Of Fairytales and Nightmares

Romantic fairytales are beautiful and in almost all the cultures they are reserved to nurture the young minds of little girls. The fairytale world is flawless, perfect, and dreamy. It is seamless and gliding, where the conflicts are resolved before they leave a smear on the ethereal persona of the heroine and definitely the prince charming is her ultimate rescuer, promising her happiness of a lifetime. The hues of love and fantasy spread out in the real world too. The soft shades of pink and pastels make their way to every shelf of the toy stores extending the beautiful imagery to the real life of these little angels. They are adorable princesses in the making and they glide through this beautiful bubble of make belief world which their dear ones hope and pray should remain intact forever. Kudos to the parents that they create two different worlds in the same house while upbringing their daughters and sons. Imagine the severance of the two worlds spilling over the realm of colors as well. Pink is reserved for girls while blue goes to boys. Recent researches have been conclusive on the impact of social environment on human brain development. The results suggest a potential neural connection between gender inequality and cognitive and emotional disability.

Fairytales revolve around satiation of the senses, and certainly beauty is the unstated undercurrent running through it. The strangest quality of beauty is that it needs the validation of the beholder. And do you ever realize that it is harder to attain the validation because the perception is all that matters. So, basically in order to be considered beautiful you have to be governed by the yardsticks set by anyone than your own being. No wonder that in today’s world of social media validation, young girls are finding it extremely difficult to put themselves out in the world to the harshest scrutiny in order to earn the badge of honor of being ‘desirable’.

Amanda Raffoul, an instructor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a researcher with STRIPED (Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders), said, “Teens’ negative perceptions of their bodies may steer them toward extreme diets or harmful dieting trends. And that is just one of the multifold problems it initiates. Depression in adolescent young girls can also trigger suicidal thoughts and make them a vulnerable target to digital sexual crimes. In the quest of validation, fed with the idea of beauty and desirability, young females are increasingly becoming a victim of exploitation. But wait – that is a chapter missing in the fairytales they have so thoroughly lived and believed.

Years pass, the vivid hues of pink fade a little, but the belief in the fantastic world still remains deeply embedded in the psyche. Smoothening the fine lines of aging and cheering the not so young spirit dulled by the responsibilities of home and work, she still longs for that perfect life which everyone around her ensured. Yet again, missing from these fairytales is the nightmarish twist in plot – a divorce. Divorce is a forbidden word in the genre of fairytales but a very common phenomenon in the real world. In developed countries where women constitute a bulk of the work force financial independence helps them assert a rightful way to come out of a pressing relationship. But one bad relationship is not enough to dissuade them from the childhood fantasy they held close to the heart. Some give it a second and third chance as well with no better results.

In traditional societies, often a woman lives in denial of an impending divorce unless imposed otherwise. Conservative societies groom the girl in such a way that education and life skills training take a back seat. The mental focus shifts to physical appearance and over dependence on the males of the family to know the real world outside the precincts of the house. And the patriarchs are quick to draw the lines for her. Besides physical beauty, the list of moral yardsticks are long: chastity, honor, loyalty, and piety are the notable ones. She thinks she knows the magic formula for a blissful life ahead. No one tells her that it is not all that she needed to know! There is a surprise card as well that can change the course of her life anytime. Any moment she can lose her charm because there are no level playing grounds.

The same moral yardsticks that she lives by do not govern her male counterpart. It hits her the hardest because as partners in the institution of marriage suddenly a woman finds that she is commanded obedience and is guaranteed no loyalty. Shaken by the sudden ouster and getting replaced by another woman leaves her bitter for the competitor still oblivious of the perpetrator of her plight. And how could she because until then she was living in the bubble of the make belief world of fairytales where the prince charming was the reward of her virtues. We weave the web of fantasies around her, blur her vision, fog her brain, and then generalize the gender’s mindset and say, ‘Women are from Venus’.