I saw this picture today on this blog, next to each princess is the lesson that her story conveys, they are:
Sleeping Beauty: Pretty girls don’t even need to be alive to get some princely action.
Jasmine (for Aladdin): As a woman your political worth is reduced to your marriagebility.
Snow White: At first, it may seem terrible being so beautiful that other women get jealous enough to try and kill you. But don’t worry, once your beauty attracts a man, he’ll protect you.
The Little Mermaid: Its OK to abandon your family, drastically change your body, and give up your strongest talent in order to get your man. Once he sees your pretty face, only a witches spell could drag his eyes away from you.
Cinderalla: if you’re beautiful enough, you may be able to escape your terrible living conditions by getting a wealthy man to fall for you.
The princess from Beauty and the Beast: Appearences don’t matter, what matters is what is in your heart. Unless you’re the girl.
It got me wondering. How much of this have we internalised? How much of it is true (how much does beauty count?)?
This is why I like Shrek and wish I had watched it rather than Snow White as a child!
i promised my self a while ago not to let my children watch these movies, the msg is coated with so many lovely stuff that u want notice the poison!!
I know, it takes some effort to peel back the fluff and see what you are really being fed. What got me when reading this satirical cartoon was that I had also believed some of the lessons being taught– that beauty surpasses all. Thanks for stopping by!
I agree it’s important to be vigilant to subliminal messages behind stories fed to us and especially to our children… BUT I think this is a really cynical take on what is essentially now a foundation to most girls’ childhoods.
Such ‘fairytales’ are a global, cross-cultural phenomenon that introduce children to many ideas, such as relationships and family, in an unharmful way. It’s possible to put a positive spin on these tales as well, such as a beautiful woman falling in love with a man not for his looks (which are ghastly) but for his kind and gentle personality (Beauty and the Beast).
I don’t think a girl’s ability to develop into an independent, confident and successful woman will be hindered by watching a Disney cartoon or two. Whilst it may not provide the most realistic perspective on love, it may encourage her to believe her dreams, whatever they are, can come true one day.
I doubt that the graphic discussing what Disney heroines might “mean” will stop people from having their kids watch those cartoons, but I do think it’s a pretty valid critique. The issue here is that, as you say, there are some moderately positive messages in the cartoons too – e.g. “favouring personality over looks” in Beauty and the Beast.
On the other hand, if you believe that these positive messages can have an influence, you’d have to accept the more negative implications can too, which is what the authors of the graphic were trying to communicate – we ordinarily think of fairy tales as either harmless, or as having inspiring positive messages for children, but as the graphics shows, there are other underlying messages which are not so great.
Regarding Beauty and the Beast, too, we can see that it’s not really so positive a message regarding looks. Although “Beauty” does accept the “Beast” for who he “really is”, by the end he’s transformed into a handsome prince, so she doesn’t actually have to spend her life with the hideous beast after all. What message does that communicate to young girls? That they can fall in love with ugly people on the expectation that the ugly people will change themselves and become physically beautiful? Not so positive…
Oh, no. I don’t agree that these stories teach this kind of things. It all depends on how we view the question of beauty. But there is a need to teach the children that beauty is not everything. In these stories beauty is not even what counts most. The princesses are beautiful because this is a symbol of their internal beauty. Notice that the message behind is that a princess must be kind hearted, polite, well-mannered, charitable, brave etc. All these qualities are in the first plan. The beauty of Disney’s princesses is a kind of special don to reward their nice personalities and to transmit the idea of inner beauty to a child whose reasoning is diferent than adult’s, so the easiest way that the child understands the need for inner beauty, is to show it on the outside, too. If the princesses were ugly, but good hearted, the child would be confused because for the child, everything must work in a perfect harmony – so, an ugly person in childrens’ stories is usually an evil character, while a good person is usually beautiful on the outside as well as inside. Only when grown up, the child can learn that the reality is different and that the appearence sometimes lie – EVEN IN ‘THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST’ this message is clear: THAT THE APPEARENCE IS BUT AN APPEARENCE and one should never be judged by what they appear to be. That is about the Beast, of course. Bella is beautiful both on the outside and the inside, to convey a child-minded logic that the inner and the outer beauty go together, although in real life, it is not always true, but that the child will be able to understand only in their adult life, so there is no point to show the child that the world is not AS NICE PLACE AS IT SEEMS TO BE… ;* It would be to destroy the child’s ilusions and take away their childhood and their innocence… ;* And remember, Disney took these stories from earlier children’s tale writers – Cinderella or Little Mermaid are but examples – these stories already existed centuries ago… ;*