Monthly Archives: August 2004

Something new for Hallowe’en

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pimp_boychild_hoDavid Morrison at Sed Contra gets the hat tip for this particularly unfortunate development:  pimp and "ho" Halloween costumes for young ‘uns.  (Click to enlarge the photos).

These charming outfits are being sold on Yahoo; let’s send them a note today and see if we can make this particular ugliness go away.

The outfits are obviously caricatures of 1970s stereotypes about pimps and prostitutes.  Interestingly, the children shown modeling the costumes are all white, while the classic pimp of the popular imagination (and of these clothes) is black.  It’s interesting, too, that only one "ho" outift is displayed, while several variations of pimp suits are for sale.  David at Sed Contra only displays the photo of the little girl, but I find the idea of little boys dressing like pimps to be at least as disturbing as that of little girls appearing as sex workers. 

Raising just and moral children involves not only shielding young girls from premature sexualization, it also involves making certain that young boys are not idolizing and emulating sexually predatory men.

“Yes, no, hmmm” and Scarlet Magazine

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One of my favorite feminist blogs is Trish Wilson’s eponymous site. I don’t always agree with her, but I’m often forced to reflect as a result of visiting her corner of the blogosphere. She has a fine post today on white men and feminist consciousness, and I recommend it highly.

It is through Trish’s blog that I learned about a new British women’s magazine called Scarlet. It advertises itself as “Sex, shopping and style — a new concept in women’s magazines”. (The link is to a page that is safe for visitors, though I imagine that when the magazine actually appears on-line, it will be too racy for me to link to.) The magazine’s press release is here.

Here’s how the magazine’s holding page advertises itself:

Have you ever looked at a bloke in bed next to you and thought ‘Can’t you just go home now?’ Or maybe you’ve moved in with your bloke and are wondering where your sex life has gone? Or you could be quite happily single and in a committed relationship with your Jessica Rabbit.

If any of these sound like you, then you’re a Scarlet woman; you know what you want and you’re determined to get it. You like shopping, hanging out with your mates and (good) sex, and you know that real sexual confidence is as much about saying no as saying yes.

Scarlet is a magazine that celebrates women. We know that all women are gorgeous if they feel gorgeous, and that any woman can pull if she knows the right tricks. And if she wants to…

Being a Scarlet Woman is about attitude, not looks. It’s about being fun, fearless and feisty. And Scarlet magazine aims to satisfy every part of you. You’ll find intelligent sex advice, features with a real women’s sense of humour and horny stories to help you get your rocks off.

I hope that merely quoting that wasn’t offensive.

My former pastor and dear friend Scott Richardson always said that when presented with something new, he would respond with a “Yes”, a “No”, and a “Hmmm.” That’s exactly my reaction upon reading the promotional materials for Scarlet.

Here’s my “yes”:

I can give an enthusiastic “amen” to anything that says real sexual confidence is as much about saying no as saying yes. That’s a point that young women (and sometimes not so young women) need to hear, over and over and over again. It’s a point that even Christian conservatives need to think more deeply about. I’ve known more than a few Christian men (and women) who thought that while a woman should only say “no” before marriage, after marriage she gave up her right to that short monosyllable! The “right to say no” is not abrogated by marriage or past history.

Our sexualized consumer culture often tells young women that “no” is a word of timidity and conventionality, while “yes” is a word of courage and empowerment. That’s one of the more insidious lies out there. Especially when we are discussing young women eager for attention, validation, recognition and love, “no” is frequently a word that requires far more guts to utter. I’m quite pleased that Scarlet magazine gets that much.

I’ve got another “yes”. Scarlet magazine seems likely to fall into a tradition of journalism aimed at reminding young single women that it is okay to be single, that having a committed relationship with a man is not the only way to enjoy life fully. Feminism is committed to the idea that women can be complete, just as they are, even without a partner. Where Scarlet and I differ is over which behaviors in the single state are truly liberating, and which are simply acts of immaturity and selfishness.

Here’s my “no”. Scarlet asks:

Have you ever looked at a bloke in bed next to you and thought ‘Can’t you just go home now?’ Or maybe you’ve moved in with your bloke and are wondering where your sex life has gone? Or you could be quite happily single and in a committed relationship with your Jessica Rabbit.

I’m not saying “no”, women don’t feel this way. I don’t deny that some women can enjoy a promiscuous lifestyle to the degree that men do, though I do think that those women will be in a permanent minority. More basically, I am saying “no” to the idea that for either men or women, this is a healthy way to live. I am also convinced that these feelings are generally red flags. It is a cliche that after a one-night stand, men don’t want to cuddle, they want to go home (or have their partner go home). It is certainly likely that a fair number of women feel the same way. But the fact that women not only behave as men do but feel the way that men do about that behavior is not cause for celebration! Wanting someone with whom you have just been intimate to “go home” is almost invariably a sign that your own soul is deeply uncomfortable with what just happened. Inthe aftermath of sex, what we really want most (and this is both chemical and theological) is to remain close to the person with whom we just shared the experience. Of course, if we don’t know the person (or don’t like them), we will find it far more difficult to snuggle and cuddle and fall asleep with them; we are more likely to want them gone so that we can soothe ourselves.

I note that in its promotional material, Scarlet puts two powerful “s” words together: sex and shopping. The latter presumably does not refer going to the market to buy butter and beans. “Shopping” here almost certainly refers to clothing, jewelry, and accessories designed to please and flatter the self. “Shopping” is about the hunt for inanimate objects whose only purpose is to delight the buyer; folks obviously don’t care about how their new dress “feels” about being purchased. The publishers of Scarlet, borrowing a tactic from men’s magazines, seem intent on presenting sex (and thus other human beings) in the same commodified light: sex is about receiving for the self alone. Hugh Hefner tied sex together with the consumer lifestyle for men decades ago; it is not progress of any sort when women celebrate the fact that they do the same.

My final “no” is to the notion that Scarlet is proposing anything new. Take a read through Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 Sex and the Single Girl, and the connections among crass consumerism, ambition, and sexuality are just as blatant as in Scarlet magazine.

My “hmmm” lies with the genesis of the magazine, and with my credibility to make comments as well. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Publisher Gavin Griffiths is no stranger to sex magazines. Previously running the Erotic Review, he saw a gap in the market for a young and funky sex title for women:

“I realised that there was no mainstream publication catering for sexually adventurous women. I started chatting to Emily Dubberley, veteran of the female sex market, and it rapidly became clear that we could put together a magazine unlike any others currently out there, and offer women what they really want.”

Love it. I guess Gavin and I are both in the same boat. Both men with a professional interest in women’s issues, both reasonably certain that we can “offer women what they really want.” I think Gavin is offering women what they often choose to settle for, while I imagine he thinks he’s offering them genuine fulfillment. But in the end, neither of us is a woman. Hmmm.

Thursday short poem — Szymborska

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In honor of the late Czeslaw Milosz, this week’s Thursday short poem is also by a Polish Nobel Laureate, Wislawa Szymborska, who won the prize in 1996. I confess I had never heard of her until she won the Nobel, but promptly began to read her. This one’s a favorite, even if the family history statistics are a bit off:

Our Ancestors’ Short Lives

Few of them made it to thirty.
Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.
Childhood ended as fast as wolf cubs grow.
One had to hurry, to get on with life
before the sun went down,
before the first snow.
Thirteen-years-olds bearing children,
four-years-olds stalking birds’ nests in the rushes,
leading the hunt at twenty —
they aren’t yet, then they are gone.
Infinity’s ends fused quickly.
Witches chewed charms
with all the teeth of youth intact.
A son grew to manhood beneath his father’s eye.
Beneath the grandfather’s blank sockets the grandson was born.

And anyway they didn’t count the years.
They counted nets, pods, sheds, and axes.
Time, so generous toward any petty star in the sky,
offered them a nearly empty hand
and quickly took it back, as if the effort were too much.
One step more, two steps more
along the glittering river
that sprang from darkness and vanished into darkness.

There wasn’t a moment to lose,
no deferred questions, no belated revelations,
just those experienced in time.
Wisdom couldn’t wait for gray hair.
It had to see clearly before it saw the light
and to hear every voice before it sounded.

Good and evil —
they knew little of them, but knew all:
when evil triumphs, good goes into hiding;
when good is manifest, then evil lies low.
Neither can be conquered
or cast off beyond return.
Hence, if joy, then with a touch of fear;
if despair, then not without some quiet hope.
Life, however long, will always be short.
Too short for anything to be added.

