Some mermaids decide they don’t like the land. Credit: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty
Scuba diving is both magical and terrifying. Put on your gear, slip under the surface, and find yourself freed from gravity. In the glory days Before Coronavirus, I remember diving through the clear waters of coastal Turkey, drifting on warm currents and rolling to stare at the sunshine playing on the surface, from underneath.
But even as I rippled through the deep, marvelling at flashing schools of fish, there was a trade-off: constant self-control. Don’t breathe out through your nose. Don’t sneeze. Never, ever panic. For a short while it’s possible to pretend that you have the freedom of such an alien world, but in truth you’re only ever a tourist, granted safe passage thanks to technology, training and self-discipline.
Something about this sense of crossing an uncrossable threshold surely also powers our obsession with mermaids. And it is an obsession: mermaids are everywhere. Monique Roffey’s novel The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story recently won the Costa Book Prize, while “mermaiding” — swimming in the sea wearing a “mermaid tail” — has gained a cult following in Australia. And you only need to browse the girls’ clothing selection in a high-street shop to find countless cartoon girls with fish-tails, sequinned and sparkly, smiling at you from t-shirts, dresses, wellies, duvet sets, pencil cases and the like.
As a parent of a four-year-old, I’m more familiar than I’d like with mermaid content, and Disney is a rich source. Sofia the First: A Mermaid Tale is a favourite with my daughter, who is entranced by the moment when Sofia is magically transformed into a mermaid and dives underwater. There, she swims in circles exclaiming: “This is incredible!”. And it is. The rest of the story is almost an afterthought, with the whole narrative punch condensed into that moment of metamorphosis, and the dive into a new and mysterious realm.
If mermaids offer an enchanting dream of transformation, perhaps it’s no surprise that the transgender movement enthuses about the special place mermaids have in their iconography. Activist Janet Mock links this to Ariel, heroine of the 1989 Disney film The Little Mermaid, who chafes at her underwater life and longs to visit the world beyond.
Ariel falls in love with a human, Prince Eric, and persuades the sea-witch Ursula to give her human legs, in exchange for her voice. Of course, being Disney, it all ends happily: Ariel gets her transformation at the end and marries the prince. It’s an elegant, arresting fantasy of pursuing and realising a seemingly impossible vision, and encapsulates perfectly the Disney motto: “Where Dreams Come True”.
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SubscribeEveryone should be entitled to “identify” as whatever they like, as long as we all keep in mind that:
1.) Reality trumps fantasy
2.) One person’s chosen (sic) identity does not trump the dignity of other people – especially those other people’s right to remain anchored in reality.
You’re free to “identify” as a lizard, a tree, a rocking horse, or as a member of the opposite sex. It’s (supposedly) a free country. But your right to self-ID as a horse does not entitle you to expect to be fed apples by passers-by.
Yes. However, I don’t think children should be allowed to make permanent alterations to their bodies without parental consent, and honestly, even with it.
And none of us should be involved in supplying the money for it to anyone.
And men who commit violent crimes ought not to be allowed to do it and go into women’s prisons.
And men who feel like a woman ought not to be allowed to compete against women in women’s sorts unless all the women involved in said sport competition are comfortable with it.
And no one should be allowed to silence people from having a conversation about it, especially when it involves the legal rights of the people being silenced.
All true but your right to self identify as a Horse, whilst doesn’t come with automatic apples should at least come with a right not to be ridiculed, ostracised or worse, physically assaulted, and abused perhaps? In a free country shouldn’t everyone feel free to expect to be treated with respect and dignity?
Everyone has the right to expect tat they will not be physically assaulted or (physically) abused.
Ostracised? That’s a harder one – people are ostracised for all sorts of reasons. Tough to see how you can legislate against that.
And, as I said above, people have the right to be treated with dignity. That dignity extends to not being expected to have to agree that a man in a dress is, in fact, a woman in every meaningful respect. JK Rowling’s dignity, in her right to express her opinion without fear of ostracism, matters just as much as anyone else’s.
