Over the weekend I sat down and finally watched Brave. I'd heard so many good things about it from gender queer friends and feminist friends and advocate friends that I decided that even though I had very little hope for "Disney Princess" movies, I might as well see what it was about.
My immediate reaction upon finishing the film was disappointment. I expected her journey with magic to uncover a handsome prince who had gotten greedy -to fall in love and redeem him through the power of forgiveness. Where was the romance? Where was the "and they lived happily ever after?" Where was the kiss at the end that the entire movie was leading up to?
And then I realized what I was doing.
Does a woman need a man to have a happily ever after? Does she need a prince to have a good ending? Does the prince need to be handsome? Maybe she can blaze her own trail and lead a tribe with her own power without having to marry someone and be delegated to second place by virtue of a vagina. After all, she won the archery contest.
This sudden frank realization that I'd been conforming to a line of sexist thinking made me wonder why. Are we really so trained to believe in the white-picket-fence fairy-tale ending that anything else seems wrong? Has the belief in the "Disney Princess" as an iconic media trope pervaded so far into our culture that we can't imagine said princess if there's not a romance story front and center?
To be honest, I think that's giving myself too much credit though. Because regardless of the conscious knowledge that having a "Disney Princess" who doesn't have a Ken doll accessory is a positive thing, I still wasn't a huge fan of the movie. I loved Merida. But the movie itself seemed cheap and anticlimactic for me.
Maybe it's the fact that my own mother and I have had more than our fair share of nasty arguments, but I find the whole idea of a mother-daughter buddy movie to be boring. Of course they are going to make up. It was a petty teenage argument -they're a dime a dozen. It wasn't like some of the movies out there such as Hook where the distant father suddenly realizes he should spend more time with his family; it was just two strong personalities butting heads.
But more than that, I like romance. Even as a queer woman, I like romance movies. I want two couples to end up happy together; it melts my heart and makes me feel like maybe there's some hope for me after all. But the preference of my children's movies directly ranks with how believable the romances are. Mulan, Tangled, and A Princess Frog are all pretty high up there, with Aladdin, FernGully, and Anastasia floating around somewhere in the middle. After a slow dwindling of movies I will watch, we reach Swan Princess, stuck squarely in the category of 'I will watch it and I will complain but secretly I like the music.' Fox and the Hound is acknowledged as a movie and something like Pinocchio is considered a travesty. In my mind, at least.
I just like romance. I think most people do. It's why things like Twilight sell so well, even though a lot of really intelligent people considered it to be painted shit (I may be paraphrasing). Yeah Twilight would've served a better purpose if it was used for wiping your ass, but that doesn't change the fact that those two (we're told) were as in love as two people can be. We don't want to think about our entertainment; we want to feel it. And the more relatable you can make something, the more we'll be able to feel it.
So while something like Finding Nemo may be a great story, I don't have a kid and probably never will, so the single father bonding film is lost on me.
Unless you're part of the incredibly small minority of individuals who are aromantic, everyone wants to fall in love. It's the one commonality we share.
Of course, the strange thing about this is that love the way we identify it wasn't always around. Take a look at the four Greek perspectives on love: eros, agape, philia, storge. None of these things equate to romantic love. Eros comes the closest, but that was purely physical. Aristotle claimed that far greater than this was philia, which is love of a mental sense. He also didn't believe that men could have this love for women -it was only love of other men. We equate this with friendship. Storge is a relatively new concept, compared to the others, and means blood loyalty, more than anything. Agape then? Second to eros, it's the most famous. And it can be applied to spouses. That's because it can be applied to anyone. Agape is a charitable form of unconditional love closer to divine love than anything else.
So it's readily obvious that romantic love did not always exist. Why then has it become so important that not only does the vast majority of the population experience it, but it's become one of the most important things in our society?
Maybe it really is all social training. Maybe when you're that socially-ingrained, you can't divorce yourself from the things you've been taught. If romantic love is such a relatively new concept, then it should be very possible for a large minority to be aromantic. But we don't see that as being the case.
I don't really know the answer when it comes to love, but I do know that I didn't enjoy Brave as much as I should have, considering how socially progressive it is. Whether that really comes down to socialization or simply taste, I'm not really sure, but I can't like it solely on virtue no matter how hard I try.
