another castle

[jazzfish]

When I was young, probably around six years old, I did some thinking about fairy tales. About brave knights falling in love with princesses and rescuing them from dragons, about grateful princesses falling in love with their rescuing knights. The conclusion I came to was that it was possible for women to simply be loved, but men could only be loved if they did something to deserve it.

This is poisonous for lots of reasons, I know. I imagine any feminist scholar could have a field day with it. The bit I’m working on at the moment is that if I’m not loved, it’s because I haven’t done enough to deserve it. And there’s two (related) ways to tackle that: either do more to deserve it, or need less so I won’t have quite as much of a deficit to make up before I do deserve it.

On some level I know this is false, but I haven’t found anything to replace it with that I can believe that bone-deeply.

Comments

[snippy]

Good for identifying it. Good for working on it.

[jessie_c]

What about the poor handsome Prince who's waiting for a Knight to rescue him from the endless line of Princesses his parents keep throwing at him? How about the Princess who cares nothing for the Princes, but who's head over heals for her lady in waiting?

Why did we never get their stories?

[sartorias]

That is the other side of the toxic assumptions of fairy tale like stories. I remember devouring Lord Dunsany as a kid, then coming back to one in college, and screeching to a halt. Wait a minnit, I thought. This princess, who is basically kept in a silken prison so that she's delivered to her husband "pure", supposedly falls in love with a brute of a knight who no doubt is stinking with sweat and blood, after just gutting some other guy, or critter, right in front of her? Wouldn't she want to run?

Then I found out that Eleanor of Aquitaine was there way, way before me, and started the whole chivalric manners, saying basically, guys, if you want to match up with one of us gals, a bath would be nice. Music knowledge a plus. Conversation on anything besides killing another plus. Definitely getting to know each other, maybe dancing a few times, and by the way, you don't have to be a hulking brute . . .

[greenstorm]

What is "being loved"? Since you can't access folks' emotions directly to rate them on the scale, you must be using a proxy. What's the proxy?

(From someone who's clearly never loved anyone because of having the sex with multiple people, by many proxies).

[sarahk]

... You are, though.
Loved.
You are enough.