This is an extremely interesting video about masculinity in Disney films.
Essentially, the video argues that masculinity in Disney movies has three primary elements:
- Viewing women as objects of pleasure or servants to please them;
- Possessing a muscled body and physical prowess;
- Being willing to fight to maintain dominance.
I think the video suffers from one fatal flaw: it does not adequately distinguish between “good guy masculinity” and “bad guy masculinity.” For instance, the video is right that pacifism rarely comes off well in Disney. However, good guys in Disney films rarely choose to fight; they are driven by the villain’s evil to fight. In fact, Disney Villain Death exists just so the heroes don’t have to have blood on their hands. Good guys, according to the Disney idea of masculinity, are classic “I didn’t start the fight, but I’m sure as hell gonna end it” people.
The objectification section is particularly problematic. Gaston is, very clearly, not a hero and his view of Belle as an object to be possessed because she’s beautiful is a foil to Belle learning to love the Beast for what he is on the inside. A Girl Worth Fighting For from Mulan is supposed to be sexist. That’s literally the whole joke of the song. See the bit where Mulan was all “how ’bout a girl who’s got a brain, who always speaks her mind” and everyone else was like “nah”? That is because they have sexist views of what women are good for, which proves exactly how badass Mulan is by defying her gender roles to kick ass and take names.
Which is not to say that good-guy masculinity in Disney movies isn’t objectifying; it is just not “women as objects for pleasure” objectifying. Instead, good-guy masculinity is pedestalizing. Good men in Disney movies treat women like, well, princesses. They see that they’re beautiful and then are willing to suffer any pain, endure any torment, do any deed, in order to earn her love.
But pedestalization is not magically unsexist. For one thing, it denies women agency: why can’t they go about earning men’s love? Besides, women– even beautiful women– are often assholes who don’t deserve to have someone go through the Twelve Labors of Hercules to earn their love; pedestalization denies women the agency to be less than perfect. It also creates a toxic view of love. Love is not something you earn. You do not deserve love because you buy flowers or pay for dinners or write poems or give compliments or open car doors or treat women like (revealing phrase!) princesses.
Love is a relationship, not a reward. People of all genders get love when they find someone whose company they enjoy, whose presence makes their stomachs flip over, who makes them a better person, who shares their values, whom they want to share a life with. You don’t have to be Prince Charming to find love; you just have to be a person. And Disney movies don’t really depict that kind of love. Maybe it makes bad movies.
Despite my disagreements with the video, I do think it’s vitally important that we continue to examine the gender politics of Disney movies from all sides, masculinity as well as femininity. Childhood popular culture is an important source of ideas about how the world works that continue to influence us for the rest of our lives– and, in terms of gender and relationships, those ideas can fuck us up pretty damn bad.
Disney movies are especially important as sources of childhood socialization, because of how popular they are. Nearly everyone saw at least one Disney movie as a child; most of us have seen most of the Disney oeuvre. As a college student, I regularly participate in spontaneous The Lion King or Mulan singalongs. Disney is a tremendously important part of our collective culture, so we can’t ignore the places where it fucks up.
Therefore, it’s important for us social justice types to criticize Disney movies when they fail. They depict thin characters as attractive and heroic and fat characters as jokes at best and nonexistent at worst. They are astonishingly heteronormative: my sociology professor, out of sheer irritation with people saying Heather Has Two Mommies was inappropriately putting sexuality in children’s media, once wrote a paper analyzing every reference to heterosexuality in a Disney movie. There are a lot. And Disney presents unrealistic and stereotyped ideas of femininity and masculinity, reinforcing inaccurate ideas of the Prince Charming and the Beautiful Princess.
I don’t want to say that Disney has never been progressive. Mulan could not be more feminist if it dropped an anvil on the viewer’s head with WOMEN CAN DO ANYTHING MEN CAN DO written on it; the movie also has Harvey Fierstein in it and seems to be arguing that crossdressing can solve every problem ever, both of which as a queer feminist I must appreciate. The Princess and the Frog has some very interesting class and race commentary: in fact, in parts, it almost seems to be a critique of the American Dream. Both Prince Naveen and Tiana are refreshingly non-stereotypical. Progress has been made, in part because people keep calling them out on their shit. Let’s keep up the good work.
