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Who’s the fairest of them all?

evil fizz

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I’m white, and I have a daughter. My skin is pretty light, but my daughter is extraordinarily pale. A’s got white blond hair, eyebrows that are so pale they’re all but invisible, and blue eyes. When she turned a year old, we took her for a checkup. The pediatrician made sure she was hitting all of her developmental milestones, and talked to us about making sure her vaccinations were current. She also talked about things to be aware of when we take her outside since it’s summertime, like sunscreen. T and I are both far more experienced than either of us would like with nasty sunburns, so we try to make sure that A is well-slathered when we take her out. When we told the pediatrician we tried to be vigilant about it, she nodded. “Yes, that’s an important thing when you have princess skin like she does.”

T and I stared, confused. “Princess skin?” I asked.

“Princess skin. Really, really pale skin, that blond hair. Princess features.”

“Oh.” T and I shared a look, but decided to let it go.

Afterward, I thought about all the things I wanted to say to the pediatrician. What’s wrong with just saying light skin or likely to get sunburned? Why the idea that princesses have to be white, blond, and blue-eyed? Surely there are brunette princesses, princesses with darker skin, princesses who don’t sunburn easily? Do you talk to people with a wide range of skin tones about the importance of sunscreen? Of all the ways to describe A’s features, why princess?

And then I thought about all the things I wanted to say to A, even though she’s no where near old enough to understand. In my head, the phrase white privilege definitely floated around, but so did dark mutterings about Disney and a marked inability to feature any non-white heroines. I thought about phrases like alabaster skin (e.g., Snow White), usually marked by cherry red lips. And then I tried to think of princess stories that didn’t involve white people. I remembered one of my favorite fairy tales, Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, which features non-white princesses. I thought about Disney’s mixed results in dabbling in racial and ethnic diversity (Aladdin lyrics, cough, cough). I thought about The Enchanted Forest Chronicles where a the heroine is (in part) not a typical princess because she’s not blond and blue-eyed. Those are just the things I remember thinking about over a month ago. I’m sure there are dozens more. Even as I write this now, I wish I had organized my thoughts on the subject better, because I know it’s the sort of thing that will keep coming up over and over again.

A’s only thirteen months old, so I definitely have time to get some kind of coherent narrative together about what it means to be privileged by having pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. I just didn’t think it was going to start so early.

73 thoughts on Who’s the fairest of them all?

  1. You are assuming that the word “princess” necessarily has positive connotations. But think about the expression: “”Oh, she’s such a princess!” There is nothing positive about that.

  2. Well docs don’t usually make a habit of insulting their patients, especially little babies, so I would guess he meant it offhand or as a weird compliment.

    No doubt lying around doing nothing while the rest of the populous sweated and bled for nothing did ensure princesses of any race had lighter skin than the people in their country…

    As much as I’d like to see more movies with non-European myths and tales, It’d probably just start drama over cultural appropriation and theft. Course it also keeps those myths & such alive when less people are actively passing them down to their children.

    Watch this doctor dude closely though. If you hear any more of that shit from him you might want to go to a different doctor, before it has a change to be harmful.

  3. I have to admit when I hit the “princess skin” line it didn’t irk me because I saw it as a reference to that same Disney trope you describe in paragraph three. But then I never thought of Princess as something really positive either and part of that is because of Disney. Only four of the so-called Disney Princesses are actual princesses and two of those, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, are some of the most useless bits of fluff ever put to film. Maybe it’s a bit privileged though; it’s easy to opt out of something when it hasn’t been deliberately excluding you.

    (and for some other non-white and generally awesome heroines try “Fearless Girls, Wise Women and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World”)

  4. I guess I be the first to say, I am totally with ya on the princess thing. It is not about whether it is positive or negative. Its about who it includes and excludes. It’s about how sexism appears in the context of skin color.
    If you a white or light you get to be a fair skinned delicate flower or a Princess.

    If you are black like me. You are not to allowed to be in fairytale. No princes to save u. You are never a princess. Never allowed to be a demise in distress. At best you a diva.

    It shows you how all women are boxed in by skin colors and looks…

  5. This resonated so much. I’m going to tell a story I’ve never before told anyone.

    When I was a child, I had blonde hair and blue eyes. My best friend had brown eyes and darker hair. One day, we were both walking home from primary school; I must have been six or seven years old. We were talking about princesses, as little girls often do, and I said to my friend that *I* could be a princess but that *she* couldn’t, because “everyone knows princesses are blonde and have blue eyes”. My friend’s mum, who was walking us home, turned to me, very upset, and said, “that’s not true at all! Apologise at once!”. Confused, I did so, too young (!) to understand why what I said was offensive (although I shudder to think back on it now).

    A few years later, I learned that my friend’s mother was Polish, and that her parents, i.e. my friend’s grandparents, had fled Poland during the Holocaust after having being interned in prison camps. Everything clicked, and I felt sick. I had grown up in a culture that celebrates whiteness, and a particularly privileged, blonde, blue-eyed form of it; despite my parents’ best efforts, I had internalised messages about the superiority of fair-haired people with pale skin. I will spend the rest of my life trying to fight off the residual impulse ingrained in me by the culture I grew up in to accord higher value to white people; it’s the fucking least thing I can do, considering how many privileges I, as a white cis hetero woman, enjoy.

    So, yeah. The princess thing really hit home in terms of reminding me of a past shame. And again, thank you to evil fizz for this post.

  6. This is slightly tangential from your main point, evil fizz, but I just wanted to point out how your post reveals some of the racism endemic to the U.S. health care system. Darker-skinned people–by which I mean mainly POC, not darker white people–may not appear to sunburn as much, but sunblock is *just* as important. Although skin cancer rates are higher among white people, for POC they are climbing in large part because there is this myth out there that ‘people of color don’t have to worry.’

    But of course, when this story is picked up by national media it comes across as, “Aw, look at the silly POC, not realizing the sun is harmful to you” instead of “Look how every single message we (the media, the medical establishment) send out says that only whites need be worried. Gosh, maybe we could change this?”

  7. “Princess skin” is also a relic from those days in Europe when a person’s class could be differentiated by how pale they were. Pale = not a whole lot of time spent labouring outside.

  8. Great post.

    To Salix: darker skin requires you to walk a fine line. Not enough sunscreen, damage is done; too much sunscreen, i.e., sunscreen in strength appropriate to lighter-skinned people, and you do not get enough Vitamin D.

    I’m a European of mediterranean type, and while in many senses I am just plain white, when we choose sunscreen I’m not as white as my Scandinavian husband. I buy factor 50 for him, 12 for me and our school age children.

