Why it Would Suck to be a Princess or the Ridiculous Idealization of Female Monarchs in Modern Times

I guess bloggers are supposed to discuss their lives at some point, maybe chat about their weekend, so here's mine. I finally watched the Man in the Iron Mask circa 1939, was accepted into NYU, and wrote an essay about princesses. Here it is.

Why it Would Suck to be a Princess or the Ridiculous Idealization of Female Monarchs in Modern Times:

Everyone says that all little girls want to be princesses. They make movies about it, Shirley Temple assures Ms. Minchin that every little girl is a princess, Disney pictures raise hopes that any girl might be a princess in disguise. Every girl wants to be a princess, big, fancy dresses, beautiful headwear, handsome princes on gallant steeds, waiting to swoop you up and take you back to their lavish palaces.
But here’s the thing, all of that is utter crap.
In the end, a princess is just a politician who can’t escape her title. Sure, you’re rich and famous, but people hold you to a higher standard; from the middle ages to the 18th century, people of a nation believed that monarchs were sent by God himself. Not only did this mean that you could basically do whatever you wanted, but you had to be perfect in doing it, lest you collapse the very faith of your people, because God does not screw up.
Being perfect is a lot of work. It’s a kind of stress that teenagers can relate to quite well. You not only have to live up to your father, but to his father and his father before him and so on. Everyone knows your family history and an entire country is constantly watching your every move. People depend on you to rule their lands, to keep their taxes just right, even to keep them physically well. (During times of plague, one much favored cure was to be touched by royalty.) And if the pressure of lording over millions of people didn’t kill you, then the millions of people might, if you screwed up. Poor Marie Antoinette was brought into a failing country, married an impotent king, was immediately hated by the people of France, nick-named Madame Deficit for living a little beyond her means, accused of cheating and even committing incest, and then , quite literally, lost her head.
As for finding true love in the form of a handsome prince- today one half of all marriages end in divorce- people seem to have trouble in pursuit of true love. Given the increasingly tiny percentage of royalty worldwide, the chance that true love would be found in that small pool of options would be severely slim. No, princesses were married off for political reasons, to strengthen ties between two countries, to seal a pact. To be married to a prince meant to be sent away from one’s family, to a foreign county to please a soon-to-be king who you’d probably have never met. Sure, he might be sweet and handsome and heroic like Prince Phillip or Prince Erik from the movies (Sleeping Beauty and the Little Mermaid), but he might also be old and ill-tempered. (Consider that most young monarchs were spoiled, indolent little cretins who got everything they wanted exactly when they wanted it who grew up to be indulgent, in France’s case, syphilitic assholes.) Sure, you might land yourself a king like John II, the Good, Charles V, the Wise, or maybe Phillip V, Le Long (the tall), but you might just as easily end up with Louis V, the lazy, Louis X, the Quarreler, or even Charles VI, the Mad. A princess was expected to be beautiful, mild-mannered, and subservient, but- above all- a good princess was required to produce an heir (preferably male).
If you found your new hubby to be a royal pain in the ass, divorce was not an option. At least not until very recently, and it’s still frowned upon (because he divorced Princess Diana, Prince Charles will never ascend to the throne). Worse, if the king to a disliking to you, he might cope by taking a few mistresses (Monica Lewinsky would have hardly caused a sandal in 17th century France or England, where kings bore illegitimate children like they doled out additional and often unfair taxes.) If you somehow became a giant thorn in the kings side, he could easily order you exiled (as king Xerxes did to the beautiful and bold Queen Vasthi in the book of Esther) or he could simply have you beheaded with one simple, royal decree, like king Henry VIII did with just a few of his six wives.
All in all, being royalty is not all that great. Even the fictional Princess Leia, elected rather than born into her title, had her entire planet destroyed by her biological father and was deceived into lip-locking her own twin brother. (And that, my friends, creates a disturbance in the force.) In most cases, to be a princess is to be rich and famous, to be held to a higher standard than most human beings by the man, but subservient to the few. To be a princess is to be under the thumb of a country and its king at all times, and to still be beautiful and delicate, to bear as many children as possible and be happy about it. So every time I go to Disneyland or the fair and see a little girl or even young woman with a conic, veiled hat or a shining tiara, a sparkling crown, I point and laugh, because the idealization of monarchy is a thing spawned from ignorance, ridiculous and hilarious in nature.