feisty!

The other week at work an intern presented a case in which a 12 year old girl invented a story about feisty unicorns. When this whole thing about feisty unicorns came up, everyone in the room laughed. And it does seem kind of incongruous, doesn't it? We think of unicorns now as symbols of soft peaceful innocent girlhood. How could they possibly be feisty?

But this wasn't always the case for unicorns. According to my trusted research sources, unicorns were believed to be wild woodland creatures with various healing powers, including turning poisons into drinkable potions. Unicorns come up in Judeo-Christian texts as feared beasts of might: "God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of a unicorn" (Numbers 23:22). They appear in medieval lore as untamed and powerful animals of the forest. Unicorns are depicted on many military coats of arms, for good reason.

So how did we get from thinking about them as this:

To this?

I know I am using more pictures than words here to illustrate (ha!) my point, but the pinkification and passification of unicorns and the girls that use them in their play is just so obvious in technicolor. And it's problematic to associate anything to do with girls and their imaginations only with sweetness, passivity, and ultimately, powerlessness. So here is another example to hate and oppose the hard-lined gender dichotomy of modern socialization. Because the mythical creatures we play with can be feisty if they want to. Don't tell us the only thing we can do with them is paint their nails and braid their tail hair.