    And so much had I internalized how a princess, or the Barbie doll, looks like, that at age eight I had decided I would eventually dye my hair blond, wear blue contacts, and have a nose job (my nose looks remarkably middle eastern).

    Of course now I realize this was all nonsense, and I refuse even smaller modifications like thinning out my eyebrows, or wearing makeup to get a pinkish instead of sallow complexion in the winter months; but it took me until I was in my thirties to accept my color and body as they are.

  9. This one of the reason why I am not sure if I want children, something like this happening and looking at my daughter or son in confusion. What should I say to him/her? Do they understand? Hmm, sounds like a good blog post to me, lol.

  10. Ayyy. What a mess. “Princess skin” indeed. That would have bothered me, too.

    When my daughter was an infant, I just got white people grilling me on how come she was born with brown eyes. (that’s supposed to be the mark of “true whiteness” or some such nonsense….being born with blue eyes. as if southern and eastern Europe don’t exist…sigh.)

  11. Look, you are making a huge deal out of nothing. Your doctor was probably raised on disney as well. There is nothing wrong with being pale, so is one of my nieces, as for the princess comment, what else do you refer to a young girl as? I will admit to calling them the horrible little trolls while I tickle them, but only then!

    If she has a mistake like Jo’s, entirely forgivable mistake, all children at one time or another make them. Of course you should have a few examples of non white princesses, I would suggest looking towards India, as they have some of the best example’s of warrior Queens.

    This is a common mistake for people, never make your children feel insecure in who they are. Trust me, they will have enough to deal with without that to drag them down, they are not the inheritors of anybody’s guilt. As long as you teach her to respect other people’s opinions and not to be ruled by them, they should alright.

    I sincerely hope that helps.

  12. My 3 1/2 year old daughter is a carbon copy of me–blue eyes, pale skin, blonde hair. We ran into no issues until a child at her pre-school brought it to her attention that she was “white” (skin and hair, gotta love the descriptions by children!) with blue eyes, and therefore, a princess.
    I cringed. I don’t mind her playing that she’s a princess, etc. But to think it’s merely due to how you look seems to me, as her mother, dangerous grounds. If you’re a “princess” on her particular school playground, you are treated by the other children as their superior.
    My only guess is that not only are this attributes reinforced by much of society (advertisements, the aforementioned Disney, etc), but also that she is the rarity at her school as she is the only child with “white” skin and hair and blue eyes.

  13. I got to deal with the Princess thing with my daughter a few months ago. One of her classmates (with red hair and freckles) told my daughter (who is Mongolian) that only Irish people can be Princesses. This sent my daughter into a tizzy, who then tried to figure out if she might have some Irish in her anywhere. We tried to tell her that Irishness has nothing to do with Princesses, showed her pictures of the non-white Princesses around the world etc. but all that effort lead up to her declaring that one of her Asian dolls was a Princess with “just a bit of Irish.” We’re still working on it.

  14. We need more african, asian, and southamerican stories of princesses. The princess in the actual stories are fair because they are part of the north european folk. And the same with the knights, we need more samurais, aztecan warriors, incas, african warriors stories.

  15. Ugh. Thank you, Disney and Barbie. (the “white princess” narrative is quite a bit more complex than that, but I imagine that’s where the pediatrician was trying to relate to the child from?) It makes you think about all the subtle messages little girls of color get about how they are NOT beautiful, NOT princesses.

    @ La Lubu. My parents got that, although when my father wasn’t around we got the fun “oh, what a darling little girl? Did you save her from Mexico?” Or the less fun alternative of being pulled over on the road for speeding and then asked for adoption papers, though that only happened once.

    I have never been made clear on the sunscreen issue. I try to get my Sicilian side of the family to wear it, to little avail. I don’t need it (don’t burn much, although now that I’m older I’m paler until I tan), but wear it anyway because I always heard what Salix was saying.

  16. prosaica: Great post.
    To Salix: darker skin requires you to walk a fine line. Not enough sunscreen, damage is done; too much sunscreen, i.e., sunscreen in strength appropriate to lighter-skinned people, and you do not get enough Vitamin D.

    @prosaica — White and light-skinned people also run a risk of vitamin D deficiency because of sunscreen use. Not sure if you were implying only darker skinned folks have to worry about it, so wanted to add this data point. It is a problem across skin colors. We all need to wear sunscreen and take D, if we can afford these things.

  17. Derek: Look, you are making a huge deal out of nothing.I sincerely hope that helps.  (Quote this comment?)

    Actually Derek, I have to disagree. The more often that this little girl hears that fair skin=princess skin, the more likely she is to believe it. I applaud Evil Fizz for trying to counteract those impressions, but for a young child, it can be very difficult to filter such comments.

    Several of the other posters (@Jo 5 and @La Labu 10) have demonstrated that you can’t ignore the broader cultural context, and that yes, in some ways, they are the inheritors of others’ guilt.

    I don’t think that there is anything wrong with trying to separate a girl’s sense of worth from her looks, especially if the looks being prized are eurocentric.

  18. I’ve got hazel eyes and dark brown hair that burns (a.k.a sun-bleaches) as quickly as my skin does–I’m also very extremely pale. At a very young age I rejected this notion that I was blue eyed and blonde–I would get quite upset then and still get kind of shocked when people perceive(d) me in that way. This generally confuses people. Apparently they think it’s some kind of complement that they haven’t really bothered to pay attention to how I actually look?

    I’m not sure where it came from, but I blame it on the smurfs. Fun fact! Smurfette was originally created by Gargamel–with DARK hair–to lure the Smurfs to their doom somehow; when she was turned good by Papa Smurf, her hair was also lightened. I remember that was really upsetting.

    It’s a weirdly sensitive issue for me, and I probably would have told that doctor what’s what.

  19. It’s funny how perceptions shape us. When I was young, I was very pale compared to my friends. I had never heard the term “princess skin” and I was pretty much under the impression that my white skin wasn’t as pretty as the tanned girls I knew.

  21. I’m was so glad to see this post when I opened my newsreader this morning. I’m white, I know certain privileges come with that, but I’m far from the blond-haired, blue-eyed ideal (my dad’s family is from Naples), and when discussions of race and ethnicity come up, I never know where my experience is supposed to fit on the spectrum.

