Don't get me wrong, I like fairy tales and I appreciate its role in building the children's characters and planting good morals inside them, it also sets their imagination free to soar in a magical beautiful world, so far we can't see the problem. But the problem is that some of the fairy tales send wrong messages to little children and especially little girls.
Let's take Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty for an example, why the girl has always to be the passive and submissive character while she's ruled by an evil witch, an evil uncle or an evil stepmother? Why stepmothers and uncles have always to be cruel and hard hearted people? Why can't the oppressed character stand up for herself and refuse to be oppressed instead of just waiting (or sleeping in case of Sleeping Beauty..:P) to prince charming to save her? Well, these questions have been wandering in my head ever since I heard these lame stories. And this is my conclusion so far. First, stepmothers don't have to be always bad, in real life there are great examples of stepmothers, but the problem is that we've taken some ideas for granted, like the evil stepmothers, evil stepsiblings, evil mothers in law, evil uncles and so on in the "evils" list. Second, this is a brief message for you Cinderella, Snow White & Sleeping Beauty: "no one is going to save you from your messed up life until you get up and do it yourself, so wake up and say no to oppression, say no to submissiveness, say no to the "no you can't" theme that coats your life with negativity, because I have some news for you, no prince charming will ever notice you if someone is taking over your life and ordering you around all the time and you are accepting that!"
Sometimes I feel that these stories tell the little girls to do nothing in their lives but waiting for Mr. Perfect, it also teaches them to use their beauty to get what they want instead of working hard to earn it. I think that these stories are also negative for boys as well as for girls, because it tells the girls that their right person should be flawless, in every story he is a prince, charming, handsome, lovable and caring as well as popular and brave, basically he's got everything and that's not real. Instead it should teach us to accept our flaws & the others' as well. It should teach us to be open enough to accept the other with its differences. As a result, when girls grow up they become dissatisfied with themselves and with the other sex as well, they want to be an exact version of Barbie and they search for a man that is exactly like ken or Prince Charming, that's why they end up depressed, lonely and with lots of plastic surgeries!
That's why I think we should enhance the self esteem of the little girls by examples from real life, examples of women that work hard to achieve their goals, women that refuse oppression and brave enough to stand up for themselves. We need to teach children to accept their flaws, and to accept the others' as well, they need to know that perfection is a result of our flaws that make each one unique and give each person a different identity, without these flaws we're just soulless copies of a dead Barbie doll and fake images of Prince Charming.
As I said before I like fairy tales and I believe that some of them are really good and teaches great morals to children, for example beauty and the beast or the little mermaid, they teach us that love is beyond looks, it's so much deeper and the importance of sacrifice, other stories teach us the value of friendship and family.
It annoys me so much that still in the twenty first century, girls think they are weak and need someone to save them, it also annoys me how girls see boys, how judgmental they can be and how shallow they are when it comes to love, I think its time to learn how to accept and respect ourselves and each other as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment