So I’m about to graduate, move, take the bar… all sorts of scary things.  I have to get a job, I have to keep looking for/look for another job (a hopefully law-related job, by which I mean, public defender position, the only “lawyer” gig I’m interested in).

And it’s reminded me that change is scary.  It’s fucking TERRIFYING.  I’ve been saying for weeks I really don’t want to graduate.  I don’t want to have to re-enter “the real world.”  I don’t want to face the stress and rejection that comes with job hunting. I’m scared I’ll leave the cozy cradle of school, something I’ve always been good at and a place I’ve always been comfortable in, and just fall on my face and fail.

But nonetheless, I am graduating, I am moving, I am going to get a job, I am going to move onto the next thing, this big scary unknown thing.

Because change is scary, but it’s also necessary. I can’t be a student forever. Change is scary but you’ve got to charge right into the teeth of it.  There’s no turning back.  The only way out is through.  You dive in, you acclimate, you learn, you grow, and then it changes again.  That’s life. 

The problem with the world today is all the people who are just flat out digging in their heels and resisting change.  They’re not just resisting change, they want to turn it back to some idealized time before “it all went wrong.”  Here in the United States that seems to be before the 60s, before Roe v. Wade, before Feminism, before the sexual liberation, before protests and the voting rights act and the civil rights act.  Or better yet, before the nineteenth amendment - before women could vote - or before the 17th amendment which made senators subject to popular election.  

The 17th Amendment?  Are you kidding me?  How far back would you like to roll the clock?  Should we just ditch this whole democracy thing because “we the people” just don’t seem to be laying down and acquiescing quietly to the corporate oligarchy you favor? 

Gays are out.  They’re forming committed relationships - eventually they will be marriages - they’re adopting children; women are in the workplace.  They control their own reproduction.  They take the pill and they get abortions and best of all they survive them. This has been true for decades and decades.  

And what, exactly, is the terrifying outcome of this? Women have control of their lives and their bodies (at least in theory), gay men and women can live lives of dignity and liberty (at least in theory).  It’s not unraveling marriages (at least not good marriages - which I’m defining as those in which both people are still in love, committed and sexually satisfied) it’s making better ones.

I’d be way more afraid of the newer changes the past decade has brought.  Wire tapping, drone assassinations of American citizens without due process, wars fought without declarations of war — these are far more tangible infringements on real rights and have far more terrifying consequences than whether or not gays can get married - which just doesn’t have any effect on me that I can see.

Change is scary.  But get over it.  Time marches ever onward and you can either keep moving with the rest of us or get trampled or left behind.  Even if we wanted to we couldn’t stop for you.

This, is an excellent piece written by Chloe Angyal of Feministing.  It talks about a lot of things that I have been thinking about for… well, for roughly three years and eight months, or since the time that I realized I was in an abusive relationship and trying to figure out how in the hell that happened to me.

Perhaps sometime more about that, but for now, let’s focus on the fairy tales.

Angyal’s piece takes Snow White as its leaping-off point.  Specifically two different Snow White movies, one of which is already out and one which comes out in June.  I’m not going to try and recap the excellent points she makes about fairy tales and the modern romantic comedy (go forth and read it yourself), but I was reminded about a conversation I had with a friend about the Snow White fairy tale specifically. 

Fairy tales generally are not really tales of active heroines; the women in fairy tales are all in bad situations and it is always the intervention of others which facilitates their escape.  That being said, there are varying degrees of agency amongst the fairy tale princesses.  Cinderella has to leave the house, has to go to the ball, has to dance with the prince.  Yes, it’s a stupid, sad, heteronormative act all about her lack of worth without an approving male gaze.  It’s also another shity tale about how women, particularly older women (stepmother) are horrible harpies who do nothing but cut other women down, especially sweet, pretty ones too nice to fight back.

Still, Cinderella has done something, she put her foot out the door.  Rapunzel, at least in the true Grimm version, may be the best, however, since she ultimately has to survive in the wild and find her prince, who is blinded and also wandering, and she heals him.  She heals him with magical tears of love, of course, so there’s limited agency in that, but she still has more agency than Cinderella in that way.  Cinderella meets the prince and then leaves and loses her shoe and does nothing about it until he comes to try and put that show on her foot.  Class politics in Cinderella some other time. 