    “And so much had I internalized how a princess, or the Barbie doll, looks like, that at age eight I had decided I would eventually dye my hair blond, wear blue contacts, and have a nose job”

    I had a similar experience growing up, though I didn’t really indulge in any princess fantasies. Granted, I was already in my late-teens when Disney started pumping out princesses, but surely I had Cinderalla and Snow White books as a kid, and had you asked me what a princess looked like, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have said my dark-haired, dark-eyed self, olive-skinned self. I didn’t have as much of a desire to change myself, not at a young age, but I did paint several dolls’ eyes brown with a Sharpie and darkened their hair with paint. I desperately wanted freckles, though. (My mom is a freckled, blue-eyed blond.)

  22. Look, you are making a huge deal out of nothing. Your doctor was probably raised on disney as well. There is nothing wrong with being pale, so is one of my nieces, as for the princess comment, what else do you refer to a young girl as?

    No, it’s not nothing. Which is my point: something like this can sound pretty innocuous, even complimentary, but it’s not. It’s yet another point at which privilege is reinforced. The intent is completely and totally irrelevant to the outcome.

    Also, whoever upthread referred to the doctor as a he, the pediatrician is a she in a big clinic at an Army hospital.

  24. Do you talk to people with a wide range of skin tones about the importance of sunscreen?

    evil fizz, thanks for bringing up this issue and discussion. I can’t tell you how often I’m reminded to wear sunscreen because of my pale-ness. Then the kids at the predominately African American camp I worked w/ for four years were almost never reminded by the same people, as if they couldn’t also experience burn. So I was there, with my huge bottle of sunscreen for everyone 🙂

    Also, thanks for correcting the misgendering of the doctor up thread. It’s amazing how strong assumptions of occupations are that even those w/ good intentions can slip, even when the gender was identified for them.

  25. Lots of people mentioned that we need better and more examples of “non-white” princesses; princesses that don’t conform to the Disney/European fantasy ideal. I think the best source for this is all the awesome, real princesses that can be found in the history of the world.

    As a child I had a wonderful book, called “To Be A Princess”, which profiled 12 real, historical royal girls, including Princess Ka`iulani of Hawaii, who fought to keep her nation independent from the US.

    Of course, 4 of the girls are British, but they don’t conform the “blonde-and-blue-eyed” ideal either (Elizabeth I, Mary Tudor, Victoria.) I loved this book as a girl, especially because these were *real* people, not the overly-saccharine powder-puffs of the Disney universe. And I am blonde-and-blue-eyed, so I guess I was supposed to relate to Sleeping Beauty et.al.

  26. evil fizz-
    Good post. This type of behavior is one of the things that scares me about having children. I don’t want people at all to comment on my infant as being princess/pretty/cute/precious vs strong/adventurer based on their gender… and I’m learning more about how race will play into that as well.
    Em.

  27. That seems such an odd descriptor for a doctor to use, evil fizz, though perhaps she has internalized issues herself with the whole princess theme (is the doctor blonde and blue and pale?) Still, I wonder what she tells the parents of the pale baby boys? Or the darker children, even darker white ones – your kid has worker’s or serf’s skin, so don’t worry so much about the sun? lol

    scrumby: Only four of the so-called Disney Princesses are actual princesses and two of those, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, are some of the most useless bits of fluff ever put to film.

    scrumby, when I heard that Disney was planning their first Black princess movie my first thought was that I really, really wanted her to be the most frilly, “feminine”, “princess-y”, useless bit of fluff ever. That’s because, as Sisou mentions above, in common media (at least when I was growing up) little Black girls are never the damsel in distress (or, if they are, they are not damsels and they save themselves), never the princess, no one is jealous of their beauty, never is it thought tragic that they live a life of drudgery instead of being feted and waited upon, no princes are thought to exist to come save them and love them and all the other stuff of the most famous of the princess themes.

    Not that any of those themes are good or anything – but little girls start from a different place in society’s psyche and I wanted the movie to work to move that place just a tad. And also give little Black girls an image of extreme “traditional femininity” to rebel against.

    Instead we apparently just got a frog princess who wants to turn back into a woman and work a lot, lol. Personally, I think Disney tried to please the wrong constituency with that movie.

  28. I think also that the princess myth itself is fundamentally problematic; it always sanctifies privilege and class hierarchy. There’s no way to invoke the myth of the “princess” that doesn’t fundamentally affirm injustice because it’s all about birthright determining value. Sure, the princess herself may rise up from a lower class, but she’s always dependent on the birthright of her husband. This is my problem with Disney’s attempts to depict POC princesses. As long as we are living in USian society where whiteness is privileged, there’s no conceivable way to invoke the myth of the princess and not have it be inherently racist. You are ennobling privileged structures the minute you do so, and you can’t for a moment erase the reality that privilege means whiteness. It’s the racial equivalent of corporate greenwashing: it disingenuously purports to do something that is at odds with its real nature.

  29. I’m also pale as milk, so I, too, am used to random strangers commenting on my paleness, worried that somehow, like a vampire, I would explode if exposed to sunshine without sunscreen. I was never told I had “princess skin”, because (besides the fact that there are apparently no fat princesses) I also have a major case of eczema that I’ve battled most of my life. Only once has a doctor mentioned my pale skin/ redish-blondish hair/ green-blue eyes as relevant to my health … in that it’s a color-scheme apparently associated with my skin disease, and it helped her diagnose an eczema break-out with an unusual presentation.

    There are films and books out there that try and emphasize that it’s what’s inside that makes someone a “princess,” rather than their coloring or looks. They’re hard to find somtimes, though, in the materials for younger readers. A Little Princess jumps to mind for me, with it’s brunette/ black haired protagonist and message that “All little girls are princesses!” … except that the book is horribly dated, classist, and the movie is a victoriana set-piece so the only person of color is the servant, Becky. Who is still “A Princess” in the movie formula (but not so much the book, where she’s Cockney), but its still a good bit problematic for younger kids. Dealing With Dragons is better, in its complete rejection of the Princess Formula, but it doesn’t have the same effect of emphasizing kindness to others as a princessy trait to strive for. I’m all for channeling the Princess Habit into a force for good, but it does need to be disassociated from outward appearances.

  30. All of this ties in to representation, to media representation; and as a coloured girl growing up on a diet of white media… yeah, I totally get this story. 🙁

    (Although I loved the Pink Turbo Ranger from Power Rangers: she was an Asian-USAmerican superhero played by a Korean-American actor. I was too young for the Yellow Mighty Morphin’ Ranger (who was Vietnamese-USAmerican), but Cassie (Patricia Ja-Lee) made an indelible impression on my six-year-old self.)