Thing of Things 
People who are more familiar with Disney can correct me on this, but what I remember from earlyish Disney (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) is that the prince is *boring*. He doesn’t really have a viewpoint, a distinct character, or a story. Am I remembering correctly?
More recent Disney fairy tale movies have characterized men. Was there a distinct shift at some point?
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You’re correct that older Disney films don’t give the princes much characterization. I don’t know when the shift happened, but at least in the 90s they had some personality.
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The Prince in Cinderella is a zero-dimensional character, a human MacGuffin.
The early Disneys were in the folkloric spirit: simple morality tales, with some gags added by the studio. Over the years, they seem to have felt freer to elaborate; Frozen, for example, bears very little resemblance to its (frankly sappy) source material.
I credit the Flynn Effect.
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Hard to say. I think people have changed as much as the movies have. I’d propose the first ‘modern formula’ for disney was “The Little Mermaid” in1989.
From sleeping beauty to that point, it was more of an adventure thing “The Rescuers” “Fox and the Hound” “Robin Hood”.
Before Sleeping beauty, it’s the cinderella formula, although there are lots of ‘oddball’ films in the period like Dumbo, fantasia, ‘victory through air power’
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Little Mermaid is absolutely the start of a new era for Disney The 80s were pretty moribund in terms of Disney films having much resonance as a culturally defining. There was actually a fair amount of discussion at the time about how Disney had redefined their approach going into Little Mermaid.
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I stopped the video as soon as Emperor Kuzco made an appearance. The entire point of his character is that he’s a gigantic asshole who needs to be taken down a peg. (Really, I should have cut it with the Gaston shot, but I read your post first and had some warning there.)
You really can’t watch these films, even as a kid, and not figure out which characters are behaving badly. They’re not exactly subtle. Child me had to be taken out of the theater crying because Gaston – not Beast – was so frightening, and the irony in “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” is thick enough to spread on bread. Taking their lines out of context does not impress me.
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It took me a second to figure out what I think you’re trying to say, here.
A Girl Worth Fighting For is sexist and that’s ok because the sexism is challenged. Its a depiction of sexism, but it doesn’t present that sexism as just “the way things are.”
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Then, would you say that works of fiction that depict sexist or racist worldviews have an obligation to challenge them? Or does this apply only to children’s movies, because children are more impressionable?
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Another big problem with the “love as reward for men” trope is that it subtly implies that most men are unworthy of love; it says most men do not deserve love unless they work their asses off for it. I think that’s part of the reason a lot of guys feel like they have to be at least one of rich, athletic, or socially popular and skilled to get dates. I know I always felt like I didn’t deserve love and that I had nothing to offer a woman because I wasn’t worth y.
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“it says most men do not deserve love unless they work their asses off for it. I think that’s part of the reason a lot of guys feel like they have to be at least one of rich, athletic, or socially popular and skilled to get dates”
In my experience* this is true though, at least if by dates you mean dates with reasonably attractive and non-fucked-up people.
* my experience is high school and a year of college. Maybe after college women magically start desiring poor, lazy, and socially unskilled men.
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The negation of “you have to be at least one of rich, athletic, or socially popular and skilled to get dates” is not “women desire poor, lazy, and socially unskilled men”.
Some women don’t demand social skills, popularity, athleticism or wealth — but if you’re bad at logic, we don’t want you either.
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I have mixed feelings about “A Girl Worth Fighting For” from Mulan. Sympathetically, I think you can interpret it as a joking depiction of sexism that’s challenged by the later events of the movie, but as a little kid, what I actually took away from it was, “Even people who are otherwise good will judge you solely based on your appearance/femininity/etc and be repelled if you act smart.” Like, we see Mulan making friends with all the dudes in the army, and they train together, and then suddenly there’s this moment where they’re like, “Well, yeah, you’re great, but a girl with your qualities would be gross, obviously.” Which was fairly depressing, as a little kid!