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The missing textbook

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I’m in my office, working on syllabi for classes that start next week. And one of my favorite texts, Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America, has suddenly gone out of print. I’ve used it in my Men and Masculinity courses twice now, but sometime in the past year, the publisher stopped producing it. The bookstore just let me know of this today; it’s far too late to order another text.

I’m immensely frustrated, but a solution will somehow be found. (It will involve xeroxing. Lots of it.) It says something, however, that the only comprehensive history of manhood and masculinity in the United States has gone out of print. In so many ways, this is the “toughest” course I teach. It’s also one of the most exciting courses, largely because it is designed to answer the questions: “Why are men the way they are?” “How did they come to be that way?”

We are a culture increasingly comfortable with exploring women’s interior lives. We aren’t yet there with men, especially men of color. And men are less interested than women in doing this work. While women are usually 90% of my students in my women’s history class, they are also 65% of the students in the men and masculinity course. That 65% generally does 90% of the participating; though I have had some terrific male students along the way. The bottom line is this: nothing in my teaching career has been more difficult than creating a safe place for men to talk about their feelings and experiences in a mixed-sex environment. Despite my maleness, I have found it easier to get female students to “open up” about body image and rape than it is to get male students to open up about their own anxieties surrounding masculinity.

And yes, as I’ve posted before, getting students to “open up” is a critically important part of the academic experience.

Sigh. Off for a run. The weather is remarkably cool for August in Los Angeles; I shall take advantage at once.

Episcopalians and marriage imagery

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I’ve been remiss in not commenting earlier about the current crisis (if that is the word) here in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Within the past two weeks, three congregations (one each in Newport Beach, Long Beach, and North Hollywood) have informed Bishop Jon Bruno that they are leaving the Episcopal Church. (St. David’s in North Hollywood just made the announcement yesterday). A summary of recent developments is in this Orange County Register article. Bishop Bruno has “inhibited” the priests of those parishes (in other words, he has suspended them); those priests no longer recognize +Jon’s authority, but instead have placed themselves under the authority of a Ugandan bishop. The issue, of course, is homosexuality and different interpretations of what it means to be faithful to Scripture.

Kendall Harmon’s site is filled with conservative coverage of the developments. Though it is updated less frequently, the Every Voice Network is the best source for a progressive perspective. The Rev. Susan Russell (who is on staff at All Saints Pasadena, the parish church to which I am returning) blogs semi-regularly at the EVN site; here is a link to her thoughts on “workers” and “walkers”. Her final two paragraphs:

I find it deeply ironic that those whose rhetoric is full of language about commitment, values and historic tradition are so quick to jettison parish and diocesan commitments, devalue by their words and actions those with whom they disagree and abandon historic ties of relationship between bishop and parish; priest and people. The family system metaphor that keeps coming to me is a troubled marriage where there are clearly long standing differences but one partner believes the marriage is worth working through the differences and the other is ready to walk.

Who are the traditionalists, then: the workers or the walkers? For Anglicans, the answer is the workers — those who hang in there in spite of differences about liturgies and language, gender and genuflection, sheep and goats. The historic faith we inherit is one that is stronger than our differences of interpretation of specific passages of Holy Scripture and deeper than the divides that sometimes separate us into different camps, parties and perspectives. It’s hard work but it’s work worth doing. And it’s the work we’ve been called to do at this particular time in the history of this beloved church of ours: to claim the tradition we inherit as we proclaim the Good News of a God strong enough to unite us in the love that is greater than any differences that threaten to divide us.

I’ve written before that Bishop Jon Bruno is a personal friend of mine. I have tremendous respect for him, for his great heart and joyous spirit. I’ve spent enough time with him to know him as a remarkably kind and gentle man. I know that it is his job to hold the diocese together, and I respect that. On the other hand, I don’t like the idea of suing fellow Christians in civil courts in order to keep them within the church!

Let me pick up on Susan Russell’s imagery of the church as marriage (it’s biblical imagery, of course, as well). She writes:

The family system metaphor that keeps coming to me is a troubled marriage where there are clearly long standing differences but one partner believes the marriage is worth working through the differences and the other is ready to walk.

