Don’t deny girls the evolutionary wisdom of fairy-tales:
Ironically, far from contaminating young female minds, these Disney princess stories — and their fairy-tale-fic precursors — provide vitally helpful messages that parents could be discussing with their girls.
Cinderella, for example, revolves around the perniciousness of what researchers call “female intrasexual competition” — the often-underhanded ways women compete with each other. While men evolved to be openly competitive, jockeying for position verbally or physically, female competition tends to be covert — indirect and sneaky — and often involves sabotaging another woman into being less appealing to men. Accordingly, in Cinderella, when the king throws a ball to find the prince a wife, the nasty stepsisters aren’t at all “let the best woman win!” They assign Cinderella extra chores so she won’t have time to pull together something to wear. (Mean Girls, the cartoon version, anyone?)
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Understanding this evolutionary mismatch helps women get why it’s sometimes hard for them to speak up for themselves — to be direct and assertive. And identifying this as a problem handed them by evolution can help them override their reluctance — assert themselves, despite what feels “natural.” Additionally, an evolutionary understanding of female competition can help women find other women’s cruelty to them less mystifying. This, in turn, allows them to take such abuse less personally than if they buy into the myth of female society as one big supportive sisterhood.
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In other words, the allure of “princess culture” was created by evolution, not Disney. Over countless generations, our female ancestors most likely to have children who survived to pass on their genes were those whose emotions pushed them to hold out for commitment from a high status man — the hunter-gatherer version of that rich, hunky prince. A prince is a man who could have any woman, but — very importantly — he’s bewitched by our girl, the modest but beautiful scullery maid. A man “bewitched” (or, in contemporary terms, “in love”) is a man less likely to stray — so the princess story is actually a commitment fantasy.
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.
You see liberated women today – do their “emotions” push them to “hold out for commitment”? Absolutely not – women’s emotions push them to party (have fun while signaling sexual availability to high status men) until their looks have degraded to the point where they’re invisible to high status men at which time they look for commitment purely as a way to get out of the drudgery of working.
Given that this is the actual observed behavior and that this behavior would leave women with lots of dead kids in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness the only conclusion is that women’s behavior was only part of getting commitment because the fact that commitment being necessary for her children to survive is true.
The solution to the riddle is that women’s behavior has been chosen to solve the problem of finding the sexiest mate possible and it was up to the men in her life (her father, primarily) to ensure that she secured commitment. Her job was to push her father to get her married off by committing acts of escalating outrageousness until her misbehavior got a reaction.
Headline I just saw in the latest National Enquirer: “Meghan and Kate: Warring Wives Tear Princes Apart. Royal catfight forces princes into separate palaces”
Well, count me on Team Kate, all the way.
But really, surely they should be in separate palaces. An heir and spare shouldn’t have to live cheek by jowl in adjacent flats like characters in Bridget Jones’ Diary.