Today’s candidate for world’s worst dad: Jeremiah Heaton.
The Virginia father of three has claimed a disputed stretch of land between Egypt and Sudan as his own in order to fulfill his daughter’s dreams of being a princess. Heaton planted a flag in an 800-mile stretch of desert called Bir Tawil and is now trying to get his claim recognized by neighboring countries (here’s hoping his diplomatic skills are better than John Kerry’s). He told The Washington Post: “I wanted to show my kids I will literally go to the ends of the earth to make their wishes and dreams come true.”
Oh, please. Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that it is not your job as a parent to make your child’s dreams come true. This imperialist dream in particular is one that any responsible father should shut down immediately.
There are plenty of reasons to tell your daughter she can’t be a princess, but here’s the best one — it’s simply un-American.
We live in a democracy, a form of government for which our ancestors have fought pretty darn hard. And we don’t put a 7-year-old girl in charge of other people or plots of land, no matter who her father is.
Sure, the Internet erupted with outrage at the way this man was spoiling his daughter Emily, who also sleeps in a custom-made castle bed. Parenting bloggers wondered whether this wasn’t a sign that this princess stuff has finally jumped the shark.
In a book called “Cinderella Ate My Daughter,” Peggy Orenstein offers a useful history of the princess trend. She writes, “When I was growing up, the last thing you wanted to be called was a ‘princess’; it conjured up images of a spoiled, self-centered brat with a freshly bobbed nose who runs to Daddy at the least provocation.”
All that changed thanks to Disney, which turned the princess fantasy into a moneymaker. In 2009, the company sold $4 billion worth of princess products. And that was before “Frozen.”
But there has been a serious princess backlash recently.
Disney has come under fire for making its princesses too white. Earlier this year a Tumblr artist received a lot of attention after she created her own version of all of the princesses — reconceiving them as women from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Way to fight the power! Now we can have little benevolent black dictators and Latina rulers in addition to the white girls ordering around their subjects.
Feminists also have their own objections. You know the lines: Why are they always waiting to be rescued by a man? Why can’t Ariel find her own voice without kissing the prince first? Can Cinderella only be saved by trying on shoes? Can’t Princess Jasmine see the world without a guy on a magic carpet showing it to her? Good points, perhaps. But the problem with princesses is not that they’re helpless. It’s that they have too much power.
If you really want to go after Disney for the images they are offering girls, it shouldn’t just be about their whiteness or their unrealistic dress sizes. It shouldn’t be about whether they have men rescue them. It should be about the fact that princess stories are products of old fashioned societies that arbitrarily give some people power over others.
Maybe we think princesses are all charming do-gooders like the lovely Princess Kate, but experience and history suggest that giving unlimited authority to girls in fourth grade does not end well.
Earlier this year Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg launched the “Ban Bossy” campaign in an effort to get people to stop calling girls the “b-word” and encourage more girls to take on leadership roles. Maybe the problem is that too many girls really are bossy — and telling them they’re princesses isn’t helping.