I’ve got a “yes” and a “no” to that. I do believe that divorce is not something to be done lightly. On the other hand, fidelity is the sine qua non of marriage. Though I disagree with this interpretation, I recognize that on the issue of homosexuality (which, of course, is the issue that undergirds this whole debate) conservative Anglicans are convinced that the Episcopal Church USA has been repeatedly unfaithful. Few folks would tell a wife to stay with a husband whom she believed to be chronically cheating on her, especially when that husband was clear that he intended to continue in his infidelity. Even the New Testament allows for divorce in the case of adultery.

Mind you, I’m not saying that I buy the conservative case that the mainstream church has been unfaithful! But being the good post-modernist that I tend to be at times like this, I honor the conservative perception of infidelity. And under those circumstances, I am willing to see traditionalist parishes leave the Episcopal Church. There are over 100 churches in the LA Diocese, and only three have chosen to leave. That’s hardly a revolution. Indeed, it may well be that the church that remains once the dissenters have left will be all the stronger as a result.

For those conservatives who say that liberal Christianity is dying and that the future lies with a return to tradition I say, come to All Saints Pasadena! Not only are we a flagship church for what is loosely called “progressive Christianity”, we are growing. Yesterday, my fellow confirmation teachers and I met with the two full-time youth ministers at All Saints to plan for the coming year. There was exciting news: preliminary numbers indicate that we will once again have a record number of confirmands. My first year as a confirmation teacher (2001), we had 12 kids in the program. My second year we had 15, and in 2003 we had 17. This past spring, we confirmed 24. We may well have over 30 kids in what we call our “Seekers” program this coming year — and that would be a record.

(I am by no means once again a liberal Episcopalian on every issue. I still remain firmly pro-life on the abortion front, and intend to give quiet but firm witness on that matter. In my heart, the evangelical insistence on personal relationship with Jesus still means a great deal to me, and at times I am frustrated by what often strikes me as a peculiarly Episcopalian reluctance to demonstrate spiritual enthusiasm. But I’ve come home, once again, to the church where I feel both most comfortable and most challenged.)

The upshot of this is that I see no reason why two independent members of the Anglican Communion, one progressive and one traditionalist, cannot coexist together in the United States. I’d rather have a cordial divorce with some finality than a rancorous, angry, uncivil marriage in which two parties grit their teeth and stay together despite irreconcilable differences.

Running, morality, and the willingness to be soft

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My fiancee and I had a fun weekend in the Bay Area, attending the wedding of some good friends and visiting my family’s little ranch in the hills above Fremont. With classes to start next Monday, this was my last break for a while.

While up in Northern California, we did watch Olympics coverage. And on Sunday, I was anguished by what happened to Paula Radcliffe in the marathon. (I was delighted by the strong showing of local gal Deena Drossin Kastor; I’ve run in 10Ks with her, and spent the first twenty or thirty feet of the race alongside her. From then on, it was just a matter of watching her backside fade from sight).

My fellow Cliopatriarch Jonathan Dresner points me towards a discussion of “Running Madness” at Butterflies and Wheels. It’s a good post, and there’s some good discussion in the comments section as well. Here’s an excerpt:

…the interesting thing from a philosophical, sociological point of view is that somehow moral judgements seem to infect how we view sporting feats. It isn’t a character flaw to stop when you’re about to collapse from heat exhuastion, it’s sensible. When I was fairly serious about this running lark, I would train with people who were very serious. In their world, my comparative lack of seriousness was considered to be a moral flaw. They’d continually harp on about the fact that “I wasn’t fulfilling my potential”, etc. Well, newsflash guys, there isn’t a moral requirement that we should fulfill our potentials; if people are happy with mediocrity, as I am, then let them be…

Bold emphasis is mine.

Coming from a runner, that’s terribly refreshing. Lord knows, I have struggled with this very thing. In early April, I struggled through a mountain 50K, only to collapse at the end. I needed an IV to get back on my feet.

I’ve often finished races or long training runs while feeling ill. I’ve only once dropped out of a marathon, down in Long Beach in 2001. I walked off the course at mile 22, but I hadn’t been feeling myself since mile 10. At the time, friends, family, and fellow runners assured me that I had done the sensible thing by not pushing myself through. A part of me, of course, believed them. But another part of me felt very much like a failure. That feeling of failure after the Long Beach marathon lasted longer than the feeling of elation I have had after successful marathons (like my 3:13 PR in Pittsburgh in 1999). It was the desire to avoid that sense of failure that led me to finish the San Gabriel Mountains 50K despite feeling absolutely wretched for the final three hours of the grueling race.

