“No consent, no fairy tale.” This is the tagline of a video tweeted out last Friday by human rights group Amnesty International. The video depicts a fairy tale prince bending over to kiss a sleeping princess and then — while she’s still asleep — beginning to fondle her genitals. This leads to a stilted conversation with Archimedes the owl (from Disney’s The Sword in the Stone) and a random frog with a mustache about consent.
The video comes days after actress Kristen Bell — who played Princess Anna in Disney’s Frozen — commented that she uses the story of Snow White to teach her daughters about consent. “Don’t you think that it’s weird that the prince kisses Snow White without her permission?” she asked.
There are number of issues with the increasingly popular notion that “true love’s kiss” is actually an act of sexual molestation. First, the prince’s intent in administering the kiss has nothing at all to do with sex. Second, the prince giving the kiss is always the princess’s “true love” and therefore not some random stranger kissing a sleeping person in the woods. And third, the kiss literally saves the princess’s life such that not kissing her would be an act of murder. Let’s take these issues one at at a time.
The two fairy tales that most prominently feature a prince waking a cursed princess with a kiss are, of course, “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” There are a number of different versions of these fairy tales but, since most of these complaints center around the Disney adaptations, we’ll stick with those.
The idea that the prince, upon kissing his sleeping princess, would then begin to grope at her crotch is so ridiculous it would be laughable if it didn’t make us wonder about the perverted mind of whichever Amnesty International employee made the video. True love’s kiss is not foreplay. (How’s that for a tagline?) In Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the prince believes Snow White is dead and is so grief-stricken that he wants to give her one final kiss. Unless, in addition to being a sexual assaulter he is also a necrophiliac, the prince’s kiss is not sexual. In Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Prince Philip knows that true love’s kiss will wake Aurora up so he is simply doing the one and only thing that will save his lady love. Neither prince intends to take things any further than the kiss because neither prince is motivated by sex.
It is well established, in both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, that the prince and the princess are in love way before any kissing happens. Snow White and her prince meet at the well early on and declare their love, and Aurora and Prince Philip meet in the woods and agree that they are soul mates — having met “once upon a dream.” The fact that these encounters are depicted as love at first sight does not negate the truth of the connection the prince and princess feel. Love at first sight is a fairy tale trope that allows us to quickly understand that the lovers have seen into each other’s souls and forged a deep connection. Fairy tales are full of this kind of symbolism — mythographer Marina Warner calls it “a symbolic Esperanto.” So the prince, when he kisses his princess, is not a stranger — he’s her one true love. (We know he is, because his kiss wakes her up.) Would it be odd for a husband to kiss his wife to wake her up in the morning? If the answer is no then there there’s nothing odd about this either.
Finally, imagine what would have happened if the prince hadn’t kissed the princess. Both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty were under a spell that caused them to remain asleep until they received a kiss from their lover. If their respective princes had been so worried about consent that they’d backed off and refrained from kissing them, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty would still be asleep — or dead. The princes — and only the princes — have the power to bring their princesses back to life. Surely we can allow them to save the day. They are, after all, fairy tale princes.
The “prince” in the Amnesty International video — whose kiss doesn’t wake the princess — isn’t actually a prince. A prince would never kiss a random sleeping person without her consent because a fairy tale prince — in that “symbolic Esperanto” that Warner talks about — represents the ideal man (just as a princess represents the ideal woman). The ideal man would never kiss — let alone fondle — a random stranger.
Disney’s fairy tales are not about sex, they’re about love — a love so deep it can break spells and save lives. If we teach children that what these princes are doing is wrong, we teach them that love — true love — is wrong too. Turning a childhood symbol of love and virtue into a degraded sexual pervert: that’s what’s wrong. And fairy tales didn’t do that. Amnesty International did.