Why do feminists hate Disney movies and fairy tales so much? Do they really corrupt society that much?

2015-10-31T19:46:23+00:00

Confusing make-believe with reality; why feminists obsess over Barbie.

The feminist obsession with Barbie dolls seems odd at first glance. Whether it is their compulsion to create ugly feminist Barbie or Computer Engineer Barbie, we see a great deal of focus on make-believe for a group of grown women. But feminism at its core is very much about make-believe, and feminists have demonstrated an incredible capacity to treat make-believe as if it were reality.

Back in July of 2013 Jessica Wakeman wrote an article at The Frisky about her failed attempt to play feminist Barbie with her nieces. Wakeman wanted to pretend Barbie was a pediatric oncologist:

I pulled a naked Barbie from a box and dressed her in a yellow gown. (Barbie’s closet seems to be entirely gowns and miniskirts.) Then I announced, “My Barbie is a doctor.”

I cleared my throat. “She’s a pediatric oncologist. That means she helps kids with cancer. She graduated at the top of her class from Yale. No, Harvard. She is trying to find the cure for lymphoma.”

But her nieces didn’t want to play pediatric oncologist Barbie. They wanted Barbie to be focused on girly things like fashion, hairstyles, and meeting Mr. Right. No matter how many times Wakeman tried to return to the feminist narrative, her nieces always steered back to traditional girl areas of focus:

Elly’s Barbie then started “doing” my Barbie’s hair. I tried again. “Maybe one day, she’ll run for office,” I mused. “She could be a senator. She could sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

“I like her gown,” Mackenzie replied.

What is so unintentionally comical about Wakeman’s piece is that there were two games of make-believe going on. One game had her nieces imagining Barbie going to balls, dressing in the latest fashion, and attracting prince charming. The other game of make-believe had Wakeman imagining herself as possessing great professional gravity and as a feminist role model for young girls to follow. Ironically Wakeman lives in the very world her nieces wanted to play in, she was just too busy playing make-believe to see it. In the real world Wakeman is a staff writer for a gossip site, not a senator or a doctor. The first five main categories in The Frisky’s banner are: Sex, Relationships, Celebs, Style, Horoscopes.

Had Wakeman only played Barbie the way she has played her real life and not her make-believe life, her nieces would have been delighted.

Snowfox2ne1 · 2015-10-31T20:39:02+00:00

Why do they hate them so much? Because they love them so much.

Every girl loves Disney movies. What better way to have every girl on your side than to have Disney tell them so? When I watch a Disney movie, I just enjoy it. When girls watch it, they want it to embody a perfect world. That world used to be that a guy would look past the poverty, mistreatment, and hardship to pick them out of all the other girls. Now they have decided that fantasy doesn't work for them anymore (unless it's in 50 Shades of Grey or Twilight), and they need Disney to back them up on it. No better way to convert people to your side than to change media at the core as early as possible.

Obviously I am being a bit dramatic, but, this is certainly how some women I have talked to feel about Disney movies.

Lethn · 2015-10-31T22:01:52+00:00

Invert social conservatives who rant about video games and rock music encouraging people to be criminals and live deviant lives and then you have feminism, that's why they hate disney movies, it's not the movies themselves they're targeting something they 'feel' it represents.

192873982 · 2015-11-01T01:51:06+00:00

They should read Max und Moritz, they'd love it. The boys are killed in the end, because they did too many pranks.

2015-11-01T02:05:17+00:00

The Disney princes are were all rich and high-status. As princes are supposed to be.

With the exception of Aladdin. And, you'll notice, that Jasmine first takes an interest in Aladdin when he appears to be rich.

But, you know, sexism because maidens.

Disney movies do not make girls behave in a certain way. Disney movies pander to fantasies. If it were the case that cartoons made people act in a certain way, I'd have grown-up dropping pianos and anvils onto people's heads and using rocket-powered roller skates to chase-after road-runners.

Okay maybe some idiot kid out there thought if they wore a red blanket, they could jump-off the roof or whatever, but they're sort of exceptional.

MKostrikin · 2015-11-01T02:37:42+00:00

I think all the newer movies by Disney have been shit with forgettable songs.

Look at Mulan, it was about a strong female. Though you won't get songs like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSS5dEeMX64 anymore out of a disney movie.

As far as current treatment, take the movie Frozen for example. You have little boys and girls wanting to dress as Elsa for Halloween.

Meistermalkav · 2015-11-01T08:31:30+00:00

lets face it: Disney fairy tales and fairy tales in reality are a world apart.

Take Hercules for example: Instead of the jealous wife, that gets poison from a centaur to slay hercules ( because he trusted her), we have... what? happily ever after?

Or Hunchback of notre damne? Instead of the real ending, where isabella gets burned at the stake, the hunchback carries her corpse to a crypt, and he starves himself sitting at her side, we have... what? Happily ever after.

The first disney rework of any fairy take, especially by the brothers grimm, tends to remove all the stuff we would see as fucked up. Nope, Of course the evil step sisters do not get tortured, of course, everyone lives happily ever after. There is a reason most libraries have the original grimm fairytales as PG 21. They are FUCKED UP.

The feminist narrative?

It tries to tell the same. It does not want to show oncologist barbie that kind of made it, but then had an abortion and got away to become a single cat lady. It wants to show oncologist barbie that runs for senate.

It does not want to show That there never was a glass slipper, that it was just a fur slipper ( becauise gods beware, there might be sex involved...)

It does not want to show that the prince, instead of marrying a watery redhead tart that stares creepily on him, marries an other princess, and Arielle has to spend the rest of her days with legs that feel painfull like daggers had been stuck in them, far away from anything that she ever knew, because she had traded away her immortality for a vanity.

It wants to show women actually suceeding, but suceeding with their message. No "I can get happy without being a feminist", or "Maybe I can be happy being a hausfrau", just "I have to follow the feminist narrative, or else I won't be happy."

Let me propose an alternate fairy tale for young boys.

The prince does not heed his advice to marry whomever his parents decide, accepts his gay brother as A OK, and instead adopts a nice young child to be his son, whom he treats respectfully and dignified, and vows to not put the same pressure on his son as his parents put on him, and instead lets his son decide what it means to be manly. When the time comes, he raises his son well, he defends his son against the gold diggers. sluts and side-chicks, and accepts when his son finds someone to spend the rest of his life with that does not exactly meet his standarts, but makes his son happy.

Then, the old prince, now the old king, gets a vasectomy, and harty chuckles are had about the ammount of sluts that try to gift him a son, despite this being impossible, and much ale is being drunken with the king and his son, untill the king dies peacefully in his bed.

The end.

ee4m · 2015-10-31T21:07:39+00:00

Perhaps this is all true, but who really cares?

anyone who doesnt want those stereotypes to continue eg, mras.

chavelah · 2015-10-31T20:24:51+00:00

Huge Disney fans in this house. We do talk a little bit about the more dated aspects of the movies - the minstrel act in Dumbo, for instance - but basically, if you watch the whole arc of feature films they've produced since the beginning, they do a very good job of adjusting cultural mores. Not every princess needs to be rescued, not every mother figure is evil, and not every father is a hapless twit - but romance and magic and adventure are universally appealing themes, and they keep rolling all that out and selling me the dress-up clothes to go with it :-)

irrelevant_usernam3 · 2015-11-01T01:10:43+00:00

I think it's because people like to be offended by things. And when they have problems, they like to blame those things that have offended them. I know that sounds vague, but here's an example: growing up, many of my friends weren't allowed to play Grand Theft Auto games. Parents didn't like the violence and didn't want their kids exposed to it. Everytime a shooting would happen, these parents would blame it on violent video games. I've grown up playing GTA and it's not like I've gone around stealing cars and shooting pedestrians.

Anyway, maybe games and movies have an impact on our behavior, but it's not nearly as much as most people believe. I don't think watching Snow White is going to turn young girls into helpless victims anymore than its going to turn them into dwarves.

themcp · 2015-11-01T03:25:16+00:00

Let's face reality: disney films used to be really sexist. Now they're... somewhat sexist.

It used to be that disney women were all helpless victims, waiting for a man to come rescue them. They ran away, they cried, they suffered, and then a big strong powerful man came along and took them away to get married, which was presented as the end goal of a woman's life. It's okay for some stories to be about that, but there were NO disney stories of women solving their own problems or living their own independent lives.

Things have gotten better recently. Disney now has movies in which women solve their own problems and are empowered people. But, almost all the women are still slim and pretty and have basically the same face: http://www.avclub.com/article/every-female-face-recent-disney-and-pixar-movies-l-216498

...and there's still this big focus on princesses. I get it, princesses sell, but I think we can all agree that it's not healthy for girls to play princess to the exclusion of all else, and grow up expecting to be coddled and worshipped in all things. And yes, some of the recent princesses are much better role models, but little girls are still being encouraged to role play the better newer princess characters with all the vapidity and selfishness of the way they were encouraged to play the older less empowered ones.

It's okay for us as men to acknowledge that women have some valid complaints about Disney, and that Disney could and should be doing better about portraying characters with a variety of lifestyles and body types and appearances, and reduce the gender role stereotyping. For both genders. Because they're making progress for male characters too, but still have a ways to go with male characters as well.

The message we should be giving about is not "how dare women complain about this," it's "yes, sister! You have valid complaints! They do similarly wrong things with boys! Let's stand up together and encourage less stereotyping and better role models for children of both genders!"

chavelah · 2015-11-01T08:23:38+00:00

Given that Anna would have probably died in the woods without Sven or whatever his name is, yeah ok. Frozen toooootally proves women don't need men. Nevermind that the entire country/kingdom froze because a girl threw a temper tantrum instead of learning to control her power.

Kids don't care about all that shit. Kids enjoy them for what they are. Entertainment, they foster imagination.

Disney movies have good messages. Adults just want them to fit their own negative minds. I'm generally negative, but Disney movies are just overall positive. (Frozen sucks though~)

They aren't meant to be over analyzed, which is why the messaging is so straight forward.

A cartoon is just a cartoon.

AlbertoRobert · 2016-02-01T20:37:16+00:00

Seriously? I really don't understand it when people criticize stories so harshly and reading into them so deeply, and I'm not just talking about crazy feminists who believe Disney is sexist because princesses, sometimes, Men's Rights Activists are guilty of this too. Are we seriously going to debate whether or not something as simple as Toy Story 3 could be anti-men or misandrist in any way? Come on people, let's not lose our heads over here, if we keep this up, everything's going to have a bias of some sort. Do you seriously believe that a little girl who watches Toy Story is going to grow up thinking that all women need to be saved by men and that they're helpless little victims? Or do you really think that a little boy is going to think that all men need to be strong and tough and no-nonsense? If we keep on believing that non-propagandist media somehow influences the way people think and act, and that there is a connection between real-life actions and fiction, then everything's going to become offensive or biased or whatever. I'm not saying we should never analyze or criticize a story, all I'm saying is that we are reading way too deeply into media, I remember reading a blog post about how "The Giving Tree" apparently promotes gynocide, it's insane. I don't want to be branded as a "mangina" because I also criticized MRAs in this post, but we can't accuse radfems of being illogical and irrational in their critiques of media when this movement is guilty of that, too.

ThePigmanAgain · 2015-10-31T22:35:24+00:00

Kids are impressionable and dumb and hence their view of reality can be twisted by the media. This is why we have wiggers in Australia without having actual niggers, by which i mean black Americans as opposed to aboriginals. The kids are getting this stuff from somewhere and, unlike Marshall, it isn't because they grew up in a mostly black American milieu. That said, Disney movies are for the most part gynocentric so the impact is something for MRAs, not feminists, to complain about. Wonderful, pure creatures who deserve to live in luxury for no good reason, that's what most of the Disney princesses are.

Title	Why do feminists hate Disney movies and fairy tales so much? Do they really corrupt society that much?
Author	leopoldmedley
Upvotes	24
Comments	19
Date	October 31, 2015 7:38 PM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/3r01ac/why_do_feminists_hate_disney_movies_and_fairy/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/why-do-feminists-hate-disney-movies-and-fairy.968216 https://theredarchive.com/post/968216

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