Fairy tales failed our daughters

[Ed. - It would take me forever to link every character and movie cited in this post. Many of them can be sourced at Wikipedia's Disney Princess entry.]

I think I understand what little girls used to dream about. Work hard, be pretty and eventually a prince will sweep you away to a vastly better world. I know this because I've watched every Disney Princess movie. Over and over and over again.

Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950), Aurora (1959), and Ariel (1989) were all separated from their mothers and tormented by stern female authority figures. But all four remained sweet, beautiful and chaste. And all four eventually had a valiant and handsome prince carry them off without anything resembling a courtship.

But Ariel was the last of a dying breed. In 1991 Beauty and the Beast introduced us to Belle. Like her predecessors, she was sweet, beautiful and chaste. However her male counterpart was not a handsome prince, but a selfish jerk cursed to mope around his castle in the form of a furry and top-heavy beast who kidnapped Belle's father and then blackmailed her into a life of slavery. Belle's raison d'etre was not to better herself, but to find a way to fall in love with this monster and - more importantly - teach him how to love her back.

Since then, America's girls have watched Tiana follow roughly the same script, but with a frog. And they've been introduced to Jasmine and Rapunzel, both of whom are beautiful, powerful princesses who inexplicably fall for petty crooks.

Post-1991 Disney princesses are not the equals of their male counterparts. They are their superiors. They are more attractive and more aggressive. Which makes me think teen boys these days must have it awfully easy. Wear slouchy pants and smoke pot and eventually some gorgeous girl will offer you adoration, money and a blowjob.

If I'm overreacting, I blame Atlantic essayist Caitlin Flanagan. She's one of those writers who thinks stating opinions strongly turns them into facts. But her apocalyptic descriptions of modern teen sexuality worry the hell out of me:

Fellatio, which was once a part of the sexual repertoire only of experienced women, is now commonly performed by very young girls outside of romantic relationships, casually and without any expectation of reciprocation... Nowadays girls don't consider oral sex in the least exotic—nor do they even consider it to be sex. It's just "something to do."

This was not the way things were when I was in high school.

It's not female empowerment that scares me. (Although I wouldn't define casual blowjobs as empowering.) It's male apathy. With Disney as their tutor, modern girls are taught to marry their lessers and then try to brush the boys towards greatness through some combination of seduction and guilt.

There is a drastic flaw with this system. Ninety percent of the things teen boys do, they do to impress girls. If the girls no longer need impressing, teenage boys have no reason to rise above mediocre.

One of Flanagan's most powerful pieces is the unfortunately titled essay The Passion of Alec Baldwin. I may have read it more times than I've watched The Little Princess. No small feat, that.

A girl wants a story to build her life on, the original story of the great love that brought her here. She wants things a boy never will: the dried flowers from her mother’s bouquet, the glass ashtray from the honeymoon hotel, the telling (over and over again) of the way her father insisted to the charge nurse that there had to be, somewhere on that maternity ward, a private room for his wife.

Perhaps this is why the princes that fell for first-generation Disney Princesses never had a backstory. Nobody cared. Boys don't need backstories. They need swords. Meanwhile, Snow White and her friends had missing matriarchs, aging tormentors, fairy godmothers, animal friends, hobbies, lovely singing voices, cottages in the woods, and so on.

But modern fairy tales fail our children, encouraging our daughters to spend their adolescence making out with losers and our sons to spend their lives pursuing nothing much at all.

With less and less help from society, parents must be more and more vigilante. They have to tell their children that the fairy tales have got it all wrong. They must find a way to explain why casual sex is the province of adults. And they need to tell their daughters this: "Marry a prince, not a project. Marry a man who does not need saving."

Won't misery make angels?

The horror movie retells the story of sin, penance and redemption. The moral is always that conventional lives are safe lives, and those who stray will be tortured until they find a way to redeem their sins.

The plot of the modern fairy tale - and specifically the Disney film The Princess and the Frog - is almost identical to that of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wrong Turn, Hostel, and the Friday the 13th sequels. Tiana is a moral girl, working two jobs and saving her pennies so that one day she can open her own restaurant. One night, she's offered a shortcut. A frog promises her riches in exchange for a kiss. (Oh those talking frogs!) Tiana sells her virtue and is instantly given, not money, but the body of a frog. The two frogs are chased into the swamp, where they are hunted by alligators and tormented by voodoo spirits. Eventually the frogs fall for each other and discover long-term love is more important than worldly temptations. Their marriage washes away their sin. And their first kiss as man and wife is rewarded by a return to human form and the good graces of their parents and community.

Compare that to any of the movies I mentioned earlier, in which good kids' sexual desires lead them off the beaten path, where they are tormented by inbreds and slashers and must suffer until they find their way back to civilization.

These days, children gain knowledge of sex and violence before they're even out of diapers. Sin assaults them from every commercial and magazine cover. It's easy to say that is causing the redemption story to creep into tales meant for younger children.

But it's not true.

It's more accurate to say that the cycle of sin, penance and redemption is part of the human experience. It is something we live with at every age and in every circumstance. It is something we experience not just as horny teenagers but as four-year-olds pouting in timeout for eating too much candy, as celebrities making tabloid headlines for VIP room dalliances, as quarterbacks stepping onto the field after short stints in the slammer, and as middle managers working the weekend to make up for a Thursday afternoon on the golf course.

Our culture believes that suffering cleanses. Isn't that the lesson that our fictions have ground into us since birth? Is it any surprise that we blithely watch as mankind burns? That we do nothing upon hearing of starvation and genocide? That we accept poverty and war? That we brush off the serial killers and head for the sports scores? We shrug it all away. And no wonder. We've been taught that misery makes angels.