  31. “As much as I’d like to see more movies with non-European myths and tales, It’d probably just start drama over cultural appropriation and theft. ”

    That’s assuming the movies are American or European. And that seems to be the assumption in general. But when it comes to princesses, there is a whole world of movies with non-white princesses. Probably nobody does historical drama and fiction like the Chinese, and there is a very wide range of princess and queen roles, dozens and dozens of flims, both in Mandarin and Cantonese. Dream of the Red Chamber is chock full of princesses and there are many film versions by now. Then there’s Gong Li’s Lady of Zhao charachter in Emperor and the Assassin.

    As for cultural appropriation, my personal favorite example is Kurosawa’s Ran, an retelling of Lear. The way he tells it the whole story revolves around the eldest daughter-in-law and her righteous vengeance. Special bonus – it’s a samurai film, and obviouly not in English, so there’s none of Shakepseare’s obnoxious prolix dialogue.

    I don’t know how much a really young child would get out of these, but for a girl old enough to read subtitles they might be worthwhile. Also, i don’t know how much these would help a girl of African ancestry, unless just seeing someone, anyone who’s not white as a princess is a gain.

  32. Nanette, I love so much of what you said. I hadn’t even thought of the problems associated with a white princess being saved, compared to a princess of color needing to save herself.

    I’m just waiting for the next Disney princess to spread misinformation about a new and different group of women. For the record, Pocahontas was ~13 when John Smith met her. 13!

  33. I am a twin, and while my twin and I were children, I had dark (almost black) hair and dark brown eyes. My twin had light blonde hair and blue eyes. I remember it was the coloring extremes between us that convinced me that she was the pretty one, and I was the ugly one. Everything about me seemed ugly – I had more hair, for one, including thick eyebrows and visible, dark hair on my body, while my twin always had sparse, light hair and thinner eyebrows. I never thought before why I was convinced she was pretty and I was not. But she had all the markers of prettiness, I just assumed, while I had all the markers of non-prettiness; maybe to be generous we’ll call it “plain.” It certainly didn’t help that as we grew up she couldn’t seem to have enough boyfriends, while it took for me until I was 19 to get my first boyfriend (at the time that was a major life accomplishment.)

    I feel pretty confident coming to the conclusion that it was those fucking princess stories that I internalized as a child that made me convinced that I was ugly while my lighter sister was pretty. Though princess stories are problematic from the beginning just because of class issues, it’s even worse that all princesses are light, with light hair and light eyes and probably no body hair whatsoever. Those stories don’t help kids, the characters are terrible role models, and it seems better to just do away with all of them. (Not necessarily the most practical solution, but certainly cathartic.)

  34. I’m very glad that I read Z. K. Snyder’s The Egypt Game as a child. It’s about children who develop an elaborate game about ancient Egypt, and one thing that comes up is that Queen Nefertiti was supposedly the most beautiful woman ever, and one of the characters (who was _east_ Asian) supposedly looked strikingly like her. I must have run across this book at just the right time, because even though I’m white and grew up in Whitey McWhitseville, it left me with the firm conviction that non-white princesses existed and were just as beautiful as white ones. I’m sure I still have plenty of internalized *isms regarding beauty and race, but at least when it comes to beautiful princesses I don’t question the existence or validity of non-white examples.

    (This book also had the interesting side effect of leading me to assume any female character who was introduced as “stunningly beautiful” or “the most beautiful woman in the world” looked like the bust of Nefertiti – black hair, dark eyes, brown skin, non-Caucasian facial structre. For years I assumed Princess Thayet of the Tortall books looked like Nefertiti for just this reason, despite repeated textual descriptions of her skin as being cream or ivory. I was seriously disappointed when someone pointed out that Thayet was white.)

    If anyone’s looking for a fantasy book about non-white princesses, I recommend Sherwood Smith’s Posse of Princesses. Both the main character and her main rival (who is considered by everyone to be the most beautiful princess present, in part because of her skin) are decidedly non-white and princesses. (The world is a bit pseudo-European, though, and somewhat inexplicably all of the people on the cover are white.)

  35. I applaud your thoughtfulness on this topic and agree with your analysis of the doctor’s words – teaching the princess skin = white skin is exclusionary and in a way privileges people with fair skin.

    Trying to be a progressive-thinking parent must be a lot of work, but I’m glad people are attempting to raise children to be aware.

  36. For U.S. Jews, “Princess” actually has a pretty terrible connotation and is associated with the stereotype of a spoiled “Daddy’s Girl” who is shallow and loves spending other people’s money. I think part of this stereotype is playing into the assumed absurdity of a Jewish Princess. And trying to punish a minority class for accumulating wealth.

    Needless to say, most Jews don’t have blonde hair and blue eyes, though some do.

  37. Also, Derek, thank you for being such a textbook definition of mansplaining! Complete with “I hope this helps!” Wow, it totally does! Next time someone is confused about what “mansplaining” means, I can just direct them to your comment. Thank you so much!

  38. I second Meg, I loved Dealing with Dragons and the rest of the Enchanted Forest chronicles. A couple years ago I bought them for my (now) 12-year-old Sister-in-Law and they definitely hold up. It has a female king, a non-blonde princess (although as I recall they make too much of that), and a definite lack of rescuing by princes.

  39. Evil Fizz – interesting post.

    “I thought about phrases like alabaster skin (e.g., Snow White), usually marked by cherry red lips”. I can’t speak for anyone else pale or generalise, but I can say from my own body and from my family (a lot of pale redheads) that very few of us have naturally red lips. I know that if I wear foundation that matches my skin tone, my eyelids and lips are not prominent, especially as my eyebrows and eyelashes are quite light as well. The thought isn’t fully coherent, but it made me think about beauty standards and ideals and so-called sirens in cinema as inheriting the princess model if these red lips can only be created artificially. Hope that isn’t too much of a tangent!

  40. Shoshie, it’s interesting that you mention the Jewish princess stereotype. I never encountered that until I went to college at an institution where 40% of the undergrad population was Jewish and managed to display some appalling ignorance of my own on that subject. It seemed like the one time where princess wasn’t fluffy and light, but scheming and avarice personified, more wiled stepsister style. I hadn’t thought about the idea of princess being decidedly negative for one group like that. I’m going to chew on that some more.

  41. K: Lots of people mentioned that we need better and more examples of “non-white” princesses; princesses that don’t conform to the Disney/European fantasy ideal. I think the best source for this is all the awesome, real princesses that can be found in the history of the world.As a child I had a wonderful book, called “To Be A Princess”, which profiled 12 real, historical royal girls, including Princess Ka`iulani of Hawaii, who fought to keep her nation independent from the US.
    Of course, 4 of the girls are British, but they don’t conform the “blonde-and-blue-eyed” ideal either (Elizabeth I, Mary Tudor, Victoria.) I loved this book as a girl, especially because these were *real* people, not the overly-saccharine powder-puffs of the Disney universe. And I am blonde-and-blue-eyed, so I guess I was supposed to relate to Sleeping Beauty et.al.

