Few adults feel as though banning a category of play altogether is the right move. Kids’ imaginations need freedom, and kids want to be accepted by their peers. Caring about romance isn’t a fatal flaw. The laws of nature are such that a parental taboo ups the appeal of any particular activity by approximately 10,000%. Also, sometimes a frilly dress really is just a frilly dress — for girls and, increasingly, boys.
Still, to let children play princess and watch stories about princesses without any thought of the ways the implicit, and not so implicit, gender and racial narratives might impact them is to do us all a disservice. These are the mass-marketed messages that beauty is paramount, and marriage to a man equals living happily ever after, with which popular culture has managed to seduce generations of women. Beauty, in this case, is often synonymous with whippet-thin Whiteness.
“I was sitting in Nottingham Cottage and ‘The Little Mermaid’ came on. And who, as an adult, really watches ‘The Little Mermaid’ but it came on and I was like, ‘Well I’m here all the time, I might as well watch this,’…