A good piece.
What is clearly there in HCA, but not in Disney, is a tragic sense of life. The situation of people who desperately feel they are/ want to be the opposite sex is a tragic one. Because, in the full sense, they simply cannot have what they want.
Yes, the myth of ‘transition’ -which is no real transition at all.
Jordan Peterson, in conversation with Douglas Murray on identity politics, January 2021:
“It is something you sign up to, that is felt to be better than having nothing to sign up to. It is something you define yourself, and that is informed by your lived experience. The problem is: what does that identity buy you ? I provides you with a path to what you’re going to do. But the question is: what will ‘what you’re going to do’ bring you ? The theory / narrative is: it will put an end to that feeling that you don’t fit in, that you’re an outsider. But the problem is: that feeling is universal and can never be cured.”
One of the great solaces of growing old is that we tend to become better at accepting not only what we are but also what we are not. Facing up to our own ordinariness turns out to be liberating. At last we can do what we do – sports, music, cooking, whatever – not to excel or to show everybody how brilliant we are, but purely for the pleasure of doing it. That brings contentment – and it takes decades to get there. What makes Mermaids and trans activism generally so pernicious is that it offers to make young people what they are not – and never will be – as a kind of fast track to contentment. Like Andersen’s mermaid, they are encouraged to maim themselves permanently in pursuit of an impossibility. And then fawned over as “žspecial”. It really is diabolical.
A women who used to be a man told her story on Swedish Radio. She said that life would have been easier if she had chosen to remain a homosexual man.
One example was how she fell in love with a man and after having sex with him told him that she had been a man but had surgery to become a woman. Her beloved turned away, trowed up and left her.
Very much like HC Anderssons mermaid.
The point about mermaids and apparent absence of genitalia is really interesting. Often in trans children the fear of developing into puberty, and all that entails (no pun intended) is so terrifying -and this fact is often just avoided by some psychologists when treating these children. Exploring these fantasies, and their associations, often helps reveal deeper truths and fears.
Always been amused by the Futurama tack on mermaids.
Our hero (Fry) eventually marries a mermaid, but the relationship eventaully breaks down when he discovers that sex is like that of fish – he must just release his sperm int the water to find the eggs,and there is no physical consummation with the mermaid.
I cannot think of a more profound flight from reality than somebody wanting a sex change. For a person to take such a gamble with their body shows deep turmoil and confusion which should trigger long term counselling, not connivance.
asdf
Hmm.
What if we retell The Little Mermaid, but with the twist that she was thrown into the water as a baby and transformed into a mermaid? Having legs may be agony, but so is having a fish tail. She is caught between two lives, neither of which she can truly live in.
What if we find a way to help the person who cant make peace with themselves to find a healthy way toward accepting and loving themselves that doesn’t involve a lifetime of meds or surgery?
Sadly, it seems unlikely she will be able to select herself out of that dilemma by drowning herself!
Extract from my article CLOSETS OF THE PAST , in NZJPH4.1 2016″‹”‹1,
“The letters of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen reveal strong same-sex attractions. Rictor Norton suggests that Andersen’s letters to his close friend Edvard Collin on the latter’s marriage share similarities to Anderson’s story The Little Mermaid, suggesting that Andersen saw Collin as the Prince, the Princess that the Prince marries as Collin’s new wife, and himself as the Mermaid. Who dies for love.”
Readers unaware of Andersen’s strong feelings for men may be unable to fully appreciate the complexity of his stories.”
http://rictornorton.co.uk/a…
I want to be a Merman with the head and torso of a fish and the legs of a human.
Bit like Zuckerberg
I also remember an episode of Red Dwarf
Fantastic analogy.
The versions of “The Little Mermaid” I’ve read say that she became a “daughter of the air” which meant that after 300 years of doing good deeds she would receive an immortal soul and go to Heaven.
Breaking news! Due to a world shortage on suppresing and inhibitor drugs the trans community has completely vanished from the face of the planet. Some pundits have highlighted the fact that “no drugs, no trans”, is a fact.