I mean, I’m not saying that no one should ever make films for kids where sexism is a theme, but I think that the way every single guy in Mulan is unilaterally, unremittingly sexist until Mulan has jumped through 10,000 hoops to prove how excellent she is does sort of end up reinforcing the idea that sexism is normal (in the sense of normative and permissible). Probably this is going to be an issue with any extremely schematic depiction of sexism, though.
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I’ve noticed that other people seem to instinctively conclude that “Depicts as Normal” = “Depicts as Positive/Desirable/Normative.” I’ve never done so myself and do not know why. This has resulted in me severely disagreeing with a lot of subtextual analyses, since I often find a conclusion that “X is portrayed as Positive/Desirable/Normative” to be completely unwarranted.
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I wonder if this is a consequence of anti-elitism: To say that X is normal, but bad—particularly if you pretty clearly have little or no X yourself—is to suggest that you are (at least in that respect) better than most other people. Bizarrely, most people seem to regard making such a suggestion as a bad thing.
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Well, I think that quite frequently, the “normal” is depicted as, if not explicitly desirable, natural and probably unchangeable. It’s the “that’s just the way things are” school of argument–you may not like what’s normal, but it’s only to be expected. That’s why I said “permissible” rather than “desirable” above.
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It probably is just a combination of typical mind fallacy and people having different levels of contrarianism!
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Of course, inevitability need not imply acceptance, particularly if one rejects consequentialism. In the words of my favorite poet:
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind [. . .]
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
—from Dirge Without Music, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
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@ osberend
OK, suppose you learn that members of your preferred sex aren’t attracted to people like you, but you don’t accept it. Now what? Do you write an essay to persuade boys that smart girls are totally sexy?
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@Nita: That would seem like a logical response, if you think that the situation is inevitable as a permanent baseline, but subject to change in individual cases. If not, if you think that the matter is entirely hopeless, then you raise your voice in protest against the injustice of the situation, and the vice that is responsible for it. You know that your noble act will accomplish nothing (except perhaps to give some sense of solidarity to your fellow sufferers), and you perform it anyway.
Of course, these two responses can easily shade into each other, differing more in emphasis than in substance.
Possibly relevant: The full poem that I quoted from is a protest against death. This is not a battle that can be won, not an oppressor that the poet can have any hope of persuading. And yet she declares her defiance anyway.
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@ osberend
Is it really an injustice? Does every woman have a right to be considered desirable? What vice is responsible for men’s sexual/romantic preferences?
I know and love the poem myself, although I’m super-deathist by LessWrong standards. But expressing helpless love and grief is very different from complaining about someone else’s sexuality.
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Nina: what would you think of someone who wrote an essay to persuade girls that smart boys are totally sexy?
(And if you say you’d approve, let’s rephrase it using words with negative connotations. What would you think of an essay by a male nerd to persuade girls to date more male nerds?)
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@ Jiro
Well, here in the real world, I would find it amusing and charming.
But in the hypothetical world inspired by “A Girl Worth Fighting For” (or its gender-reversed version), it would be completely ineffective. That’s why I don’t think Osberend’s non-acceptance strategy would have helped young Bem very much.
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@Nita: I didn’t think I was presenting a strategy; my statement about non-acceptance was meant to indicate that it erroneous (and, in fact, vicious) to make the logical leap from “normal” to “normative and permissible.”
Regarding your broader point, I do think that events later in the movie are relevant (as bem ambivalently acknowledges); “no man is ever going to want you without enormous effort on your part to make him see why you’re actually desirable” is a rather unpleasant message to receive, but it’s still very different from “no man is ever going to want you, period.”
Or, to zoom back out: “Men/women/humans are naturally like this; that fact is unchangeable” and “men/women/humans are naturally like this; they are unchangeable” are actually two very different statements, but for some reason, a lot of people seem to assume that the former implies the latter.
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@Nita
Hit a quick Google search for “right to be considered desirable”. First result? The wiki page for “entitlement”. 😀
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Wait, what’s the difference, exactly? And if it’s a bit too subtle for me, what can we expect from the average Disney-watching kid? 🙂
This conversation reminds me of a more general issue with kids and popular media: for satire to work as intended, the audience has to be familiar with its object. But sometimes children encounter the satire first, and then we get real-life “Kick a Ginger Day”, or the belief that a smart girl can only earn love and respect by becoming a national hero.
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@ Leit
Uh, I’m getting “Right-wing politics” without the quotes, or “Easy tips to Lose Belly Fat Page 49” with them 😛
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Nita, I think the idea is that the first version leaves it open that even though it’s natural for them to behave a certain way, you can maybe still get them to behave in a different way (at least on an individual basis). The second version suggests that you can’t do even that.
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@Nita: Creutzer has it precisely. “Men/women/humans are naturally like this; that fact is unchangeable” is a statement about the inevitability of a certain baseline; “men/women/humans are naturally like this; they are unchangeable” is a statement about the inevitability of a certain ultimate result.
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> Easy
> Page 49
I don’t think that author really thought this through…
Hmm, my first result with quotes looks like an argument about hetero and homo desire, followed by the belly fat guide. Without quotes I get the wiki first… Google might have decided there’s nothing interesting for me in right-wing politics? It’s apparently decided that I’d be interested in reproductive rights in sub-saharan africa, though.
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@nita
“Is it really an injustice? Does every woman have a right to be considered desirable”
I do not know what “right” means. Obviously women should not use force in their quest to be considered desire-able. However I would say that in a decent world every woman would be considered very desire-able (by some reasonable set of people). It is horrible aberration that some people, of both genders, are considered unattractive by the vast majority of their desired sexual partners.
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@stargirlprincess
Dear sweet heaven, no. That’s what I was poking at with my Google search comment earlier.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that the conventionally unattractive tend to interpret “there should be someone for everyone” as “people that I am attracted to should be obligated to be attracted to me”. Those other people should be allowed their own standards of attraction as well.
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@Nita: Is it really an injustice?
Not (necessarily) in an interpersonal sense, but in a cosmic sense. It is the world not being as it ought to be.
Does every woman have a right to be considered desirable?
Not every woman, perhaps, but every worthy woman has . . . if not a right, then at least a worthiness-to-possess.
What vice is responsible for men’s sexual/romantic preferences?
Insofar as those preferences are against virtue, they are themselves a vice. It is always vicious to desire a person less, whether as a friend, a lover, or any other sort of companion, because of that person’s virtues. Therefore, since intelligence (or at least, the proper use thereof) is a virtue[1], it is vicious to prefer an unintelligent woman to an intelligent one.
I know and love the poem myself, although I’m super-deathist by LessWrong standards.
As am I, although that’s really not saying much, is it?
But expressing helpless love and grief is very different from complaining about someone else’s sexuality.
Perhaps your reading of the poem is a bit different from mine; I see it as a lament, yes, but also as a protest. To lodge a complaint against death has even less hope of success than to do so against another’s sexuality, and yet insofar as either render’s the world less just, it is right to do so.
[1] One which comes far easier to some than to others, and which some can only have in small measure no matter how great their efforts. But where is the virtue of which is this not true?
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@osberend
Your very first reply (about anti-elitism) makes a lot of sense to me. When I identify something common as undesirable and make efforts to stop doing it I do feel superior to other people. And if other people get angry at me for doing so I am less bothered by their anger than I normally would be because I know deep down I am smart and they are fools.
I suppose I never recognized this as elitist because I always considered it ridiculous to not be proud of self-improvement.
@Nita
>>>>This conversation reminds me of a more general issue with kids and popular media: for satire to work as intended, the audience has to be familiar with its object.
