[content note: spoilers for "Ella Enchanted" (2004 movie)]
I recently watched "Ella Enchanted" and was struck by its message on the importance of consent. Let's talk about it.
Here's an overview of the story: It's a fairy-tale setting, with magic. Ella (Anne Hathaway) is a girl who was given the "gift of obedience" by a fairy- meaning that anytime anyone orders Ella to do something, she is compelled to do it. This is a huge issue because it means she's extremely vulnerable. Anyone who knows about the "gift" can take advantage of her and make her do anything (and indeed, one of Ella's stepsisters figures it out and uses it against her). Really it's a curse rather than a "gift." Ella goes on a journey to get rid of the curse, and along the way meets Prince Char and they fall in love and end up together in the end.
This wasn't the first time I'd seen "Ella Enchanted." I saw it long long ago, back when I was an evangelical Christian, and the lens that I viewed it through was the idea that obedience is a virtue. Yes, when I was a little kid, I was taught by Sunday school teachers/ Christian books/ etc that obedience is a virtue. We're supposed to obey God/ our parents/ rules.
So back then, my evangelical take on "Ella Enchanted" was that in general, obedience is a good thing- but in this story in particular, there were people ordering Ella to do things that weren't good- and it's not okay that her "gift" required her to obey those.
In other words, I thought, obedience is a good thing, but with a few caveats.
I don't believe that any more. I don't believe obedience is inherently a good thing. I don't believe trust is inherently a good thing. I don't believe loyalty is inherently a good thing. Trust and loyalty can be good, but only if there are good reasons why that person deserves your trust/loyalty. As for obedience... I'm having trouble thinking of a situation where obedience is a good thing. Perhaps obedience is only a good thing in the case of a child obeying a parent about basic health/safety things, like "you need to brush your teeth every day." But even that is just a temporary situation; long-term, you want your kid to brush their teeth because they understand the health benefits, not because of "obedience." The only other situation I can think of where obedience is a good thing is if you're in some kind of emergency situation and your leader orders you to do something and there's no time to explain to you all the reasons for it, so you just have to trust that they have a good reason (I guess this is how armies work?). But that requires you to have the kind of relationship where you've worked closely together for a long time and you really really trust that if they tell you to do something, there's a good reason for it. But even in that situation, it's still not really ideal... you should still be held accountable for your actions, and "I was just following orders" is not gonna get you out of trouble, if someone ordered you to do a thing that seemed bad, but you trusted and obeyed them, and it turns out that yes, that thing you did really was bad. So again, it comes back to choosing whether or not to put your trust in someone- and if you choose wrong, that's on you- trust is not inherently a good thing.
So, back then I watched "Ella Enchanted" through the lens of "obedience is a good thing, with some caveats." But this time when I watched it, knowing what I know now about consent, I was surprised to see how strongly the pro-consent message is in this movie. Like, wow, I love this. It makes a lot more sense to view this as a movie about consent, rather than about obedience.
Let's talk about the relationship between Ella and Prince Char. Prince Char has tons of fangirls following him around everywhere, and he is drawn to Ella because she's not like that. She initially doesn't like him because she views him as complicit in the legalized discrimination against elves/giants/ogres, put into law by his uncle, King Edgar. He listens to her- and also listens to an elf and a giant talking about their own experiences under the laws that King Edgar made- and decides to take action to help. And then, the thing that is unique about the way he treats Ella is that he respects her right to consent, unlike anyone else in her entire life.
For example, look at this conversation:
Ella: So, have you seen Slannen? We have to leave. My godmother's on some kind of bender.
Char: You can't leave now, it's the middle of the night. You have to stay for the party.
Ella: [magically compelled to do what he says] Okay, I'll stay.
Char: ...I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you don't have to stay. I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do.
Ella: Thank you, Char, for everything. So, I'll see you around? [she turns to leave]
Char: But I wish you would stay.
Ella: I guess one more night wouldn't hurt. [she stays]
I love this so much! At the beginning of the conversation, he can tell she doesn't want to stay- and then when she suddenly agrees to it, he feels like something is off. Consent is not just about if someone says "yes", because people can say "yes" to things they don't want, if they are coerced. He can tell from the way she's acting that she doesn't really want to stay at the party, even though she agreed to it- so he tells her explicitly that she doesn't have to do it.