Snow White, however, is the worst of the fairy tale heroines - well, her and Sleeping Beauty are more or less the same, really.  Snow White is basically helpless at every turn.  She goes for a walk, the huntsman is all set to kill her, she doesn’t run, just sits there and cries.  The Huntsman chooses not to kill her (cuz she’s just so damn pretty) and tells her to run.  Apparently she couldn’t come up with that herself.

She also can’t survive in the woods.  She has to discover the little house of the seven dwarves Goldilocks style, and she stays there doing the only thing a little woman can do - house keeping. Eventually her evil stepmother finds her and Snow White, having learned NOTHING, apparently, trustingly takes the apple, takes a bite, falls into a deathly sleep, where she remains until kissed awake by the prince.  The. End. 

Snow White is my least favorite, particularly the Disney version. She just strikes me as the absolutely dimmest Disney princess ever.  I don’t have any specific memory of dressing up as a Disney princess.  I’m pretty sure I was Laura Ingalls Wilder once, Pippi Longstocking for sure.

Point being.  I have not yet seen these new Snow White movies, but I hope that they do something to give the Snow White character greater personality and agency and brains than I recall her having in previous versions.  Because otherwise all it really becomes about is a horrible witch, and how older women are petty and vain when they try to cling to the physical beauty which the rest of the world values more highly than her brains or her wisdom or anything else. 

I’m saying there are a lot of women out there, not just girls - women, who are waiting to be rescued.  There are women who are sacrificing their agency without really even thinking about what they’re doing, without first even understanding that they HAVE agency, and fairy tales are part of it.  Romantic comedies are part of it (again, read Chloe Angyal’s article); but most importantly we are all also a part of it.  

I have pretty progressive parents who certainly didn’t encourage me to pursue not one but two degrees (B.A. and J.D.) so that I could land the most important one of all: the Mrs.  If anything my parents think that I think about my relationships or lack there of too much.  And they’re probably right.  And yet, these are the same parents who bought us all the Disney movies.  We are spectacularly uncritical of the messages that young girls are receiving from popular media, even the safe “family-friendly” media outlets like the Family Channel and Disney.  

We need to pay more attention to what kind of women young girls watch and are encouraged to emulate and admire.  I can only imagine how much worse my own story would be had I not been such a voracious reader and read lots of books that starred women with real agency; women with their own goals and drives and wants that were clearly considered real and valid by the authors (usually women).  

In conclusion,… well, I’ll defer to Sara Bareilles on this one:

1) I’m sure in the vast array of limitless possibilities there is a circumstance where a safety officer in a public high school might have to use mace and that use could be commensurate with public safety, policy, etc… but I’m damned sure that no fucking food fight rises to that level.

2) Apparently, we womens don’t care as much about money, that’s why we’re making $0.77 on the dollar compared to similarly situated men ($0.75 in WI where they just repealed the state equal pay statute) BUT the economy is still the issue we care most about (according to the mens, who obviously know better than silly us) BUT polling shows that women favor Obama in droves because BUT this is apparently we don’t understand the issues as well as teh mens.

3) SERIOUSLY?  WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

4) I am too tired to have a debate on this.  If you, for some reason, feel that somehow macing children in their school because they were throwing food is appropriate or that it’s totally okay that women get paid less because, y’know, some of them choose to have babies (even though the pay disparity remains even when you control for marriage and motherhood and FUCK YOU), just keep it to yourself.  Maybe after I’m done with law school and passing the bar and getting a job I’ll have the bandwith once again to fight with misogynists and fascists, but now is not that that time.  It has been a long hard road to get here, one that has forced me to internalize that many people consider me a second class citizen simply by virtue of my biology and that the institutions I thought were meant to be “for the people” don’t actually have my back.  So I don’t care to listen to your ableist, infantalizing, patriarchal excuses.

5) The world was supposed to be better by now.  We were supposed to make it better.  Not more efficient, not richer: BETTER.  We should be better than this.  I have always believed that humanity is inherently good and that we can rise above and evolve socially and intellectually and emotionally and spiritually; I believe that we’d eventually grow past prejudice and bigotry and embrace pluralism for the incredible enriching experience and resource that it is.  You are making this very hard.  If it gets much harder I will simply become a hermit-author-poet who will be famous long after I die for writing that no one will actually understand and this will be a loss to you, because alive-and-engaged me is  awesome.  Stop letting me down people.