Snow White Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Laughter, Pleasure, Malice, and the Pursuit of Adult Fun

Why Is There No King Charming?

How come Prince Charming never becomes King Charming?

Ever notice that there is no King Charming?

Prince Charming? Him we know.

He's a polygamist, the main figure of one of those cults where there are 758 kids, and women all have the unibrow and wear Little House on the Prairie throwback dresses.

Prince Charming marries Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and for all we know, he's also knocked up Mother Goose. Who knows? Maybe he's responsible for all those children who live in a shoe.

(You know the real rhyme, right? "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe/ She had so many children, she didn't know what to do / Try as she would, she could not detect / which was the cause, and which the effect.")

Prince Charming is just a reprobate, what the Brits would call a "lad," and what delusional women all over America would refer to as a " hot guy with commitment issues."

What I want to know is this: what happens to Prince Charming after forty?

How come he never becomes King Charming?

Is it because once a man becomes King, he doesn't need to charm anymore? Is it because, once he's got the throne, scepter, crown-or the corner office, the Lexus, and the hairplugs--he simply bosses everybody around, charm be damned, and since no one can afford to say the Emperor's not wearing clothes (or point out that the clothes he's wearing are badly tailored, the wrong palate for his preternaturally pale skin, and generally ill-conceived for someone of his age) he lives in blissful unawareness of the small pleasures he awards to those who have the rather scanty reciprocal privilege of serving at his pleasure?

Not that I'm bitter.

The man who would be king is not a man who needs to charm; the man who would be king insists on being charmed.

 

 

adapted from It's Not That I'm Bitter....



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Gina Barreca, Ph.D., is Professor of English at UConn, and author of It's Not That I'm Bitter: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World.

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