He's paying enough attention to her to realize that she's agreeing to something she doesn't really want- and it matters to him. He wants her to be free to do what she wants. Nobody in her life has ever cared about her in that way before. Ella's stepsister Hattie figured out that Ella does whatever she's told, and uses it to force Ella to do things. Random strangers tell Ella to do things and don't seem to notice or care about whether Ella wants to. Even Ella's mother sometimes used the "gift" to control Ella, but for "good" reasons like telling her to practice her musical instrument. (It's not okay that her mother did that.)
Char is different; he doesn't want Ella to have to do anything she doesn't want- even if it's something he thinks is good. He cares about consent. He tells her, "I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do"- and that's a big deal. No one has ever told her that before.
Maybe some people would view it like "If they're forcing Ella to do something bad, that's bad. But if they're forcing Ella to do something neutral or good, well, that's fine." Char does NOT believe that, and that's a big deal. Char truly believes in consent, and I LOVE IT.
Similarly, typically in conversations about consent, people are only thinking about it in terms of sexual situations- "If they're forcing you to do something sexual that you don't want, that's bad. If they're forcing you to do something non-sexual, well, whatever, not a big deal."
Because yeah, I think this is very important: when I'm talking about consent here, I don't mean in terms of consenting to sex. I think the concept of consent applies in all kinds of situations. It's weird that people seem to only talk about consent when they're talking about sex.
And I love how the movie showed so many different situations where Ella's obedience "gift" was a factor. Her beginning a romantic relationship with Char was just one small aspect of it. Consent should be about everything, not just relationships/sex.
Also, at the end of the movie [spoilers!], when the king had ordered Ella to kill Char, and she was holding the knife trying to stop herself from going through with it, and she ordered herself, "you will no longer be obedient" which finally freed her from the curse- it seemed a little too easy in my opinion, but at the same time, that is how it works in real life. The real-life equivalent to Ella's obedience curse is being a person who just does what other people want you to do, without any awareness about what you want yourself, without believing that your own desires matter. And the way to break out of that is by taking control of your own life, knowing yourself, knowing what you want, confidently pursuing what you want. Changing your thinking so that you believe that your own desires matter.
In real life, yes, the change really does have to come from inside you.
Another observation about "Ella Enchanted"- there were a few characters who figured out that Ella would do whatever anyone told her to. Ella's stepsister Hattie figured it out, and then she told King Edgar. And there's a scene where Hattie suspects that this is true about Ella, so she asks her to do some weird things in order to find out if it really works (and later another scene where King Edgar also does this). And it felt SO REAL, the way Ella is so terrified as she realizes that these other characters have figured out her weakness. Realizing that these people (who probably have bad motives) know that they have the power to make her do anything they ask. That's terrifying. The power dynamics of it.
And one more thing: Ella's mother ordered her to never tell anyone about the "gift", because obviously Ella is incredibly vulnerable if anyone finds this out. Overall, perhaps it was a good thing that her mother gave her an actual magically-enforced order to never tell anyone; otherwise, at some point she may have been magically compelled to reveal it against her will, and her mother's order protected her from that. But also, Prince Char knows something is wrong and is really trying to help her, and she's not able to tell him about the problem. It would have been better if she was able to at least tell him part of it- like "I'm under a magic spell that forces me to do specific thing X" (only mention the specific thing that's currently worrying her- don't mention that this would be true of literally anything that anyone tells her to do, that's just way too vulnerable).
This reminds me of how, because there are societal factors that make it harder to freely consent, society sets up other guidelines to try to correct for it, but those other guidelines introduce new problems. For example, people worry that teenagers are too young to make good decisions about sex- so then they teach abstinence-only sex-ed. Instead of giving teenagers good information and advice on how to make good decisions, adults just make a lot of rules. And maybe these rules do protect from certain risks (protect your daughter from rape by never letting her go on a date), but they cause other problems (encourages your kids to hide things from you/ won't come to you for advice/ they get sex-ed from bad sources instead). Similarly, Ella's ability to consent has been taken away, so Ella's mother "protects" her by also taking away her ability to consent, but in a different way. Maybe it's good that her mother did that, because Ella wasn't able to protect herself, but still the entire situation is so wrong. Wouldn't everything be so much better and healthier if everyone could know their own desires, communicate them clearly, and make their own choices rather than being pressured into anything? (Easier said than done, though- there will always be societal factors making this difficult.)
