Disney Picture Link. Graph Link.
The Walt Disney company is one of the most successful, and well-known businesses throughout the world. They have produced and released some of the most popular and legendary children’s movies that are popular in every family home today. Disney Movie’s are aimed for an audience of children from 3-15 years old as they are branded with mostly G and PG ratings, but people of all ages can watch their movies and enjoy them. But because most of their viewers are so young, you would think that they would promote positivity in body image, not caring about social status and teaching them to love themselves for who they are. Rather than promote misrepresentations, stereotypes and gender roles of women to teenage girls.
Body Image.
Plus Size Princesses. Disabled Princesses.
In most Disney movies ugliness is commonly seen in the main antagonist or villain in the films, making teenagers and children identify and associate ugliness as a sort of evil that shouldn’t be accepted in society. It is mostly female villains who are subjected to this kind of body shaming treatment, they are fat (Ursula from ‘The Little Mermaid‘) old (The Old Woman from ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’) and also hideously ugly (The two step-sisters from ‘Cinderella.’) As almost all female villains on Disney Movies are portrayed this way, this then leads to a common representation that can potentially influence young teenage girls to believe that all fat, ugly and old women are associated with evil, also that they are all mean and bitter due to the fact that they aren’t pretty, thin or young. This main idea that Disney projects is that they openly teach young teenage girls that the more attractive you are, the happier and more morally accepted you will be in life. Also Disney Villains are commonly shown as being insecure about the way that they look, which then causes them to take out their anger and frustration of younger, slimmer and more attractive characters. A prime example of this insecurity would be the ‘Evil Queen‘ in ‘Snow White’ as she is determined to be and obsessed with becoming “the fairest of them all,” in fact she is so willing to be the fairest in the land she even attempts to have somebody kill Snow White (who is the fairest in the land) in the hope that with Snow White gone she can be the ‘fairest of them all.’ Another example would be in ‘Cinderella’ where the two ugly step-sisters constantly bully and abuse the beautiful Cinderella, by basically making her their slave and not letting her leave the house. I believe they bully and abuse Cinderella, due to their own insecurities about the way they look and how they secretly wish that they looked like Cinderella. Whereas Disney promotes beauty, if you’re beautiful you will live a happily-ever-after. In the film ‘Beauty and The Beast’ Disney tried to promote the ‘looks don’t matter,’ which I will give them recognition for trying, but if you look at the plot structure this isn’t true. As at the climax of the film Beast ends up transforming back into handsome human form, before he goes on to live his happily ever after with Belle who is equally as attractive.
All of the Disney Princesses have one thing in common, they all have minuscule waists. Look at the picture of Jasmine, as you can probably see both Jasmine’s head and neck are bigger than her waist. Megara on the other hand is even skinnier than Jasmine, who’s waist is even smaller than the width of her own ponytail. Disney constantly wants to portray the princesses as beautiful which I totally understand, but why do the princesses have to have the tiniest waist line and completely flawless in order to be considered beautiful. Disney shows teenage girls that the representation of beauty is what their ideal normal woman should look like, but in reality it is impossible for a teenage girls to look like them no matter how much they want to. As the Disney Princesses all have size 0 waists, skinny limbs and even small feet. This unhealthy, and unnatural body size is presented through Disney’s animated characters of course and has received plenty of criticism, but this kind of body type is what society wants out of teenage girls. Our society sees a slender, hourglass figure as the beautiful ‘ideal-perfect’ woman, and all media sources reflects that furthermore influencing society. I’ve noticed that Disney constantly follows stereotypical beauty made by society’s expectations through it’s animations. If the Disney was to show a princess with a different body type that was plus sized for example, society may not find her beautiful as she doesn’t live up to their expectations, and Disney could risk losing popularity and profit from it. Disney continues to use this trend of thin, society approved women since the earliest productions with female leads. Disney movies present the idea of beauty that society seeks to them, but with that comes an increase of negative influence of the “ideal” body type to teenage girls and children.
Jasmine with a realistic waist line.
The Little Mermaid is one of the worst movies in terms of representation and stereotypes of teenage girls. In this movie, Ariel is a sixteen-year old girl who dreams of living on the land. She then goes to the surface and see’s Prince Eric, whom of which she instantly falls in love with. But in order to be with him she abandons her entire family, runs away from her home and moves in with a man she has only seen once and hasn’t even talked to. She then sets out to find Ursula who is in fact considered so dangerous that she has been banned from the kingdom and forced out of society, purely because she overheard two eels saying that Ursula was a miracle worker. Then after Ursula convinces Ariel with insults, Ariel take approximately 3 seconds to agree to give Ursula her voice in exchange for a magic potion that will turn her tail into legs and she truly believes Ursula when she says that in 3 days it is possible to “make” some guy love her otherwise she has to become a sea plant, i.e. a vegetable in a garden of lost souls.
Everything about that short summary of the film is just wrong, especially the misrepresentation, the stereotypes and gender roles targeted at teenage girls throughout this film. This movie pretty much promotes the harmful stereotype of ‘you must change yourself for the person you love,’ you can see this in Ariel as she starts the film out as a brave, curious and adventurous young mermaid. She even saves Prince Eric from drowning, but as soon as she ‘falls in love’ with Prince Eric she suddenly changes into a quiet, love-sick girl, constantly obsessing over him and does nothing but stare wide-eyed at him in admiration. Ariel is so obsessed with Prince Eric even though she hasn’t even talked to him, that she runs away from her family and home to just to be with him. Ariel even struck a deal with Ursula to change herself from being a mermaid to getting human legs, to meet Prince Eric in exchange for her voice. This message shows girls that because Ariel is beautiful she doesn’t need her voice to portray her thoughts, leading for Ariel and real life teenage girls to believe that it’s their physical beauty that trumps their beauty on the inside and what your personality is like. Her whole demeanor is changed from being bold to being submissive to Eric, and her whole interest in human culture shrinks down to just seeking out a ‘kiss.’ In the end, Ariel does ultimately get ‘her prince’ but at the expense of giving up her personality and leaving her family, friends and whole world behind. Sending out the message out to young girls that in order to get somebody to fall in love with you, don’t be yourself.