    I agree with this comment. I didn’t have that book as a child, but I did have one that sounds similar – it wasn’t about princesses specifically, but “heroines” – which I liked for the similar reason of it being about *real people*, for it teaching you actual history, but also for including other roles than “princess” that historical women had taken on. There were two queens/princesses in that book – admittedly, both white, and one blonde – but the rest of the book was (imo at least – not necessarily right) pretty well balanced both in terms of race and of what the women were being celebrated for.
    The royalty that were mentioned in my book, for instance, were being celebrated for their political achievements and ruling capabilities rather than for looking pretty. The same seems to apply to K’s book, if what was memorable about Ka’iulani was her fighting for independence.

    I think there definitely need to be more representations of *real* princesses – and other women – of every race, as well as more fictional princesses of colour. Real women – especially the ones who’ve done enough to make a mark on history – are not homogeneous, and are not perfect, and so many famous historical women (including those queens and princesses who had power in their own right rather than dependent on their husbands or other men) had to fight hard enough to hold onto what they wanted to do with their lives that they can provide much better role models than passive, damsel-in-distress fantasy princesses.

    Physically I fit the ‘princess’ archetype described here pretty much perfectly – I’m blonde, blue-eyed, and pale (though my skin has been described in lots of complimentary terms, I don’t recall ever hearing ‘princess’, though). I’ve never wanted to relate to fairy-tale princesses, and the thing I resented as a child was the implication of so many of the stories I read was that being female, pale and fair-haired seemed to limit the roles of people-who-looked-like-me (especially if they were princesses) to the delicate, the passive and the in-need-of-saving, at the same time as excluding the people who didn’t fit the looks criteria. A lot of the time, even in stories that subvert the princess paradigm – like The Enchanted Forest Chronicles – the non-conformist princess is darker, as well as being the adventurous and independent one, as evil fizz pointed out in the main post. To girls who are dark it says ‘you can’t be a princess unless you’re fair’, to girls who are it says ‘you can’t be kick-ass unless you’re not fair’. (That’s, incidentally, one of the [many] reasons I first fell in love with The Lord of the Rings when I was small, problematic though a lot of it can be. Because Eowyn.)

    I’ve gone through several phases of wanting short/dyed hair (as a matter of fact, am getting it all chopped off again tomorrow…), at least partly to try and disassociate myself from the ‘princess’-y image long blonde waves give off. I don’t want to be in that box, and I certainly don’t want to be in it when there are so many other girls that might want to and feel they don’t have a right to be in there. My dislike for the princess stereotype has only grown as I’ve got older – when I was little I wanted to be a boy, or to be dark-haired if I had to be a girl, because as far as I could see they were the ones who got to get adventures. It’s just worse now that I also know that there are so many darker girls who want to be allowed the princess spots.

    I wouldn’t mind the old archetypes existing, as long as there were new ones as well. I want there to be beautiful Black princesses who have princes to save them, and I want there to be brave blonde ones who can save themselves – and anyone else who needs saving. And every other possible combination besides. I want us to all be allowed to be what we want to be.

    I’d like to write those stories, if I thought I could.

  42. The comment definitely says a lot about the doctor and your reaction speaks volumes about you. I think what you’ve shared with some of the poc here today is validation of those things-that-must-never-be-spoken-in-a-black-person’s-presence-but-we-can-say-them-to-one-another crap.

    I’m from the “deep” south, Mississippi. I don’t think it gets much deeper than that.

    My children attend private school. Of course, they’re the minority. But for me the choice between the public education that’s offered here versus private school was an easy decision.

    A few white parents who aren’t from this part of the country have shared with me some of the appalling things other white parents who are from this area have said to them.

    I guess it’s some unspoken rule that it’s okay to say racist things with your own kind. Until your own kind tells you were to get off.

    I’m not saying the doctor’s statement was racist. Just interesting.

  43. evil fizz: Also, whoever upthread referred to the doctor as a he, the pediatrician is a she in a big clinic at an Army hospital.  

    yet another post I’m working on as we type. Gender roles. the doctor is male – the nurse is female. As archaic as that sounds, you would be amazed at the number of people who presume male nurses are doctors and female doctors are nurses. It’s unbelievable.

    But back on subject. Sorry

  44. on the one hand, you’re absolutely right, acting like princesses only have the kind of looks we see in fairy tale movies is hugely problematic. on the other hand, man, i would love to be told i had princess skin sometime instead of being called a cave-fish.

  45. I also never heard of the Jewish Princess stereotype until I was in college. My introduction to it was seeing young women wearing pink tracksuits similar to what a lot of the sororities wore that had “JAP” across the ass instead of sorority initials. I was completely shocked that these white girls were openly slurring japanese people on their clothes. It was a while later that I found out what JAP meant.

    So, it seems that the stereotype is embrace by a certain percentage of the people it’s aimed at, much like the “guidettes” on Jersey Shore. It’s certainly not a stereotype I’d bring up myself, but I have had friends refer to themselves as “Japs”. I think it’s one of those words that is ok to use if you are a member of the group being referred to, but not if you aren’t.

  46. I make it a point to avoid the princess stuff with the little girls I come into contact with (family members, neighbours, etc.), because with a few exceptions, princesses don’t do anything. I don’t want the girls in my life to get the message (from me, they’re already getting it most everywhere else) that they are valuable because of their appearance.

    And I would have to second what Shoshie said about the connotations of princess for Jewish girls and women, although I’m in Canada.

  47. @Roschelle “I guess it’s some unspoken rule that it’s okay to say racist things with your own kind. Until your own kind tells you were to get off.”

    YES. I’ve seen this again and again. I attended a small private liberal arts college for my undergrad and the student population was mostly affluent white kids. I had to get very good at saying, “Don’t assume that because we share a skin color means I share your ignorance.”

  48. I just wanted to comment that as a dark-skinned, black haired, brown eyed woman who was told by all the pale, blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian types here in MN that I was ugly and “not a princess”* and disgusting that I’m glad you, and others, are aware of and have examined the privilege inherent in what skin, hair, and eye colors are deemed more acceptable by society.

    *And I realize how troublesome this phrase is but as a young child it hurt to be told I was the “princess’s servant” because I wasn’t blond and blue-eyed.

