{"id":988,"date":"2012-02-05T13:40:49","date_gmt":"2012-02-05T18:40:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funnyfeministdotcom.wordpress.com\/?p=988"},"modified":"2013-05-29T00:27:29","modified_gmt":"2013-05-29T00:27:29","slug":"disney-princesses-bella-swan-and-trusting-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/2012\/02\/05\/disney-princesses-bella-swan-and-trusting-girls\/","title":{"rendered":"Disney Princesses, Bella Swan, and Trusting Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve spent any time in the feminist blogosphere, you may have gotten the impression that many feminists don’t really care for Disney princesses or Twilight.<\/em> You’ve heard the reasons: they promote physical beauty over character, they encourage objectification of women, they send dangerous messages about romantic relationships, they put women into victimized positions where they need to be rescued by men, and they romanticize abuse. When exposed to these stories, girls will internalize these messages and it will negatively affect the way they view themselves and their future romantic relationships.<\/p>\n

After reading one of these posts, the image of Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons<\/em> popped into my head, and she wailed her catchphrase: “Won’t somebody please<\/em> think of the children?!”<\/p>\n

<\/em>I’ve read studies about the effect of media on our brains, I’ve recognized how some of my own perceptions were partially formed by the stories I consumed as a child, and I know that people can easily internalize messages from the media they consume without even realizing they’re internalizing them. But sometimes, I feel like these criticisms cross a line and presume that girls are slaves to media influences and can’t discern the difference between fantasy and reality. <\/p>\n

Now it’s possible that I take these criticisms a little personally because of my own viewing history. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have viewed The Little Mermaid<\/em> and Beauty and the Beast<\/em> at least a thousand times over the course of my life (that’s what you get when you have an autistic sibling with obsessive-compulsive disorder). If anyone was going to internalize negative messages from these Disney movies, it was going to be me.<\/p>\n

But I didn’t watch The Little Mermaid<\/em> a thousand times and walk away from it thinking that I have to change my body to please a man I like, or that I should leave my family to be with someone I barely knew. I walked away singing “Part of Your World” and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and had fantasies about a prince falling in love with me – after I saved his life, of course.<\/p>\n

I didn’t watch Beauty and the Beast<\/em> a thousand times and walk away from it thinking that I need to give a jerk a chance until he changes his ways and start being nice to me. I walked away from it learning that character is more important than physical beauty, and that a man who gives you a library is much better than a man who tells you not to read.<\/p>\n

(And seriously, how does one get the “be patient and wait for a jerk to change his ways” message from Beauty and the Beast?<\/em> Belle isn’t<\/em> patient with him. She doesn’t give him an inch or make allowances for him at all.<\/em> He starts being nicer and then<\/em> she starts warming up to him. If anything, the message is, “If a man is mean to you, don’t take any of his crap, ever. He might change, like the Beast, or he might stay a jerk, like Gaston. Either way, stand up for yourself.”)<\/p>\n

As for the other Disney princesses – well, my brother didn’t watch any Disney movie as frequently as he watched The Little Mermaid<\/em> or Beauty and the Beast,<\/em> but I still saw those movies often enough to have opinions about them. I remembered thinking that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs<\/em> was beautiful to look at but all the characters were annoying or boring. I didn’t care one whit about the princesses in Sleeping Beauty <\/em>or Cinderella<\/em>; for me, those movies were all about the side characters – the fairies and Maleficent, and the mice and the Evil Stepmother. Likewise, in Aladdin,<\/em> I was too caught up in the Genie’s antics to care much about Aladdin or Jasmine. I thought Pocahontas, Esmeralda, and Megara were all too sexy and\/or skinny, and Mulan was really cool.<\/p>\n

Yes, somehow I absorbed a lot of Disney movies – over and over and over and over again – without developing an eating disorder, becoming obsessed with my appearance, or marrying a guy who’s mean to me.<\/p>\n

Am I that special that I managed to escape internalizing these damaging messages? I don’t think so. I’ve mentioned my teaching experience in this blog before, and I happened to teach middle school during the time when Twilight<\/em> became super popular. Most of my female students devoured Twilight<\/em> and gushed over Edward and Bella and Jacob. Some of the boys also read it and liked it, while other boys started to read it but thought it was stupid (and so did some of the girls).<\/p>\n

It just so happened that some of the biggest Twilight<\/em> fans in my classes were also the smartest, most accomplished girls in the eighth grade – passing standardized tests with flying colors, writing brilliant essays for English and<\/em> kicking butt in the science fair. These were the girls who dominated the conversations in class discussions while the boys sometimes had to fight to get in a word edgewise. They disagreed with each other – and with boys – loudly and emphatically.<\/p>\n

They also read Twilight<\/em> and fell in love with Edward. They thought he was so romantic, so sweet for always wanting to protect Bella, and the best boyfriend that anyone could ever have.<\/p>\n

I suppose I could worry that these girls would turn into Bellas and sacrifice all of their goals whenever their Edwards came along, but I saw them a year after they graduated, and they were all kicking butt in ninth grade, excelling in all of their classes in some of the best high schools in New York. They’re probably going to be fine.<\/p>\n

I’m the last person to say that we shouldn’t be talking about the disturbing and\/or antifeminist subtext of popular stories. We absolutely should. But when the conversation shifts to talk about how these stories will affect young women, it takes a turn that makes me uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

Maybe girls will watch Disney movies and become obsessed with princesses and never break out of that mold. Maybe they’ll watch Cinderella<\/em> and find it completely boring, and find Lilo and Stitch<\/em> more entertaining. Maybe they’ll indulge themselves in pink and pretty when they’re little girls and then grow out of that phase when they get older.<\/p>\n

Maybe a girl will read Twilight <\/em>and internalize negative messages about relationships. Or maybe she’ll love Edward, but think a real-life boyfriend who tries to prevent her from seeing her friends is a jerk and she’ll break up with him – because she knows that fantasy and reality are not the same thing.<\/p>\n

The point (after over 1000 words) is this: when we talk about how stories and characters will affect girls, we shouldn’t leave the girls themselves out of the conversation. We should ask them what they think about these stories instead of assuming they’ll react a certain way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve spent any time in the feminist blogosphere, you may have gotten the impression that many feminists don’t really care for Disney princesses or Twilight. You’ve heard the reasons: they promote physical beauty over character, they encourage objectification of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[65],"tags":[33,17,20,47,25],"class_list":["post-988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogposts","tag-less-feminist-than-it-seems","tag-more-feminist-than-it-seems","tag-movies","tag-politics-schmolitics","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3zNYR-fW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2915,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions\/2915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}