princess diaries

According to the BBC, ‘Japan’s princess is getting better’. Her illness came as news to me, not being as well read on matters of Asian politics as I could be, unless it has to do with angry Vietnam vets or underage Thai prostitutes or the latest scare that North Korea is just going to say to hell with it, and nuke us all. Apparently the president of North Korea is very keen on his luxury goods, and an embargo from Vuitton was enough to keep him on the straight and narrow for a while, so I’ve heard, so there’s a sigh of relief. Thank god for greed, right?

This story concerns the Crown Princess of Japan, who has not been seen out in public since 2003, which is starting, I would have thought, to be a seriously long time. She was a multi-lingual diplomat before she, like so many others, fell sway to the Cinderella legend, and married the Crown Prince. Perhaps it was love. Who knows. Rumour has it that she is suffering from what is gently named, ‘adjustment disorder’. What a great title for an illness. Stop slipped discs, depression, anything bipolar. No, adjustment disorder. My first thought was that it was an adjustment to life in the royal family. Possibly the biggest lie Cinderella told us was that moving to the palace was a good idea. Ok, she got to stop washing floors, and watching her less sexually endowed sisters get nice clothes and go out, which would annoy any girl of spirit, but who said everyone loved this idea? Can you honestly imagine a royal family welcoming someone who was ‘not one of us’? It’s a phrase that you can hear any weekend at bistros from Wandsworth to Richmond, in case you thought it was outmoded. Not to mention the fact that no family becomes the royalty without chopping a few heads here and there. These aren’t nice, welcoming people. They are the leaders, the ones whose ancestors schemed and planned their way, if not to get to the top, to stay there.

But the couple has been married since 1993. Since then, again according to articles on the BBC website, she has only been permitted to travel infrequently, as she needed to focus her energies on ‘conceiving’. One miscarriage led to fertility treatments, which resulted in a girl. Happy days, one would have thought. But no, these are funny times we live in, where our mediatised image of slick modern life convinces us that we have escaped a feudal, dogmatic past. Fortunately, our religious training has allowed us to accept any manner of ‘truth’ without calling upon it to actually make sense. So we have our heroine, the poor princess; not lucky enough to produce ‘the heir and the spare’, as Diana managed, she only came out with a girl. Not good enough to assure the succession. But there’s more. Plot twists worthy of any good soap. The Empress, the mother-in-law, does not like her, surprisingly, it seems, for she as well is a ‘commoner’, that funny term given to those who have something to do with royals when they oughtn’t. The sister-in-law has managed to drop a boy sprog, so the royal family will keep going. Some pressure off. But a close friend of the Princess, a cousin of the Emperor, died playing squash at the Canadian Embassy. Call me old-fashioned, but I see conspiracy. The man could have been putting the line at risk. What if he was going to father the next emperor? Possibly a greater danger is that he was on her side. Boom. Off he goes, no one the wiser, and the princess’ camp is one fewer.

I have the impression we get into problems when we start putting women in these fixed categories – princess (of all kinds), breeder, diplomat, wife, sex symbol. But this has been going on for a long time. Women, conform to your ‘highest and best use’ – a little like a tax assessment – or else be subject to the nasty sounding ‘adjustment disorder’. As the princess said herself in 1996, ‘at times I experience hardship in trying to find the proper point of balance between traditional things and my own personality’. Find me a woman who hasn’t said something like this at least once in her life, though probably not as politely.

We have seen a number of Cinderella fantasies go wrong in the past few weeks. There’s the tragic demise of Anna Nicole Smith, who may have been a junkie, but was smart enough to get her hands on the fortune, and savvy (if cold) enough to know that her baby daughter was going to be of more interest for her money, than for any intelligence, beauty, or humanity she might bring to the world, and wrote her out of the will. It’s a little bit like Onassis’ daughter, who finally died from the weight (literally) of her loneliness and misery, a vast fortune not able to prevent her from terrible depression. Then we have the fascinating spectacle of Britney and her shaved head, a woman who is certainly trying to ‘adjust’. Britney, who, as teen conventional wisdom would have it, was never the same after Justin, the love of her life, left her. But everyone was so excited when she finally dumped the loser who got her pregnant not just once, which might have been an accident, but twice, which appears like carelessness. What was she thinking? And who pushed whom? Now, like many single mothers, she is caught between a rock and hard place. Be your former self: sexy, slutty, making money for everyone. Go back to being the cash cow. But there’s a problem; she’s got the little ones to think of, and maybe she’s a little pissed off. It’s possible she’s going to have to fight the father, who may still want to prove a point about who is the better person. There can’t be many stronger incentives than having an entire country dislike you. Must be the kind of case lawyers dream of, and again, there’s money up for grabs, a lot of money. But the Cinderella story isn’t supposed to end with Cinders contacting the best lawyer she can find, or going into rehab. I can still remember the movie and Cinderella’s hair when she is dressed for the ball: blond, upswept, with those strange little lines drawn on the side. Imagine what I might have thought as a child if the last frame of the film was her letting her hair down, just to cut it off.

Which sort of ‘adjustment disorders’ are these women suffering? They had talent and their beauty and it was supposed to get them the Cinderella story that ‘every little girl dreams of’. Of course there were a few variations on the theme. Anna was a Playboy bunny hooking up with a man 3 times her age. Philip Roth territory, and someone was bound to get hurt. Then there’s poor Britney, who went from Mickey Mouse good girl to nymphette with cash. She seems to have lost her way, or found it. Cutting off your long, flowing blonde hair can’t be a clearer sign that you don’t want to play the secondary sexual characteristic game. Too bad we’re so hooked on the rules that as an audience we’re all happy to damn her to rehab hell without finding out what her second act might be. A lesser character in our shooting fairy tales in a bucket dream, Lindsay Lohan, just came out of a month stay in a facility. It’s too soon to see if it’s cured her ‘adjustment’ problem. And we can’t ignore Kate Moss, who bounded back so spectacularly from her fall into ignominy, she should write a how-to book. Or at least she could give Britney some advice. When you think that at the height of the media frenzy, she was not only accused of doing drugs – (imagine! – a model, doing cocaine - shocking), but of having sexual affairs with both men and women. The power of the story to keep us in line backfired a little, mostly because she seemed to be having so much fun. Kate has sorted out the adjustment problem, but it can’t hurt that she is in the business of making cash from her beauty and sexuality, rather than just trading it over in a relationship, for some kind of non-existent stability.

As a society, we are pretty happy to watch our heroes eat dirt. Men love Cinderella. They ‘save’ her, until she gets bored of being barefoot and pregnant, or playing the adoring fan, and reminds the men exactly how she managed to put up with washing floors unjustly all day. But what woman hasn’t gone through some kind of ‘adjustment disorder’? We have to play so many different roles, it’s easy to lose track of who you really are. Most women don’t demonstrate the extreme reactions of a Britney, or suffer the house arrest of the Japanese princess. But women are twisted into uncomfortable shapes frequently enough that the troubles of these iconic women should resonate. Our fictions are what we make the world out of; how difficult our world is finding it to live up to the myth.

It’s ironic that Cheney, everyone’s favourite saviour of democracy, just went to visit Japan, hot on the heels of the US government asking the Japanese to apologise for the use of women as sex slaves during World War Two. The Japanese were offended. Maybe he should have really carried interventionism a step further and visited the princess. But what do we do with the spectacle of women everywhere staggering under the weight of the roles society has handed out, calling it choice? At present all we manage is to watch women struggle, and condemn them, with prettily named stones right out of the DSM-IV, and if they are lucky, we might forgive them for letting us down.