  49. Morgan, I grew up feeling the same. My parents were/are progressive types, and I grew up really uncomfortable with the attention and stereotypes my freaky-pale, lightly freckled skin, reddish-blonde waves and green eyes got me. Hated them. I hated being presumed to be fragile, stupid, “princessy”. I dyed my hair as soon as I was allowed, and was everything but blonde until I was 24.

    12 o’clock: I agree with you, though I do have naturally red lips, it’s really uncommon. (and was self-conscious about those too)

    I’d be really uncomfortable around that doctor.

  50. I’m eastern and southern European, and my parents are both on the darker side with curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and olive skin. My little sister looks perfectly like a combination of them. I somehow came out tall and thin with light blond hair and green eyes.

    For as long as I can remember, I’ve been told in one breath how beautiful I am and how different I look from my parents. My sister has major body image issues that I worry stem partially from being ignored while people fawned over my looks.

    Meanwhile I have issues with being invisibly physically disabled (is that even the right phrase? I have weird neurological issues that make my legs shake and make me very unsteady. Stairs are hard) and my sister is very strong and balanced. My body is a lovely fragile decoration piece, but hers is strong and functioning.

    1. I’m eastern and southern European, and my parents are both on the darker side with curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and olive skin. My little sister looks perfectly like a combination of them. I somehow came out tall and thin with light blond hair and green eyes.

      For as long as I can remember, I’ve been told in one breath how beautiful I am and how different I look from my parents. My sister has major body image issues that I worry stem partially from being ignored while people fawned over my looks.

      My sister and I are the same way, except she is the taller, super-thin, super-fair blonde one with long legs and no curves. My mom is also fair, blonde and blue-eyed and was skinny her whole life. I ended up short with a big butt and otherwise on the “solid” side with brown hair and olive skin — decidedly not skinny, not blonde, not fair, and in my own head, short, fat and ugly. My dad’s sisters are dark, but they’re also all tall and thin. No one can figure out where my body came from, and it’s been a source of anxiety and shame my entire life. The constant comments about how much my sister looks like my mom’s side, and how her skin is so beautiful, and how she’s so skinny just like my mom and her sisters, always made me feel like an ugly intruder. It didn’t help that my pediatrician made comments about how I needed to lose 10 pounds when I was 16 years old, 5’2″, 105 pounds and a very active kid who played several sports, and then asked my when I had broken my nose (“because it’s so crooked!”). I’m still hyper-sensitive to the comments that anyone, but especially my mom, makes about my weight or what I’m eating. It is rare that I go for more than an hour in a day without worrying about what my body looks like, or how I’m too fat, or how I need to lose 20 pounds. Even when I’m just sitting at my desk, talking to no one.

      My sister, on the other hand, has expressed that she feels some anxiety over me always being “the successful sister” — the one who did really well in school, went to law school, etc etc. She’s just as successful, but I think I felt some need to use traditional markers of success as self-definitional, since I felt like I didn’t have much else to offer. And she always felt like she was judged against me, by our parents and by teachers and by our friends.

      Point being, these narratives that get set when you’re very young — who’s pretty, who’s smart, who’s funny, who’s shy, etc — end up sticking with you, especially when they come from your family and people you trust. Doctors especially have a lot of power to make kids feel like they’re different or ugly or not normal.

  51. I totally agree with the points about the term “princess” inherently idolizing class privilege and the latent racism in our health care system. Both the comments about princesses and the idea that dark skinned people don’t need to use sunscreen are subtle, yet insidious ideas that can really damage individuals and entire populations.

  52. Evil Fizz, thank you for posting this. It’s very refreshing to read about someone for whom creating a narrative about skin-tone bias is a priority. Pallor carries so many social advantages with it, and people who possess it are often unaware of their privilege. And so few people who perpetuate that privilege know (or care) about the damage it does to those of us who don’t.

    As a kid, I was in the thrall of the alabaster-skin myth. Like Pecola, I wanted those deep, blue pools heroes and princes were always gazing into. I wanted white skin like everyone around me had. Hell, even Cimorene is white. I could work with black hair so long as it was white hair. When what you want is not what you have, the tendency is to grow to hate what you have. And I did.

    As I grew older I wore makeup that was shades paler than my natural skin tone. I relaxed my hair. I did everything I could to hide that I just wasn’t “princess” material. No one had to tell me I was ugly and worthless, but you can bet that they did and that I believed them. On some level, I still do.

    Sorry for the detour into personal history, but I wanted to show the few people who’ve said that this isn’t a big issue that it is, in fact, a big issue. I can’t speak to what being pale does for you, but I can say what it’s like to grow up brown in a world where blonde-and-blue are prized above all else. It’s hard to feel like a princess, that’s for sure.

  53. Evil Fizz, thank you for posting this. It’s very refreshing to read about someone for whom creating a narrative about skin-tone bias is a priority. Pallor carries so many social advantages with it, and people who possess it are often unaware of their privilege. And so few people who perpetuate that privilege know (or care) about the damage it does to those of us who don’t.

    As a kid, I was in the thrall of the alabaster-skin myth. Like Pecola, I wanted those deep, blue pools heroes and princes were always gazing into. I wanted white skin like everyone around me had. Hell, even Cimorene is white. I could work with black hair so long as it was white hair. When what you want is not what you have, the tendency is to grow to hate what you have. And I did.

    As I grew older I wore makeup that was shades paler than my natural skin tone. I relaxed my hair. I did everything I could to hide that I just wasn’t “princess” material. No one had to tell me I was ugly and worthless, but you can bet that they did and that I believed them. On some level, I still do.

    Sorry for the detour into personal history, but I wanted to show the few people who’ve said that this isn’t a big issue that it is, in fact, a big issue. I can’t speak to what being pale does for you, but I can say what it’s like to grow up brown in a world where blonde-and-blue are prized above all else. It’s hard to feel like a princess, that’s for sure.

  54. I experienced a kind of similar thing in a Catholic primary school, where we were told that “anglo-saxon” came from the word “angel”, since pale, blond haired, blue eyed British kids resemble angels. It really upsets me that I didn’t realise how racist and fucked up (and incorrect) that was at the time.

  55. @Roschelle-Maybe less of the men=doctores, women=nurses belief, and more of my own inability to imagine a woman doctor pushing the fairest-of-them-all “girls should be little princesses” crap. Apparently, women are just as likely to spew ignorant, hateful crap to your children as men. :/

  56. Lasciel: @Roschelle-Maybe less of the men=doctores, women=nurses belief, and more of my own inability to imagine a woman doctor pushing the fairest-of-them-all “girls should be little princesses” crap. Apparently, women are just as likely to spew ignorant, hateful crap to your children as men. :/  

    Totally agree. I have no doubt that women are just as capable of spewing ignorant, hateful crap to our children as men.