Runners do tend to be a moralistic lot. It’s no accident that the only sports metaphor regularly employed in Scripture is that of “running the race”! For St. Paul, to not finish “the race” has fairly serious consequences! In Hebrews 12:1, the Apostle says:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

In other words, to fail to finish the race is to succumb to sin. Surely no other athletes experience such theological pressure as do distance runners! (Nowhere in Old or New Testaments do I find references to beach volleyball, artistic gymnastics, or the 100m butterfly).

As running (or for many folks like Oprah, run-walking) marathons becomes increasingly popular, the marathon becomes increasingly imbued with both mythic and moral qualities that are not found in other sports. When I did my first marathon in 1998, I did it because (like most folks) “I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.” I hear that same phrase from virtually every first-time marathoner. Folks don’t say things like that about tennis, golf, or badminton. Only endurance sports (marathoning chief among them) become tests of one’s spirit, resolve, and yes, willingness to endure pain and hardship.

When a gymnast falls off a balance beam, we say “ooh, bad luck.” When a marathoner fails to finish a race, we ask “why didn’t she keep going?” Ask any runner who has done at least five marathons or ultras: we’ve all had days where everything started perfectly, we were well-trained and rested, and things inexplicably fell apart. But not being able to finish a race isn’t seen as bad luck — it’s seen as succumbing to weakness. No wonder so many of us, professional and amateur alike, often push ourselves through despite the risk of serious injury. We all have within us (and for a Paula Radcliffe, outside of us) a “great cloud of witnesses”, reminding us of the consequences of failing to finish!

Sometimes, though, it isn’t mediocrity that leads us to “fail to live up to our potential”. Sometimes, not living up to our potential is an act of love:

You see, I weigh twenty pounds more today than I did in 1999 or 2000, when I was at my fastest. I don’t run the way I once did, with a single-minded obsessiveness. I don’t know if I’ll ever do a sub-3:15 marathon again, or another sub-40 10K (those were my benchmarks of success). My resting heart rate is unlikely to be 44 again, as it was during those years. Today, I do other things with the time I spent running: I volunteer. I blog. I lift weights. I spend time with my fiancee and my chinchilla. (I was always in the best shape when I was single, not surprisingly). I still work out five or six days a week, but I don’t run the mileage (or do the track work) I once did. I am happier with a more balanced life — but I am still haunted by that voice that tells me, as the friends of the blogger above put it, that I’m not “fulfilling my potential.”

I’ve got places on my body that are softer than they were five years ago. (I was regularly hovering around 4.5% body fat in those days, and believe me, I was tested monthly!) Some of that softness is a result of aging. Some of it is a result of my incurable sweet tooth. (I am a lover of Cadbury Cream Eggs.) But some of it is a result of choosing to give more to others and spend less time sculpting my figure for my own gratification. I long to be a father, as any reader of this blog knows. I expect that I will become one (to someone other than Matilde) in the next couple of years. And I know my future son or daughter would rather have a father who is present, available, and possessed of a roll around the middle than a preoccupied and distant father who has nary an ounce of fat upon his frame and a resting heart rate lower than his age.

For me, and I can’t be alone in this, being willing to have an “average” body is a sacrifice of love. Being willing to not continue in order to preserve my health for the sake of those who need me is a similar sacrifice. Sometimes, the “cloud of witnesses” want you to stop running, take a shower, and “love on them” for a while. And though I expect and hope that there are plenty of marathons and ultras in my future, I am trying to remember to keep this most theologically and spiritually significant of athletic pursuits in its proper perspective.

Thursday short poem — Milosz’s Veni Creator

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I’m afraid this will be my last post until next Tuesday. I’m off later this morning for Northern California, where my gal and I shall visit my ma and also spend an extended weekend at the wedding of some dear friends.