So anyway, I love everything this movie has to say about consent. It works a lot better if we view it as a movie about consent, rather than obedience.
[content note: abuse. If you want to skip it, scroll down to the image of Ella's martial arts pose as she fights off bandits]
And speaking of situations which are about consent but people wrongly think they are about obedience- well, I have to talk about John Piper's advice to women who are abused by their husbands. (Background info: John Piper is a big-name conservative Christian pastor who believes it's super super important that wives have to "submit" to their husbands, and women should never be in leadership over men because that would be against their God-given nature or something.)
Piper was answering the question "What should a wife's submission to her husband look like if he's an abuser?" (2009 youtube video) He gives a bizarre answer which assumes the issue is that the husband is ordering the wife to do something that God says is a sin. (He gives the example of a husband wanting his wife to participate in group sex.) As if it's about obedience, and the correct order of obedience for a woman is obey God first, and her husband second (and her own desires don't factor into it at all). He then says if it's a different type of situation, "if it's not requiring her to sin, but simply hurting her" then she should "endure" verbal abuse and being "smacked one night" and then go to the church for help.
He's viewing it like it's all about obedience. What are God's rules for this? What is or isn't a sin? What's the right way to get help while still obeying the "submit to your husband" rules? But that's all wrong- it's not about obedience, it's about consent. People deserve to not be abused. People have a right to stand up for themselves. It matters what you want; it's not just about if something is a "sin" or not- if it's not a "sin" but you're still not okay with it, then you absolutely have the right to not consent to it.
(Yeah... you may be wondering why I'm bringing up this one guy's bad opinion from 2009. If you're not connected to evangelicalism and have never heard of John Piper, I'm happy for you. But I used to be in that world, and I viewed him as a trustworthy Christian role model, and really bought into what he said. I truly believed that my own desires and my own suffering didn't matter- all that mattered was, am I sinning or not? am I putting God first? am I obeying God correctly? After you get out of that ideology, it takes a long time to even understand what your own desires are. And actually, immediately after getting out of that ideology, the concept of consent on its own is not that helpful because it relies on you knowing what you want. Hmm this is something I could maybe write about more in another post, if y'all are interested.)
(See also: Libby Anne's responses to Piper's statement, here and here.)
And maybe, to some extent, teaching obedience is the opposite of teaching consent. Obedience says that you should do what an authority figure says- for example, parents, teachers, pastors, boss, God, husband if you're a woman- simply because that's the correct order of the hierarchy, and your own desires don't matter at all. Consent says that your body, your possessions, your time, your emotions, your money, your life plans, all these things belong to you. You should figure out what you want, and make your own decisions. For things that belong to you, it's right and good that you should do what you want- that it should solely be your decision. There's nothing virtuous about handing control over to an authority figure, in the name of "being a good kid" or "obedience" or whatever.
In summary: Now that I know about consent, I recognize the very strong pro-consent messages in the movie "Ella Enchanted" (whereas I never noticed this before, viewing it through an evangelical Christian lens, believing that obedience is a virtue). Prince Char actually cares about what Ella wants, and genuinely doesn't want to force Ella into anything she doesn't want to do. It's not about if the thing she's forced to do is "good" or "bad"- it's inherently wrong for her to be forced into anything, regardless of what it is. Even when she agrees to do what he says, he feels that something is wrong and suspects that she doesn't actually want to, and he explicitly tells her he doesn't want to force her into anything she doesn't want. In that situation, it would have been easier for him to just let her do what he wanted, since she agreed to it- no one could blame him, right? But no, his concern is not meeting minimum standards of human decency so that other people won't judge him. He truly believes that Ella should not be forced into doing things that she doesn't want. This is what it means to truly value consent, and I love it.
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Related:
Let me tell you about a fanfic that reminded me of my marriage
6 Ways Purity Culture Did NOT Teach Me About Consent
Tickling, Consent, and The Way It Works
When the Teacher Says, "Don't Look at Your Report Card"