    I was speaking to the assumption that evil fuzz was clarifying where someone presumed the “doctor” was a man.

    I’d been working on a post about gender stereotyping especially in the health care field.

  57. Salix: cancer

    Just wanted to add that, in the USA, Black people are the most likely to die from skin cancer. This is a recent article from Essence, but I think the medical community’s been aware of this for at least a few years: http://www.essence.com/lifestyle/health/black_women_skin_cancer.php

    Doctors still don’t tell Black patients signs to look out for. My brother’s dermatologist is the only doctor I’ve ever come across who’s warned us to keep watch on the birthmarks under our toenails (where dark-skinned people are most likely to get melanoma).

  59. Yes, recently some relatives of mine expressed happiness that their baby’s eyes had stayed blue and when I asked why they felt this way they said “well, blue eyes are better.” So I remarked, “you know who else felt that way? Hitler.” I’m a lot of fun at dinner parties.

  60. Nanette:
    scrumby, when I heard that Disney was planning their first Black princess movie my first thought was that I really, really wanted her to be the most frilly, “feminine”, “princess-y”, useless bit of fluff ever. That’s because, as Sisou mentions above, in common media (at least when I was growing up) little Black girls are never the damsel in distress (or, if they are, they are not damsels and they save themselves), never the princess, no one is jealous of their beauty, never is it thought tragic that they live a life of drudgery instead of being feted and waited upon, no princes are thought to exist to come save them and love them and all the other stuff of the most famous of the princess themes.
    Not that any of those themes are good or anything – but little girls start from a different place in society’s psyche and I wanted the movie to work to move that place just a tad. And also give little Black girls an image of extreme “traditional femininity” to rebel against.
    Instead we apparently just got a frog princess who wants to turn back into a woman and work a lot, lol. Personally, I think Disney tried to please the wrong constituency with that movie.  

    That’s pretty much what I realized at the end. I can throw bad apples out of the bunch because I have apples to begin with. I can reject the conventional princess narrative because I was made to feel a part of it. You just can’t win with this mess.

    @Wednesday
    Yeah for the Egypt Game! I used to have and illustrated version of the Arabian Nights with an image of Scheherazade that had a similar influence on my standards for beauty.

  61. Hey! I’d just like to say, I’m not the Wednesday at No. 34, and I’m sorry if I’m using a handle that someone else uses! Will be using the handle Weekday Blues henceforth, ftr, is that okay? *guilty*
    — Wednesday

  62. I thought Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, showed that African American skin can also be “princess skin”.

  63. Shoshie’s comment really rings true for me, too – as an Ashkenazic American Jewish teenager, that’s what “princess” meant to me. That was well before the Disney Princess onslaught (I was born in 1960), so there was no blonde-and-blue princess stereotype in my head. The princess I remember most clearly from my childhood reading is Sara Crewe, and she was specifically *not* blond and blue-eyed (although her dark hair and eyes made her look “queer”, in Burnett’s phrasing. Hmm).

    Anyway, this post made me think, evilfizz, and I appreciate it. My daughter has olive skin, hazel eyes and curly brown hair, and while she craves straight hair, she loves her skin tone. She went through her own Disney Princess phase as a preschooler, and I never considered the impact of the color of the princesses (I was too busy hating on them for their passivity and prince-worship).

  65. Roschelle, I am working on a post about gender-stereotyping in health-care, too. I’ve been at work for an hour so far today and have had to explain to two people (one family member, one delivery person) that I am the doctor. That has happened every day – every single working day and few when I wasn’t working – since i started my third-year rotations in med school, July of 1984. 26 goddamn years.

  66. My daughter is entirely too fond of the Disney Princess crap. I don’t enable her, but my mother does. I send her away to her grandmother’s and she comes back with a suitcase full of princess pajamas, and while at least some of the princesses have brown or black hair, every damn one of them is white.

    And that’s not even universal with the Disney Princesses. I don’t think I’d mind the princess merchandise so much if it wasn’t *always* Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and one of the moderns, preferably a white one like Belle; or Cinderella, Snow White, and one of the moderns; but usually it’s got the two blondes in there, and THEY ARE THE ONLY TWO. The other princesses are Ariel (white, red hair), Jasmine (Arab, brown skin, black hair), Pocahontas (Native American, brown skin, black hair), Belle (white, brown hair), Mulan (Asian, black hair), and Tiana (black, with brown skin and black hair)… so why are the *white* princesses always on all the marketing crap? Hell, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are two of the least interesting, most useless women out of the whole group… and it’s not that those characters are more appealing to little girls, since, frankly, little girls have not even *seen* those characters unless their families went out of their way to get them the DVDs.

    My mom loved Maleficent when she was a girl and thought she was beautiful. (My mom, like Maleficent, has white skin and black hair.) So why is she inflicting all this blonde princess shit on my red-haired daughter? And why doesn’t Disney even *sell* “Disney Princess” crap where there are three princesses and they’re all non-white, or one is white and two are not white?

    I buy my kid Dora and Kai-Lan stuff. (Not the aged-up tween Dora stuff, that makes me so sad. I find myself imagining a little Mexican girl who loved to explore in the jungle with her animal friends being subtly pushed by her middle-class family to take on more sedate, appropriately girlish pursuits as she hits 9 or 10, so now she wears her hair long and brushes it all the time and sits at her computer chatting with online friends most of the time and it makes me so goddamn *sad*, because even though Dora is a fictional character this has been happening to adventurous little girls since long before C. S. Lewis had Aslan keep Susan out of Paradise because she’d moved on to clothes and makeup and given up “childish” adventure. I mean, Diego’s older sister got to stay an animal rescuer, why did Dora have to give up the exploring when she got older and get all into hair styling and makeup and online friendships instead of flying around the world in some helicopter Swiper undoubtedly stole to find friendship bracelets? But I digress.) My daughter loves them. But she plays princess a lot too.

    She told me that a black friend of hers from preschool wasn’t her friend anymore because the girl had ugly hair. That made me want to cry. I told her that her friend had beautiful hair and went on a whole rant about all the different ways that hair can be beautiful, and then I went out of my way to say things to my daughter like “Did you see how pretty your friend’s hair was today?” or how nice her dress was or whatever (except I use the girl’s name, I don’t just say “your friend”.) But it’s so damn hard. I mean, nowhere near as hard as it is to raise a little black girl in a racist society, obviously, but it’s so damn hard to try to raise a little white girl in a racist society so she won’t be a privileged little asshole (kind of like raising a little boy of any race in a sexist society to not be a privileged little asshole, actually.)

