Being a Princess is Boring

Well, unless you're Kate Middleton, I suppose. This princess nonsense has gotten women into nothing but trouble since time immemorial. We moon around and wait around for our chosen Prince Charming to show up, thus wasting a lot of time which could have been so much more profitably spent working on our MBAs or traveling the world with the Peace Corps. Hmm. Maybe not when we were kids. But there were still soccer games to be played and books to be read and papers to be delivered--all more worthy pursuits than modeling fake tiaras and ingesting the second-class status of a female royal whose major skill is knowing how to be waited on. Think Princess Buttercup in The Princess Bride, crooning, "My Wesley will come for me." Ugh.

One worthy exception to the uselessness of princesses was Diana, the late Princess of Wales. There was a woman who gave princesses a good name. She was a genuinely lovely person, caring for the sick and the lonely, the poor and the hopeless. She made being a princess a worthwhile career. And, of course, she was beautiful. But she married a toad.

Much earlier than the 60s, our mothers, older sisters, aunts, and grandmothers were trying to warn us that this princess stuff is a crock of . . . spoiled milk or something nasty. The lucky among us have been able to really hear them. Most of us got sucked into the princess sham to one degree or another, though, before experience became a hard teacher and we shook off our princess fantasies for good.

The princess critics have been weak-voiced in the last few decades, perhaps silenced by the dominant power structure fighting back against the feminist movement of the 60s--a great treatment of which is found in Susan Faludi's book Backlash.

But some powerful women have been taking up the princess-exposure business recently. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently told Sesame Street viewers that being a princess is just not a viable career option, no doubt thrashing Disney's sales figures for the quarter. Also not a princess fan is First Lady Michelle Obama. The first family is perhaps the closest thing to royals that we have here in America. But can you imagine Michelle encouraging her daughters to assume the princess role? I think not. Her staunch commitment to children's physical fitness does not jibe with princess-like ways. I mean, have you ever seen a princess sweat or high-five a teammate after the big game?

In my childhood, I couldn't see any advantage to being a princess. They didn't get to do any of the fun stuff. They had to wear gaudy dresses and do their hair all the time. It was the princes or the knights that got the horses, and the cool swords, and the shot at adventure. The princesses got to hang out in moldy, dank castles with bad lighting and creepy old men, waiting for the castle to be invaded by even more unpleasant men whom they might have to marry.

Maybe I'm just mad because no one gave my sisters and me any princess dolls for Christmas. Oh, my sisters had Barbies, but they generally preferred to pose them in Ken's Jeep and hurl them down the hallway while the song Dead Man's Curve played on the stereo. I myself got a G.I. Joe outfitted as a Mercury astronaut, complete with space capsule.

I'm not saying that this formative-years play led my sisters to become NASCAR drivers, but one did major in the rigorous physical recreation course at Springfield College and the other started a small business--seriously un-princess-like pursuits. And me, well . . . I didn't enter the astronaut business, but I did become a pilot and passed my flight instructor test on the tragic day that Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, lost her life when the space shuttle Challenger exploded after takeoff.

For the parents out there, there is good news. I see lots of movies being made with strong female characters, nary a princess among them. I'm dying to see the sci-fi epic Ender's Game, which appears to have a very impressive female role model. Thank goodness all that princess-like mooning over male vampires is finally fading. And next year, sci-fi writer David Weber's long-awaited adaptation of the Honor Harrington series is coming to the big screen. She's the strongest starship captain ever, bar none. Princess dresses will soon be OUT and the white beret of a starship captain will be IN! We can only hope.

Our Jude Hayes excerpt of the day features Amanda Josephine (A.J.) Pierpont, always a lady, but never a princess.

A.J. steamed through the open office door like a battleship coming about to firing position, Bethie and Gisela panting in her wake. Her hazel eyes flashed like eighteen-inch guns firing as she said, “Sometimes I hate people, I really do!” She slapped her gloves onto the table and thunked her handbag down next to them, just missing a plate of sandwiches.

Every member of her audience was standing, watching her in various degrees of astonishment. A.J. Pierpont simply did not raise her voice. Getting control of her temper, she seemed to notice our assembled group for the first time. “Oh, please forgive me, friends. I simply can’t stand to see bad things done to good people in the name of greed.” She looked at each of us in turn. “I think we’d all better sit down—it’s a horrible story I have to tell you and we have much to figure out.” With that, she pulled out a chair and seated herself as elegantly as her state of agitation would allow.