young girls who aren't white (if Disney's own promotional photos of girls wearing the Jasmine costume are any indication), at least until Tiana arrived.

Ariel is, in my experience, significantly more popular--a step below the Big Three, as Steerpike pointed out. She has a distinct personality, a thirst for adventure, a neat collection of landlubber stuff, and a couple funny male sidekicks who are unmistakably second fiddle to her, not the other way around. And she makes a compelling mistake in her haste to go see the world.

Then she spends the latter two thirds of her story unable to speak. Every action that contributes toward the resolution of her unfortunate circumstance is accomplished by some other character. She may as well have been in a coma like her princess predecessors.

Point is, even if we bring it forward to the 90s, any agency the princesses have is what gets them into trouble, not out of it.

I was actually referring to Belle, Mulan, and Pocahontas. I seem to remember all of these being more popular than Snow White and Aurora in my childhood. Their movies were definitely more watched.

 

[Steerpike]

They've pretty much all seen Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, as well as the rest of the movies.

I was just at Disney in L.A. last summer, and I can tell you the Snow White, Aurora, and Cinderella merchandise is still heavily in view. My guess is those princesses are still popular. Remember, they're not ONLY in the old movies, either. Disney has chapter books about them, videos with songs for the children to sing, and all kinds of other media tie-ins with new content featuring those older princesses.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

My daughter wore a sparkly, frothy princess dress and a tiara for Halloween. Then I put makeup on her and made her into a zombie. The effect on other kids was priceless.

I think I love you right now.

 

[saellys]

Well, some would argue that when Ariel can't speak is when her curious personality really shines through -- she explores the human world with reckless abandon, and her communication via body language, gestures and expressions is quite effective (until the whole "you're marrying the wrong woman, Eric!" bit, at least). And she does save Eric's life not once, but twice. How many other Disney princesses have done that?

Excellent points, but I still feel these positive aspects are overshadowed by her helplessness in the context of resolving her own story.

It's not that I want them taken off the table, it's that I personally think people should target the problem more narrowly. It's more accurate in my mind to say the movies themselves were fine, even great for their time, but that the ongoing merchandising surrounding them sucks, and skews the importance of what should just be another movie. There's nothing wrong with Cinderella, but there's something wrong when you isolate her and hold her up as the standard, and create a caricature of her that's somewhat even detached from being just a story.

I mean, I totally get all of that, but I just want to separate it for the millions of people who actually do view Cinderella as just another movie they liked for whatever reason growing up. There wouldn't be anything wrong with Cinderella, or any of the princesses even as a whole, if they had just run the normal course for movies.

Agreed.

If Aurora and Snow White are popular, it's not something I understand, unless that represents more of a nostalgia by older women who may not have followed the newer releases, and still make decisions for their daughters. If Ariel is listed fourth, though, that might just be the order of release. I believe Aladdin was tops at the box office, but I don't know how that echoes with the merchandising.

I think moms' and grandmothers' nostalgia plays a pretty big role in the continued popularity of the most passive princesses. I also think Aurora's popularity among young girls is almost entirely due to wardrobe choices--she wears pink. Cinderella retained her classic Grimm ballgown the color of moonlight, and Snow White wears bright primary colors. For girls entering the phase where gender distinctions are super important, identifying as "girl" in every possible way becomes a priority. There is absolutely nothing more socially accepted as "girl" than the color pink, so they gravitate toward the most feminine possible princess.

I wish I knew what to say here. For me, I sometimes have to be careful with feminist literature because there are just a couple of feminist issues which as a Catholic I just don't want to read about. But I make that determination by reading pages, or reviews, or by knowing the person who's recommending it. I've never skipped a book just because a woman wrote it - that seems unjust, to me.

Growing up, the only fantasy novels to make any impression on me were Narnia, Tolkein and the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, followed in college with Harry Potter. That's not a great selection of fantasy, but it's a pretty good split for both female writers and female protagonists, and not a background that would give me any reason to avoid anything written by anyone.

Real talk. Sometimes I hear crappy things in advance about a given book and avoid it if the advice comes from someone whose opinions I trust, but more often I'll just read it for myself to find out how bad it was.

How about Belle? She seems pretty popular. She has agency, and rejects the idea that it is her lot to just be married to some provincial boor. She gives herself up to save her father, but doesn't take any guff from "the beast." Ultimately her story does become one where "true love" is the end game, but that seems to be a staple of the genre. Insofar as she and "the beast" are both pursuing that same goal, she does not seem to play second fiddle to him.

Crap, I forgot Belle! I was actually a HUGE Beauty and the Beast fan as a kid, concurrent with my Jurassic Park obsession (which is still going strong). There's a pretty creeptastic veneer of Stockholm Syndrome over her story, but as a character she's fairly solid in that can describe her as a person, and not just the things that happen to her.