  67. Oh, and regarding sunscreen:

    When I was a kid, it was called “suntan lotion” and it was considered almost wholly optional. *No* one put it on their kids before they went to school. Now I can safely send my albino son to school with a tube of sunscreen and they’ll put it on him.

    I think that “people with dark brown skin can’t tan/burn/get skin cancer” is a myth borne of ignorance, but the necessity for sunscreen itself was something the majority of white people were ignorant of as recently as 30 years ago, so I do have hope that this situation will correct itself. Just like “oh, right, women *do* get heart attacks!” is slowly correcting itself. What bugs me is that, in the area where white people are known to be physically “weaker” than black people (meaning we have less physical tolerance for something), we did quickly respond, start treating our own weakness, and all that needs to be done now is for it to percolate through that it’s actually everyone’s weakness, just we have more of it; but in the areas where black people have a lower tolerance, I see no sign that anyone even recognizes there’s a problem.

    Specifically, milk. Today I dropped my son off at camp and I saw a black girl pick up a carton of free milk from an entire table of free milk, and while it’s quite possible that she’s lactose-tolerant and drinks milk all the time, the truth is that statistically black people and Asian people and Native American people lose their lactose tolerance early in childhood, most of the time… so why do we continue to feed all our school-age children milk, and *only* milk? Juice boxes are not provided as an alternative, cold water bottles are not provided as an alternative… hell, soda is probably better for a child with extreme lactose intolerance than milk is, but the only concession I’ve ever seen to this fact in school lunches is that in schools where the population is 99% black sometimes they have Lactaid brand de-lactosed milk in cartons. Um, wouldn’t it be cheaper to provide *juice* than *Lactaid*? And what about the schools that are 50% black, how come they don’t get the Lactaid? My city is 61% black, why are we not offering our children juice as an alternative to milk for lunch, across the board? There are *no* public schools in this city with 0% black students.

    I feel like, if something is a problem for white people, it will be addressed. Then, if it turns out to be a problem for black people too, it’s just a matter of “no, they’re not immune, they have that problem just like ‘normal’ people do” (ie, white people are normal) percolating into people’s minds. But if something is a problem for black people, I feel like it basically never does get addressed by the systems designed to support the majority, even in the localities where black people are in the majority.

  68. Double yes on the milk thing. Pretty much anyone without Northern European or East African decent are going to lack the mutation that makes lactose digestion as an adult possible. Something like 75% of the world population has trouble with milk but don’t tell that to the school board. It took my mother weeks of heavy campaigning to get juice for me and my brother because we “could always just bring food from home.”

  69. Longtime lurker here. I just wanted to echo Elby a little: I grew up with the idea that pale, pale skin such as mine was sickly looking. No one ever told me my skin was pretty – people, including my father, my friends, and even TEACHERS, usually made mocking observations about it with surprisingly little inhibition.

    However. The effects this had on me never ran deep, precisely because all the hurtful remarks people make about the super-pale are strongly counteracted by many cultural messages telling us pale skin, if done right (ha!) is The Most Beautiful, associated with class and femininity – that in short, it’s “princess skin,” as your doctor so well (and inadvertently!) put it. It wasn’t the paleness (read: whiteness) that people found “ugly,” but the things that came along with it in my particular case (veins, red blotchiness, etc.). Paleness as an isolated characteristic? Huge privilege.

    Now that I’m in college, things have reversed a little, and I see people snarking on girls and women for tanning *too* much, and it’s all bullshit because of a) hello, body policing, and b) the tan/pale debate excludes poc. I mean, when tan white people make fun of extremely pale white people I’m sure there is some kind of “ism” at play, but I dunno – I never directly encountered it/them, was never made to feel totally inferior because of my skin the same way poc are. I only write this, because, it’s an inevitable part of the discussion when teaching pale children about their privelege. Many of them may be mocked the same way I was – but it’s important for them to understand where that mockery stems from and how it’s different from racism.

  70. AC: I only write this, because, it’s an inevitable part of the discussion when teaching pale children about their privelege. Many of them may be mocked the same way I was – but it’s important for them to understand where that mockery stems from and how it’s different from racism.  

    Dude, this is SO IMPORTANT, this RIGHT HERE. Like, the number of times I, writing in a fat acceptance capacity, have encountered people who say, “Oh yeah, body snarking is totally awful and happens to everyone.” Or a black lady writes about her struggles accepting her hair, and a white person say, “Yeah! I got made fun of because of my totally straight, flat hair!” It’s a weird variation of a “What About the Men/Skinny Chicks/White Folks” argument, and it is totally insidious and sucks. Because if you try to explain that, no, it’s not the same, then you end up looking like the baddy, denying someone else their lived experiences.

  71. Evil Fizz, thank you for not flaming me.

    I was raised by my mother who took ever drug you have ever heard of, for migrains which later turned out to be caused by a tumor.

    Then there was my aunt who simply put, was a druggy. I ended up raising my two cousins while being babysat, all before I was twelve.

    But the role model of my life was my father. What little i saw of him. He taught me that a man’s job in life was to go to work. You are having a argument with your wife, go to work. You miss your children, trust your wife to take care of them, the only thing you are good for is to go to work. My father, and myself can barely stand up straight. Our backs are that screwed up. But we go to work.

    Boys don’t cry, that is what my parents taught me. I was raised knowing that I would be crawling through a river of shit, that I would be in pain until the day I died. And I would be doing it for the woman who decided to put up with me,”and I better appreciate it.” And perhaps the children I might have with her. The children I will rarely see, because I will probably be at work. There is more pain than anybody can easily allot, to go around, when it comes down to it, the woman I love shall rule my emotions and my actions, because I am incomplete as I am.

    I looked at you posts because I was trying to understand, but it goes both ways. I am big, brutish, tattood, and scarred. But I am easily hurt, Shoshie your flame hurt more than when I got stabbed seven times. Evil fizz, I know I was just a guest on this site, and I thank you for you understanding, I won’t bother you again.

    For the earlier post, I am sorry if you thought I was being condescending, that was not my intention. Due to the way I was raised, I view things from a differently perspective.

    Sincerely Derek VerHaar

  72. What about mentioning that princesses aren’t good things? That “princess” is a title in an anti-democratic political system that makes classism a fact of law? No girl should want to hold a hereditary title that endows unbelievable wealth and privilege by birth right.

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