By Celine Zeineldine | Staff Writer
The word “3a2belik” rings in my ears at every single wedding I attend. Among the shoes stabbing at my heels, the sprayed hair burning my eyes, and the cinched dress digging into my ribs, this word is the straw that broke the camel’s back – the camel being me. As such, I wondered: why is it that everyone thinks that my lifelong goal is to meet a man who will take me as his lawfully wedded wife? Why did I grow up believing this?
My role model as a six-year-old was Belle from Beauty and the Beast; I wore her dress for my eighth birthday and had a framed picture of her, Cinderella, and Aurora in my room. If you would have asked me why I loved her so much, my reasons would be her love for reading, her self-sacrifice in order to save her father, and the way she “fixed” the beast. However, if I were to be honest, I would admit that I probably liked her because I thought she was the prettiest Disney Princess among them. This matter of the fact made me realize that, as a child, most movies that I had seen had always portrayed a conventionally beautiful, slim girl in need of a man to save her. Cinderella was so beautiful at the ball that the Prince Charming could not recognize her out of her dress, Belle’s name literally means pretty in French, Aurora is rarely referred as her actual name because she is known as the Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White had to run away from her castle because she was too beautiful for the evil queen to bear. Had the princesses not been beautiful, they would not have “scored” a man to save them. All of the princesses I have mentioned were saved by a man, except for Belle who fell victim to the Stockholm syndrome, which seems to be romanticized instead of problematicized. Both Aurora and Snow White needed a man’s kiss to wake them from their potentially eternal slumber.
Let us take it up a notch, Aurora had 17 minutes and 52 seconds of screen time during the 1 hour and 15 minutes movie that is supposed to be about her. Cinderella lost protection the second her father died and found protection again only when the prince came to take her hand.
At a young age, we have been spoonfed the idea that our worth is only as much as a man sees it to be. We have been taught that we need to wear dresses, paint our faces, tear off our body hair, burn the hair on our heads, lose weight, and be a damsel in distress because, otherwise, no man will want us. As a result, women fail to realize that their physical appearance does not define their worth. They find it difficult to realize that their hopes and goals do not need to include a man. Merida from Brave and Elsa from Frozen did not need a man, in fact, they beat them at their own game. Even though both Anesthesia and Mulan ended up with men, those men just came along and were not these princesses’ saviors. Women should live their lives the way they want to. If a lover comes along the way, that is okay. It is okay to want a partner but do not forget that you do not need one.