I remember frequently encountering satires of things when I was a kid that I didn’t know were satire, and most of the time I still kind of got what the author intended. For instance, there was a storyline in “Dilbert” that was meant to be a satire of the War on Drugs, that went completely over my head until my parents explained it to me; but I still understood that Scott Adams was portraying the government as evil for banning the medication Dilbert had discovered.
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Well, ceteris paribus. And are there really that many people who would ceteris paribus prefer a less intelligent woman to a more intelligent one? It’s just that cetera are rarely para.
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@Creutzer: And are there really that many people who would ceteris paribus prefer a less intelligent woman to a more intelligent one?
There are quite unambiguously some, and informal observation seems to me to suggest that their numbers are non-trivial (at least for comparisons like 120 IQ vs. 110; probably less so for 80 vs. 90). On the other hand, the number how are not like that is also plainly non-trivial. Beyond that, I lack the statistics to say.
It’s just that cetera are rarely para.
Sure, but I’m responding to bem’s inferred message from (parts of) Mulan that “even people who are otherwise good will judge you solely based on your appearance/femininity/etc and be repelled if you act smart.”
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And if it’s a bit too subtle for me, what can we expect from the average Disney-watching kid?
Applying this to a much wider context. Disney makes ‘family films’. The family is likely to include children of several different ages, and a grandparent. (Dickens, Lewis, Barrie — most popular authors had this problem.) You need to provide something for everyone, pretty constantly, so no one gets bored. Often this is something that can be taken at several different levels.
One trope in fairy tales is “You have to try many many times, be defeated many times, perhaps give up hope, before you succeed.” How does an author portray this for different attention spans? Too many defeats, and the smaller kids get bored or discouraged. Too few, and the older kids don’t get that trope at all.
In the Mulan song, some very young kids will just see quite a few defeats without decyphering the content, though they’ll probably note that the defeats are coming from stupid vulgar men. Some kids old enough to notice a generality in the content, will see that it is being satirized. Sexism is common — but only among men whom we Other and stand away from.
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“I mean, I’m not saying that no one should ever make films for kids where sexism is a theme, but I think that the way every single guy in Mulan is unilaterally, unremittingly sexist until Mulan has jumped through 10,000 hoops to prove how excellent she is does sort of end up reinforcing the idea that sexism is normal (in the sense of normative and permissible). ”
At the age a film like that is aimed at, that is absolutely the likeliest impression a girl is going to get. And the hell of it is, for the period when the Mulan story is set, that kind of sexism really was the norm. IOW the film is just being historically straight. That’s an pretty much insurmountable problem when you drag old stories before a modern and still not very worldly audience.
What would mitigate some of that impression would be cultural familiarity with the tropes of Chinese martial fairy tales – everybody who is anybody, male or female, is expected to have superhuman gongfu. What American 10-year-old is going to know that (even if she’s Chinese-American.)?
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>>And the hell of it is, for the period when the Mulan story is set, that kind of sexism really was the norm. IOW the film is just being historically straight. That’s an pretty much insurmountable problem when you drag old stories before a modern and still not very worldly audience.
Ah yes, because everything else about Mulan is so extremely historically accurate. ^_^ I mean, you kind of said this yourself with “everybody who is anybody is expected to have superhuman gongfu.”
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Also, the Disney version is super-consistent with the original ballad regarding when and how Mulan is discovered to be female[1]:
“I open the door to my east chamber,
I sit on my couch in the west room,
I take off my wartime gown
And put on my old-time clothes.”
Facing the window she fixes her cloudlike hair,
Hanging up a mirror she dabs on yellow flower powder
She goes out the door and sees her comrades.
Her comrades are all amazed and perplexed.
Traveling together for twelve years
They didn’t know Mulan was a girl.
Similarly, the supernatural elements are also totally present in the original ballad’s laconic account, as is the attack on the palace.
[1] Translation by Hans Frankel; I know no Chinese.
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“Ah yes, because everything else about Mulan is so extremely historically accurate. ^_^’
Parts are, like the sexism, and parts aren’t, like the way she looks so Caucasian. And speaks English. (Just kidding!) And the way the story is massaged.
