I was involved in an email discussion recently with a few web 2.0 savvy women recently when the conversation turned to princesses. You do know, don’t you, that every time we women talk amongst ourselves, we always get around to shoes and princesses? I proposed that we hold a Princess 2.0 conference. What better way to attract women speakers? We could have a masked ball and a tea, we’d have no annoying panel discussions (how vulgar!), and speakers would get to wear tiaras and sit on a throne.
There’s no denying that the princess myth has a hold on our culture. Just go to Target during the month of October and you’ll see that the majority of Halloween costumes for girls are princesses of one variant or another. My six-year-old daughter has been a princess for each of the past three years; this year she went as Odette dressed for subfreezing temperatures.
What’s this fascination with princesses all about? Pretty obviously, it’s about how being young and beautiful and marriageable is really cool but what’s even cooler is hooking up with a handsome and manly prince. It’s about the value we place on female beauty and youthfulness. From those perspectives, it’s not exactly a cultural myth that deserves any extra play.
If you wanted to look at it another way–and I do, because I haven’t given up yet on becoming a princess–you could consider the wish to become a princess as an expression of the Nietzschean will to power. Princesshood, on this interpretation, is not just about a romantic and beautiful life with darling kids carrying the royal DNA. It’s about being as powerful as possible. For women of the past, especially during the time of princesses (the middle ages, perhaps?), marrying a powerful man was probably the best way to gain power for one’s self.
Those days are gone and though being married to a powerful man has its benefits, we women don’t have to divert our will through men any more, although you might have some doubts about that if you’ve recently attended a technology conference.
We need a new version of the princess myth. Princess 2.0. In Princess 1.0, the goal is to find a man, a man who is a prince, marry him, and thus turn oneself into a princess. In Princess 2.0, the goal is to get your own power, thus becoming a virtual princess: one who can command resources and people in whatever domain she wants to rule.
I thought I was a princess last week when I got to go to Adobe Max and my badge said press/analyst–I had arrived! The reality was somewhat different; it turned out I was not the princess I imagined but rather a pea, signifying nothing, except perhaps some minor annoyance and irritation for the corporate communications personnel lying atop the mattress heap. Well. A pea has some power, so that’s not so bad. But I’d rather be a princess.
6 Comments
I like this idea! (But I find myself looking around furtively, wondering about the sisterhood PC factor… is there a consideration I overlooked in having an automatic resonance with the idea? Am I a “bad” or fairweather femininst? Ever do that?)
Amyloo - I have had this post sitting around in my drafts for weeks wondering whether I really had the nerve to publish it. I have some worries about the PC factor, but I hope it does more good to air out ideas like this than to just stuff them.
signs and signifiers- I would *really* be interested to know what if anything you learned at MAX. You did the set up - misconceptions about Flash, without the punchline.
Princess 2.0 - that could be Queen, no? Elizabeth 1st was a princess once, but never needed a man to drive her will to power. she married England, and led it to greatness. She was a polymath and to my mind one of England’s true geniuses.
James, I was thinking of “sound and fury, signifying nothing” instead of semiotics, so maybe that’s why there’s been no blogging about Adobe since the conference. And I think my Flash misconceptions post had quite a few punchlines in it.
The queen doesn’t have quite the archetypal resonance as the princess, that’s the problem. We’re up against biological reality here, where women have more value as fertile vessel than as commanding presence.
From an Australian perspective, we were well into Xena, the Warrior Princess until Mary, the Real Estate Agent met the Danish Prince at the pub during the Olympics and turned us all back into conventional potential princesses again (and yes, she’s a Danish Princess now).
I think the princess concept is alive and well…
What about the 2.0 Princess? Well… the problem I have with the 2.0 Princess is that she’s allowed to be pretty but not so smart. She’s allowed to be a figurehead, but only in the way that conventional princesses are.
She should definitely be into current fashion and future breeding.
I was just reading the Guardian weekend magazine this weekend which features page after page of Web 2.0 heros, and although on the front cover it says ‘the men and women who broke the web’ there are two women featured and both of them are ‘partners’, not princesses (sorry Caterina, bit that’s how it came off).
There are some really interesting gender questions to ask at the moment… I’m not sure they’re about princess-ness, but they’re interesting nonetheless.
Leisa - yes, it does seem that women are more often portrayed as partners or helpers but not the prime movers behind important things that happen. Then there’s the assumption that it’s a matter of temperament and interest instead of an interlocking set of cultural expectations and restrictions that lead to that outcome. Who knows what the real story is.
I’m not sure that princesses are what we need to talk about either, but I worry that if we ignore these kind of narratives that little girls grow up with we miss something significant. Could we instead turn these stories upside down? Probably not, but I can’t let it pass me by without trying, especially at Halloween, when I see princesses running all over the neighborhood.