But I shouldn’t leave without the Thursday Short Poem. Yesterday, Annika posted a very fine poem by a former Cal grad student named Archibald Ammons. Today, I’ll post one of my favorite shorter poems by former Cal prof (and Nobel laureate) Czeslaw Milosz, who died last week at 93. In 1998, I heard him read at a poetry festival in Claremont; he was magnificent.

Veni Creator

Come, Holy Spirit,
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards,
or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.

I am only a human being: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well,
that the statue in church lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore, call one person, anywhere on earth,
not me-after all I have some decency-
and allow me, when I look at that person,
to marvel at you.

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The obstinate instructor

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Here’s a small rant on a minor topic that may not be of great concern to those outside of academia. I’m not exactly sure it will matter to those in academia, either, but it is on Hugo’s mind this morning. Forgive me.

Classes at Pasadena City College start in twelve days. Though I can scarcely believe it, I’ve been a full-time faculty member at PCC since 1994 (I was an adjunct lecturer for a year before that). I’ve had tenure since 1998. But my official title is still “instructor”, and if I have my way, it will continue to be.

Academic ranks mean different things at different institutions. At most four-year American institutions, “instructor” (or “lecturer”) denotes someone who isn’t tenure-track and who lacks job security. “Assistant professor” is for those who are tenure-track but not yet tenured; “associate professor” for those who are tenured but not yet senior faculty; “professor” is used only for senior faculty. There are variations on this pattern, but it holds true across most colleges and universities.

At PCC, none of this applies. Here is a link to a PDF-file of our Academic Senate’s guide to rank. At PCC, “instructor” is the title given to newly hired full-time faculty members. (“Adjunct” is used for part-timers). An “assistant professor” is one with four years of experience and tenure. An “associate professor” is a faculty member with seven years of experience who has “given evidence of professional growth”. A “professor” is someone with twelve years of full-time experience who has “given evidence of additional professional growth since becoming an associate professor.”

Here’s the kicker: none of this has any bearing on salary or seniority. As the linked document states in section 6 (under “Additional Considerations”):

Professional rank shall not become a factor in determining salary.
All faculty members holding one of the professional ranks will be addressed uniformly as “professor.”

Promotion from instructor to assistant professor, and all subsequent promotions , does not take place automatically. Nor is it based on real merit. The only way to advance up this ridiculous cursus honorum is to apply to the Academic Senate’s committee on rank, and demonstrate completion of “professional growth”. (I hate that phrase, it makes academics sound like realtors.) I have asked many folks on campus where we got this practice, and no one seems to know.

All I know is that I aspire to become the most senior “instructor” on campus. A number of faculty who were hired after I was have applied to be assistant and associate profs; their titles have been changed in our catalog listing of faculty. Though there may be others, I don’t know of any other profs who have been teaching full-time as long as I have who have not “upgraded” from instructor to one of the loftier titles. I know that I am much higher on the salary scale than a number of folks who have higher titles than my own.

Why won’t I apply? The easy answer is that I’ve always loathed titles. (Odd for someone with a doctorate in medieval history, I suppose). Perhaps it’s my inner socialist. As I wrote a couple of months ago, I do prefer to be called “Hugo” in the classroom. I also won’t apply because in the absence of any impact on my salary or my seniority, it’s hard to see any pressing reason to do so.

And that’s why I get to be a “professor” with a small “p” and an “instructor” for life.

The Tiara and the Thong

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I’m moving from blogging about South America, Hugo Chavez and race to write about princesses.

The LA Times has an interesting piece today on the popularity of “princess” culture. Here’s some of it:

In Los Angeles, Disney Princess teas held in conjunction with the release of “Princess Diaries 2” on Wednesday at the El Capitan Theater sold out their Saturday and Sunday spots weeks before the movie premiered. Those teas and other princess-themed events have become popular permanent additions to Walt Disney World attractions. In Japan, princess classes, which began in Tokyo three years ago as an attempt to introduce the new princess brand, have spread to five cities — last year, more than 15,000 girls paid $150 a pop to learn from Snow White how to love animals or from Ariel how to sing.

Recent movies like “Ella Enchanted,” “The Prince & Me,” “A Cinderella Story” and now “Princess Diaries 2″ have hauled out all the time-honored symbols of the mythology — the jewels, the dresses, the handsome boyfriend and, of course, all that dancing.

