Prince Charming?

After a perfect Valentine's weekend with my boyfriend (my real-life prince charming), I debated what an appropriate blog topic would be for class. I thought about the fairy tale character of "prince charming" and how he was never what I wanted when I was growing up. Every prince in my fairy tale books and in Disney movies seemed so boring. They never had personalities, they were just pretty boys with geeky combed hair who showed up at the right time. I always wanted a strong, brave, tough kind of guy... definitely NOT one who looked like he walked out of a Broadway makeup room.

To get a bigger picture of what was out there, I looked up "prince charming" online. The experts at wikipedia gave me this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Charming

Not a whole lot of information, but notice that he's called a "stock character" and it is noticed that he isn't developed very much. This is an interesting addition to our discussion about women in fairy tales being passive; in fact, the men seem flat and somewhat passive as well. Just because Snow White's prince came along and kissed her doesn't really make him much of a hero. Even when the prince does do something semi-heroic, he's more of a function than a character. The female protagonist has to be saved, so he shows up to do the saving.

As a female who grew up with fairy tales, I was never confident that the standard prince charming was what I wanted...I wasn't blindly convinced that just because all of the fairy tales I read provided a perfect, boring, coiffed guy that he was the ideal man.

So, to sum it all up: