Yes I’m a curmudgeon so, yes, I do tend to be a raw nerve, always ready to be annoyed.
My last post included the quote about “just because you’re offended doesn’t make you right”, and I’m finding that I need to take my own advice so late tonight.
Looking through the Tastefully Offensive blog, which I normally like (stupid pictures of dogs & cats!), I found Dina Goldstein’s “Happily Ever After?” series, featuring Disney princesses (Snow White, Cinderella, and all them) in various “real issues” (quote from the artist’s website). So we get Cinderella drinking heavily in a bar, Snowy with a bunch of kids and living in, uh, less than a castle, etc. And poor Rapunzel, sitting in a hospital, with her long hair sitting beside her, bald head shining, getting chemo. Yes, she has cancer, according to the artist’s explanation. (Now would be a good time to check it out, just Google her or the series name, I’m uncomfortable including a link).
I am basically fine with the work; I interpret it as a challenge to the Disney and the princess culture that seems to swallow young girls. My issue is with Tastefully Offensive, because they created a blog post featuring all the photos and titled it “Fallen Princesses”.
So my question is, how is getting cancer make one “fallen”? I suppose none of the princesses are really fallen anyway; this isn’t the 1950s where getting pregnant makes a woman fallen, and it is a woman’s right to drink up a storm in a bar. But the cancer one really bugs me, it insults me because it hints at that “blame the patient” thinking.
But the name of the blog does contain the word offensive. So I re-read the “outraged cancer patient/stop blaming the patient” comments I wrote at the bottom as I prepared to re-blog, and then I hit cancel.
Damn. I hate taking a taste of my own medicine
anotheronewiththecancer 
You are my favorite cancer malcontent.
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Awww, thanks!
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I don’t think a princess is a woman, hence the “fallen.”
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Oh dear! If not a woman, then what is she?
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She’s divine! As in divine right. I suppose what I mean is — a woman isn’t a fantasy, but a princess is.
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Ah, right, hence the original artist’s intent, to challenge the fantasy, I suppose. Oh well, I was never much for fairy tales.
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I am quick to be outraged (yesterday was a doozy), but I see “fallen” as meaning the princess has fallen from the pedestal where life is made easy for her. In Cancerland, little is easy for us. I sure don’t feel like a princess now (despite how kind most people are). I wish I could live happily ever after.
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Hmm, you are most likely right, and I took “fallen” to mean the old timer (in my small town) meaning of a “fallen woman”, usually meaning a woman who had a child out of wedlock…in other words, “she should’ve known better than to get herself into that fix!” So, “fallen” has VERY negative connotations in my region, and in that instance the woman is to blame for her fall, regardless of the fact it took another person’s involvement to get her into the “fix”. Hence my over-reaction to the word fallen. Or you know I was just looking for trouble yesterday, LOL 🙂
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