““everybody who is anybody is expected to have superhuman gongfu.””
I must have been unclear. That part is also historically accurate as far as story-telling conventions go. It is so derigueur that novels drawn form story-telling sources are loaded with it, and it extends even to novels that were purely original. the first couple chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber are all fairy-tale woo and wandering sages with supernatural powers. It was a pretty strong convention.
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Oh, no, I got what you were saying about the storytelling conventions. I was pointing out that, as far as I can tell, this doesn’t seem to be the case for the Disney film. I haven’t read Dream of the Red Chamber, but it seems like there’s a similar effect in place for The Water Margin, which I have read. Assuming we’re thinking about relatively similar literary conventions, of course.
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Bem, I have to confess I haven’t seen the film but I am pretty sure you’re right on that. It’s been forever since I read Water Margins, and it kind of bogs down, so I don’t remember if I finished it. I do remember a chapter where one of the heroes face punches a tiger in his path and kills it on the spot. That’s the kind of thing I mean.
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I don’t want to interrupt the attraction/virtue ethics conversation going on above, and thus am replying to myself, but…I think it’s interesting that everyone jumped immediately to discussing attraction? Technically, I guess, the song is about that, but I was always more bothered by the way the movie showed non-romantic rejection. Like, at the start of the movie, Mulan has, apparently, no friends, because she’s not appropriately feminine, then her family rejects her for the same reason, then she goes off to war and the soldiers reject her for not being appropriately masculine, and then she figures out that actually, she is pretty good at being a man (!) and she makes friends (!), and then the moment she suggests that, as a dude, she might like women who have the same qualities she does, all her so-called friends are like, “Ew.” No one makes fun of the dude who’s like, “Okay, literally the only thing I care about in a wife is whether she can cook,” but, you know, Mulan’s supposed preferences are out there.
The romance with the general (or whatever his rank is actually supposed to be) bothered me less, because it’s such a straight inversion of the usual “a man has to prove himself worthy to gain a woman’s love” story, and that reversal appealed to me a lot, as a kid. But the thing where all her friends reject her was depressing.
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There’s no denying that Disney has done a pretty terrible job over the decades when it comes to non-sexist storylines, and even many of the recent Disney plots which are more pro-feminism show signs of a very conscious effort in that direction. But I’ve always been annoyed with the complaint I often hear from my feminist friends that Beauty and the Beast is a really sexist story.
I mean, yes, a large part of the plot revolves around the fact that the Beast is holding Belle prisoner, and that eventually Belle falls in love with her captor, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to isolate this supposed “Stockholm Syndrome” aspect of the plot and brand the whole thing as sexist. One obvious intended message of the Belle / Beast plot is that sometimes it’s possible to find the little bit of good in someone and draw it out by giving them love — rather similar to the Luke / Vader plot in the original Star Wars trilogy. Granted, it’s easily possible for plot elements to be objectionably sexist even while the intended message isn’t, but it seems to me that you have to sort of be trying to find sexism to interpret the story as showing that the most effective way for a man to earn a woman’s love is to lock her up. And meanwhile, some of the other plots and themes are pretty much explicitly feminist — fairly progressive for a Disney movie of that time. (Then again, some of the explicitly feminist moments involve Belle responding to Gaston’s chauvinism, which a lot of feminists also seem to consider objectionably sexist content… but Ozy basically covers that above.)
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Interesting flip of the narrative. Since you mentioned star wars, I can see it’s also possible to look at Belle following the hero’s journey of Campbell- She goes into a world of supernatural wonder, confronts them, and at the end she gains the ability to bestow boons (saving the beast)
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Unfortunately, many people try to do it in real life, and it can end very badly. And then we ask, “oh, but why didn’t they leave their abusive partner earlier?”
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So a Disney is sexist for promoting virtues of forgiveness and charity and attempting to find the good in people because sometimes that doesn’t work?
Is “turn the other cheek” also sexist?
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I said exactly nothing about sexism — in fact, neither sex nor gender are mentioned in my comment.
