brethren priestess online

Here’s the usual set-up: The townspeople are victimized by the local dragon. The king, having no other recourse, offers his daughter’s hand in marriage to whatever knight can remedy this political problem for him by slaying the dragon. Thus, the fates of dragon and princess are tied, one being the scapegoat for the problems of the elite male society and the commoners, the other being saved, then offered as the side benefit of the resolution-via-slaughter.

Despite, or because of, its similarity with my own situation in modern society, I have never found the role given the elite female here very appealing.

But supposing I were the princess, what sort of a quest would a knighted suitor need to go on to obtain my love? The knight’s winning wooing would have to be to undertake a PR campaign to disabuse the common people of their prejudices against the dragon, and turn their outrage instead against the king, whose economic oppression of them is the real source of their woes. Thus, the origin of the society’s problems is correctly identified, not as dragon (a mythical creature, after all) but as monarch. His victims are likewise identified, each oppressed in unique ways and often pitted against each other: the townspeople, the dragon, and the princess.

And this is what ecofeminism is: the identification of the interconnected struggles for liberation of princess and dragon. It is the mutual liberation of spotted owls and working class loggers and townspeople down the hill who rely on the watershed for their drink. It is the interconnections of oppressions because of the interdependence of society and ecology.

This partly explains why I have had trouble seeing myself as the princess: I’ve always identified more with the dragon. Now I see that those two characters aren’t as separate as I’d thought. Also, I understand how useless the knight is in this story; the princess and people and dragon can carry on just fine without him. Perhaps he is the most fictional one of all.