Person A: I have the right to self identify and you don’t have the right to address me or think about me in certain ways. Person B: paradox and contradiction there? Person A:! One another aspect- the science of hormones means that young men have physical advantages over girls in sport all other things being equal such as training and fitness. You can’t, for example, transition to being shorter.
Of course you can ‘transition’ into being a much stronger sportsman/woman. But that’s breaking the rules.
With you all the way about the commoditisation of seff, Mary. To be expected, I suppose, when cultural hegemony comes from a nation obsessed with self reinvention.
For your daughter as she grows: the late poet Helen Dunmore wrote a lovely mermaids series for kids, Ingo, whose underlying message is environmentalism. And the brilliant Aussiie Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island deals with the selkie myth in a very unsettling way.
And then, there is the legend of Clytie (Ovid’s Metamorphoses), which perhaps Andersen’s mother read to him, as mine did to me. Early inoculation against wishful thinking. The real, old legends and folk tales — as opposed to the Disney version of — should be part of the canon for formation of the young.
“So you want to be a mermaid?” I’d rather be a human, thank you. Children are bombarded by so much crazy information nowadays! I’m amazed that adults choose to have children!
There’s no shortage of not very polite modern euphemisms for women’s genitalia referencing seafood
There isn’t?
Bivalve, razor clam, limpet, periwinkle, sea urchin, coquille St Jacques…
No, me neither.
Mermaids are harmless made up creatures, like pixies and elves. My daughters always wanted to be mermaids when they were little. I love the sea and know lots of women who do as well and spend as much time as they can in it, paddle boarding, kayaking, scuba, snorkeling. Best scuba diving in the world……Bonaire. Close to my heart. Nothing nefarious about women and the sea at all.
“Nothing nefarious about women and the sea at all.”
Well, yes – of course.
But that misses the point. First, there is a UK organisation called Mermaids that campaigns for aggressive chemical management of mental illness in children in the UK.
Second, sea-dwelling women have real significance in mythology, and perhaps inevitably, as the dangerous work of sea-faring has always been men’s work (as just about all dangerous work is).
I don’t live in mythology, I live in the real world. As to an organization that co-opts the name of a mythological creature, what difference does that make in what the organization does? If it’s purpose is bad or wrong, it isn’t because it has the word mermaid in it. Would it be a better organization if it were named dragon or fairy?
Well -they chose the name for a reason, right? though they may not have been fully conscious of why. Symbolism? (Although I just tried looking up Mermaid in the Dictionary of Symbols and astonishingly it’s not there!!).
How does that matter to what they do? Would their mission be better or worse if they’d chosen a dragon?
The most dangerous work a human can do is create life. Only humans who are women can do it, though.
You’ve not been keeping up with your trans-ideology 🙂
Seriously, though, your claim is false. In the US, about 700 women die in childbirth each year. About 5,500 people – the great majority of them men – die in industrial accidents.
Yeah but childbirth is still dangerous work, by any reasonable yardstick. Which rather falsifies your own claim, no?
Nonsense. Women do not create life all by their little selves; they do need the input of sperm, from a man, in order to become pregnant and in due course give birth to a new baby, an embryo human.
While made up, pixies and elves are not always harmless in tales– that for a reason.
They are also harmless to people. We can’t eliminate every fantasy character ever written or sung about. Dragons are harmless too.
Not everyone thinks on that literal plane. The human trick, I think, is to maintain a hold in reality, and yet enrich one’s speculations with symbolism. One can choose to love a dragon, but can one scale the heights? One can love a mermaid, and then wake up next morning to a dank and distinctly homely manatee…
Fantasy doesn’t trump reality even if some believe in it, I guess that was my point. I love mermaids and Santa Claus but I know they aren’t real. As much trouble as some have holding on to reality today, it’s more important than ever that we are able to separate what’s real from what’s fantasy and symbolism.
“Nothing nefarious about women and the sea at all.”
What about toxic salinity.