The films, like the books many are based on, all have slight post-feminist twists, but they still adhere to the basic princess ethos: You may think for the moment that you are a normal, powerless girl plagued by mean friends and nagging parents/stepparents, but really you are a princess, with liberation and a truly excellent wardrobe just a few plot points away.

“Whether feminists like it or not,” says Gary Foster, spokesman for Disney consumer products, “at some point in their lives, most girls want to be a princess.”

I haven’t seen the Princess Diaries 2 yet. I saw the first one back in 2001, and thought — seriously — that it was one of the best films of the year. I’ve rented it twice since.

As a pro-feminist concerned about young women, I’m not particularly troubled by the resurgent popularity of “princess-ness”. The Times article explains my reasons why:

Wish-fulfillment story lines fuel many of the books and films aimed at tween and teen girls, which gives princess culture the staying power it needs to transcend the fairy tale reading years. In the preadolescent and adolescent years, many girls are beset by self-doubt, and they look to transformative narratives to give them hope and confidence.

The “rags-to-riches story is everywhere these days,” says Rachel Simmons, author of “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls.” “All the teen and tween movies are about girls who go from being unloved and uncool to being incredibly popular. Which is what happens to princesses.”

Simmons, who works with the Empower Project, a Washington, D.C., group devoted to improving the lives of girls, says she has been surprised by the number of princess T-shirts and paraphernalia she has seen on the streets of New York and wonders if it isn’t a response to the tough skate-board girl mentality that has also fueled fashion and attitudes among teens. “The princess is the last frontier of acceptable girliness,” she says. She applauds any arena that allows girls to access playfulness and protects them from sexualizing themselves before they are ready. “It points to how crazy our times have become that I, as a feminist, am promoting princess culture because, hey, at least you don’t have a 12-year-old wearing a thong.”

Rae Dubow, a Los Angeles drama teacher, tried to show her 5-year-old daughter the other side of the fairy tale myth by reading her “Cinder Edna,” a retelling of the famous tale by Cinderella’s sensibly shod, eco-friendly neighbor. Cinderella, by contrast, is made to seem vain and silly. “My daughter was not at all interested in Edna,” says Dubow. “All she wanted to know was why Cinderella didn’t have a bigger part because she is so pretty.”

Parent Erika Schickel has mixed feelings about her role in providing the items necessary for a modern princess. “As a feminist, I think, ‘Of course they’re obsessed with princesses because princesses are being crammed down their throat and not just from Disney, but from all these tweener movies.’ But then I remember as a little girl just craving really pretty things too.”

The bold emphases are mine.

Schickel is quite right when she implies that the story of the princess is deeply imbedded in our culture, and perhaps, in the psyches of a great many young girls. It would be absurdly ahistorical to give 20th-century Hollywood the credit or the blame for creating the popularity of the princess archetype; even a casual student of folk culture knows that “princess stories” (often with a rags-to-riches theme) go back many centuries in European culture.

But what I really appreciate about princess culture is that it offers young girls (and not-so-young ones) the opportunity to celebrate the feminine without having to cope with dangerous, exploitative, premature sexualization. Princesses, at least as portrayed in the first “Princess Diaries” film, aren’t merely pretty girls with nice clothes (though the clothes are important). Princesses are also expected to be brave, kind, thoughtful, and, yes, independent. (The “queen” in both films, played by the incomparable Julie Andrews, is a widow; clever, witty, and very strong.) If the popular “princess classes” mentioned above are teaching young girls how to love animals (though most young girls don’t need to be taught that) and how to enjoy a proper tea, than I say “hallelujah.”

The culture of the thong (which I’ve written about in other contexts here and here) revolves around the sexualization of young girls. “Thong culture” teaches girls that the attention and the validation that they crave can be had easily, both by displaying flesh and by being sexually accessible to young (and sometimes not so young) boys.

For all of its silliness, “tiara culture” seems far less bound up with the urgent pursuit of male attention. Look, when and if I have a daughter, my first choice would be to have her in track spikes and soccer cleats from the time she can walk. But if faced with the choice between having her walk around with a tiara on her head or in a thong that rides up out of her low-cut jeans, I’m pretty clear on the fact that I’d pick the former.

Perhaps I’ll go to Target and buy a whole bunch of plastic tiaras for the girls in my youth group at All Saints.