Also in this ‘children’s movie’ Ariel is way over sexualised. Ariel is a 16-year old girl who wears only a clam shell as a bra, and of course her mermaid tail. Although Ariel is supposed to be portrayed as independent, explorative and rather intelligent, her skimpy clam-shell bra doesn’t reflect her true self worth and just makes her appear to be so much older than what she really is. Also not to mention the fact of when Ariel is turned into a human and she takes a magical potion that knocks her out and she then wakes up on a rock beside the shore completely naked aside from just her clam-shell bra. To which reveals a darker theme by Disney for a so called children’s movie, this representation of teenage girls being over sexualised by Disney is not an accurate representation of all teenage girls. I believe that it’s not an accurate representation of teenage girls because teenagers wear a lot more than just a clam-shell bra, and it makes teenagers seem as though they okay with being nearly naked in public. But in reality most teenage girls suffer with self-consciousness, low self-esteem and low self-confidence due to their own physical attributes not even nearly coming close to Ariels figure, as most teenage girls don’t have naturally flat stomachs with minuscule waists, or wide hips.
This also causes implications to how society and the public perceive teenage girls to be like due to this misrepresentation, like how teenage girls can be perceived to be slutty/shallow due to older people imagining them to be dressing and acting in the same way that Ariel does when it comes to boys or going to teen parties. Teenagers also can be perceived as being obsessed with boys because of the ‘crazy teenage hormones’ that most parents dread,apart from the ‘directioner fan girl‘ this simply isn’t true either. For the most part teenage girls are only obsessed with food and social media outlets, I mean most girls do like boys but using the word obsessed seems to harsh a term. This then causes society and media to perceive teenage girls as obsessive, clingy and weird, as if this is what teenage girls are like in movies such as ‘The Little Mermaid’ that was made by a company with adults working there. Then they must be right, (note the sarcasm). Another way teenager girls can be perceived by society is that, they can make stupid decisions when they are in love. With Ariel, a stupid decision that she made was trading away her beautifully talented voice to a dangerous stranger that was exiled from Ariel’s entire society because she was that dangerous, for a pair of human legs so that she could go get the man that she loved but hadn’t held a conversation with before. This then lets society and media see an over-exaggerated version of a stupid decision that teenage girls can make at such a young age. To which of course the media will see and continue to perpetuate this over-exaggerated message of stupidity with teenage girls when they are in love, leading to society perceiving teenage girls as stupid when they are in love and making bad decisions because of their relationship. However this isn’t the case, more often than not teenage girls manage to fall into the trap that is stupid in love when they get into a relationship with a new boyfriend. This will then lead to teenage girls being criticised by adults, friends and strangers on their relationship and the decisions that they make in that relationship like having sex, or having a baby in that relationship at a young age. Then due to this decision to get pregnant at such a young age she will then be criticised by all the people I mentioned previously, this can lead to peer pressure to get an abortion of the baby and make the mother put the child up for adoption, when she may actually want to keep the child. Or she could also receive bullying because of this decision of hers to have a baby with a man she loves at a young age, which can also lead to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, low confidence, and could go to such extreme lengths that the mother could potentially kill herself and the baby.
Gender Roles.
(Link to Pic.)
Disney portrays gender roles a lot throughout all of their films and also in their stores, a statistic that I found was that “73.2% of all toys sold by Disney are marketed as “boys only”,and gives the “boys only section 100% of the vehicle, building, and weapons toys. The chats also show that the girls toys were given 66.7% of all of the toys that cultivate creativity, 97% of the dolls, and 100% of beauty cosmetics and jewellery.” (Click here for Link to Blog.) This statistic astounds me as to why there is even sections named “boys only” and “girls only,” because when we were all younger we only played with what we liked and what we thought was cool. Rather than thinking I want to play with these toys because it’s pink and i’m a girl and this is what I am expected to like. I remember when I was a little girl my favourite toys were lego’s, cars and pretty much anything to do with building so why must other little girls be taught that no you can’t play with cars because those are for boys. Ultimately it is teaching children from a young age about gender roles, what society expects them to like when it comes to toys and clothes and inequality. Whereas an example of gender roles in one of their films is in ‘The Lion King,’ when Simba’s father is killed, Simba runs away and Scar takes over. The Lionesses are then shown waiting around for Simba to hopefully return and save them, furthermore showing the lionesses as weak characters and in need of rescuing as they aren’t able to do it for themselves and depend on the lions.
These gender stereotypes of how women should act compared to men is an awful message to portray to young girls, this is because in these films the women are often seen as weaker compared to men, sensitive, emotional, passive, domestic, stereotypical and troublesome for male characters. Is this really a message that we want to send into the minds of young girls, that will remain with them throughout their child hood and teenage hood. This stereotype that Disney has produced of teenage girls can then result into real characteristics that some girls may develop if they consider the disney princesses as their idol, or a role model they look up to. Which can later cause some serious problems in the future such as being in an abusive relationship (Beauty and the Beast), leaving everyone you know and love to get a man you have never talked to (The Little Mermaid) and many other serious implications.
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