 

[Zero Angel]

Yeah... that's really freaking sexist. Thanks for admitting it, I guess? I've been "burned" by countless male authors who reduce female characters to whores and corpses, or relegate them to the most minor of roles, or tokenize them as part of some dude's story, with equal amounts of crap writing, but it hasn't turned me off of "men's literature" (otherwise known as literature).

Let me rephrase slightly I suppose. I don't usually know or care about the gender of an author, and unless it's a famous author, I probably don't even care who the author is, but if for some reason it is MADE known to me that the author is female, as in, this is a selling point of the novel, then it is a very strong possibility that it will be the "women's lit" that I described before. And I think many people have made this argument in this thread although they may not have put it this way, but anything that is "for women" or "for girls" is usually crap.

That, I thought, was the problem that many people would like to see fixed. If literature and media for girls and women gives them such terrible images of themselves and their role in society, relationships and in family, then what hope do we have for literature and media for everyone?

 

[Scribble]

I let my daughters watch Xena. I also let them run around whacking things with swords. But, sometimes they dress up like princesses. The issue is the volume of input. If ALL they see are passive girl characters, that is what they may understand is the norm. Already at 8, my daughter had begun to struggle with the "girly-girl" vs "tomboy" dichotomy. Her words. This is life on the playground, I can't engineer that, all I can do is talk with her.

Although she is too young for me to tell her about the finer points of human behavioral biology, I am trying, in my way, to teach her that people naturally make groups. Humans try to put people in one group or another, we can't stop doing it, it's how we are made. It helps us to figure out how to deal with people. Just as ants leave chemical trails to tell the other ants where to walk, just like the bees dance to tell the other bees where the flowers are, humans make groups and rules about who does what in which group.

So, while you can't change how people make groups or deal with them, you can change how they see groups. I tell her, you can make your own group who can do "tomboy things" and wear "girly things". I cringe at the use of these words, there are stereotypes built into the grammar of them, but how else can you relate?

All I can think to do is to tell her that it takes courage to make your own group, and sometimes the only person in the group is you, but when people see your courage, they will want to join it too. How cool would it be to start your own group? You can call it, "cool girls". They wear dresses, they wear jeans, they climb trees, they paint their nails. They can do anything.

 

[saellys]

Let me rephrase slightly I suppose. I don't usually know or care about the gender of an author, and unless it's a famous author, I probably don't even care who the author is, but if for some reason it is MADE known to me that the author is female, as in, this is a selling point of the novel, then it is a very strong possibility that it will be the "women's lit" that I described before. And I think many people have made this argument in this thread although they may not have put it this way, but anything that is "for women" or "for girls" is usually crap.

That, I thought, was the problem that many people would like to see fixed. If literature and media for girls and women gives them such terrible images of themselves and their role in society, relationships and in family, then what hope do we have for literature and media for everyone?

Thanks for the clarification. I think we're on the same page about writers like Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James, but I don't see how avoiding stuff written by women is going to fix the problem.

Just out of curiosity, do you consider Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy "women's literature"? Or Kristin Cashore's Graceling? Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion? They're all female-penned books with female protagonists. They seem to fit your criteria for "potential women's lit; best avoid," which means you really are missing out on a lot.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Let me rephrase slightly I suppose. I don't usually know or care about the gender of an author, and unless it's a famous author, I probably don't even care who the author is, but if for some reason it is MADE known to me that the author is female, as in, this is a selling point of the novel, then it is a very strong possibility that it will be the "women's lit" that I described before. And I think many people have made this argument in this thread although they may not have put it this way, but anything that is "for women" or "for girls" is usually crap.

That, I thought, was the problem that many people would like to see fixed. If literature and media for girls and women gives them such terrible images of themselves and their role in society, relationships and in family, then what hope do we have for literature and media for everyone?

I think I hear what you're trying to say, and you remind me of a point brought up by Sherrilyn Kenyon in her Chronicles of Nick book Infinity (I think), where her 14-year-old male protagonist is agonizing about his summer reading list being all about girl stuff - girls suffering from their bodies changing and girls suffering from social issues and girls discovering that men are all evil pigs only after "one thing." And he wishes that just one book would tell them that most guys are basically decent and would make good, safe boyfriends.

So, maybe what you're saying is you feel that some "women's lit" isn't as fair as it could be?

Kenyon, by the way, writes in "dude" in a way that just leaves me in awe. Of course, she has the mad hax of having 3 teenage sons to use as source material.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I let my daughters watch Xena. I also let them run around whacking things with swords. But, sometimes they dress up like princesses. The issue is the volume of input. If ALL they see are passive girl characters, that is what they may understand is the norm. Already at 8, my daughter had begun to struggle with the "girly-girl" vs "tomboy" dichotomy. Her words. This is life on the playground, I can't engineer that, all I can do is talk with her.

Although she is too young for me to tell her about the finer points of human behavioral biology, I am trying, in my way, to teach her that people naturally make groups. Humans try to put people in one group or another, we can't stop doing it, it's how we are made. It helps us to figure out how to deal with people. Just as ants leave chemical trails to tell the other ants where to walk, just like the bees dance to tell the other bees where the flowers are, humans make groups and rules about who does what in which group.

So, while you can't change how people make groups or deal with them, you can change how they see groups. I tell her, you can make your own group who can do "tomboy things" and wear "girly things". I cringe at the use of these words, there are stereotypes built into the grammar of them, but how else can you relate?

All I can think to do is to tell her that it takes courage to make your own group, and sometimes the only person in the group is you, but when people see your courage, they will want to join it too. How cool would it be to start your own group? You can call it, "cool girls". They wear dresses, they wear jeans, they climb trees, they paint their nails. They can do anything.

I do not remember where I ran into this, but I thought it was called for here...

Why I Bought Boys' Underwear For My Daughter

 

[Steerpike]

Just out of curiosity, do you consider Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy "women's literature"? Or Kristin Cashore's Graceling? Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion? They're all female-penned books with female protagonists.

Thanks for mentioning Kristin Cashore. I like her a lot. I liked Fire even better than Graceling. Have not read Bitterblue​ yet.

 

[saellys]

Thanks for mentioning Kristin Cashore. I like her a lot. I liked Fire even better than Graceling. Have not read Bitterblue​ yet.

I really need to finish Graceling. I found her writing a tad bit clumsy early on and lost my steam, but just now I'm craving it.

 

[Zero Angel]

Thanks for the clarification. I think we're on the same page about writers like Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James, but I don't see how avoiding stuff written by women is going to fix the problem.

Just out of curiosity, do you consider Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy "women's literature"? Or Kristin Cashore's Graceling? Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion? They're all female-penned books with female protagonists.

I can't speak to the writing quality of the Hunger Games, but I never thought of it as women's literature and the movie (although terrible and in my opinion sexist to boot) did not strike me as a "women's movie". I haven't read the latter books you mentioned, but I've never heard Moon's books described as women's lit.

Example of Women's Literature: The Handmaid's Tale.

Going back to Disney, if you thought the characters weren't hypersexualized enough, there is always J Scott Campbell's renditions of them, which keep coming up again and again on my Pinterest feed.

 

[saellys]

I'm not a huge Atwood fan or anything, but I've always thought The Handmaid's Tale could be pretty beneficial reading for people of any gender.

 

[Steerpike]

I really need to finish Graceling. I found her writing a tad bit clumsy early on and lost my steam, but just now I'm craving it.

Get Fire​ too

 

[saellys]

Get Fire​ too

I think I downloaded that one at the same time because I'm a completist.

 

[Scribble]

I do not remember where I ran into this, but I thought it was called for here...

Why I Bought Boys' Underwear For My Daughter

This is great

I raised a 20 year old daughter already, so I have been broken in, all my taboos about buying feminine undergarments are gone. My 8 year old is keen on this aspect, and we talk about it. She gets irritated that there is "every color" for boys, and pink for girls. We talk about it. I explain that the people who are making the clothes are afraid that people won't buy the other colors, so they don't make them, but that's silly because people don't buy them because they don't make them. The people are afraid of not making money, and they don't understand how modern girls think. That's why they do it.

Lego started their "Friends" girl-oriented kits. The boxes are purple rather than pink. If you look at the playsets, they are very safe. Girls go to Olivia's house, they are veterinarians, they own bakeries. A slight improvement but not quite there. The rest of the toys: My Little Ponies, Barbie. I bought them Meccano, "regular" Lego. Microscope. Then, birthday party comes and all 8 kids' parents go out and buy "girl" presents. Jewelry kits, more Barbies, butterfly wings.

This is the stuff at their friends' houses. This is what a parent buys with their 25$ gift limit.

All I can do is talk to them. I don't want to drown them in gender awareness issues at such a young age either. I want them just to be who they are. It's not easy.

 

[Zero Angel]

I'm not a huge Atwood fan or anything, but I've always thought The Handmaid's Tale could be pretty beneficial reading for people of any gender.

I just don't like seeing women abused throughout an entire novel, which is another reason why I usually don't like tales that are classified as "women's lit".

Talking about it as a social commentary is one element of it and I don't necessarily disagree that religious fundamentalism is wrong and so is slavery and sexism etc, but the enjoyment of the book is zero for me.

...and I mean zero as in, no enjoyment, not as in, me.

Even your words to describe it, "it could be pretty beneficial reading" makes it sound like a chore/medicine/something-to-learn-from-but-not-enjoy.