But here’s the sex-specific aspect, if you like: in fairy tales, Being a Nice and Patient Girl, even (and especially) in adverse circumstances and under unfair demands, is the female equivalent of Going on a Dangerous Quest / Slaying the Dragon. It’s how the protagonist proves her worth. Look at how Cinderella tries to be the perfect little servant to her adopted family, or what Show-White does when she stumbles upon the dwarves’ house.
Of course, in real life, heroic deeds don’t result in marriage to a princess, and heroic love and patience doesn’t result in finding your True Love.
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Unfortunately, many people try to do it in real life, and it can end very badly. And then we ask, “oh, but why didn’t they leave their abusive partner earlier?”
Even the non-abusive/non-vicious analogue—”there are aspects of his personality that are compatible with mine; surely if we love each other enough and I work hard enough, his entire personality will eventually be”—can end pretty badly, in terms of frustration and suffering.
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This is indeed a very strong point, and I can only attempt to counter it with the following points, each of which I’m afraid may be relatively weak.
1) When things start turning around in the plot, the Beast stops acting like such an abuser. Forlorn Hopes pointed out below that a lot of the change in their relationship came from the Beast. In fact, admittedly I haven’t seen the movie in many years and have never seen the musical, but as I recall, the Beast actually instigated the first act of kindness. Eventually the Beast has abandoned his controlling nature so completely that he’s ready to lie down and give up his home to invaders.
2) The intent behind the whole Belle-falling-in-love-with-the-Beast plot is very clearly one of portraying a protagonist who eventually “destroys” their antagonist through love and finding the small bit of good in them, not the guy who gets the girl by holding her prisoner in his home until she acquiesces. “Love” in this context, while turning out to be romantic love, would better be translated throughout the movie as a very strong “caring about”: the Beast needs to learn to actually care about other people, and needs someone else to care about him in return. And yes, sometimes the means of conveying a good message in a plot are sexist, “intent isn’t magic”, etc., but I think audiences tend to be influenced primarily by very explicit intended messages rather than what one has to make some effort to read into the plot.
3) Which brings me to the fact that yes, even the clearly intended “show mercy, find the good in your oppressor and draw it out” philosophy can result in continued abuse in romantic relationships. But that philosophy is so broad that it can result in all kinds of other things — for instance, trying to show love and charity to a bully who has been beating up your underdog friends, only to get beaten up yourself (what could have happened in Star Wars). Both Disney films and the original Star Wars trilogy should be approached with the understanding that they are naive and unrealistic in terms of their portrayals of good conquering evil.
The epistemic status of my defending Beauty and the Beast is slightly shaky. It’s possible that at the end of the day, I’m swayed by my hating to see one of my favorite early-childhood movies, which beautifully promotes great values, including some feminist ones, roundly dismissed as “such a horrible sexist story”.
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>>>Unfortunately, many people try to do it in real life, and it can end very badly.
I wonder if there’s some sort of selection effect element to this? We see all the people who fail to change their abusive partner wind up battered or dead. All the people who succeed in changing their partner look like normal happy couples, so we never even notice that they succeeded. All the hard work took place behind the scenes.
I wonder if there’s some kind of study out there on the effects of trying to change someone, and how frequently it succeeds.
I don’t have any personal experience in this regarding romance, but in terms of parenting my parents were highly successful in getting me and one of my brothers to change and improve their behavior, but spectacularly failed at getting my other two brothers to change anything.
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Well, obviously the aim of fairy tales is not to lure people into unhealthy relationships. I think the original story can be seen as a parable about arranged marriage — at one point, Beauty says:
and indeed, the original Beast is unerringly sweet and gentle to her, and she to him.
(of course, there’s still the Unfortunate Implication that attempting suicide is a great way to get out of the friendzone, but I suppose boys were not the intended audience)
And then Disney tried to adapt it to modern times, which worked well in some ways, as you and Forlorn Hopes explained, and not-so-well in other ways. In their latest films, they stray further and further from the original stories, and perhaps that’s a good choice.
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@Ghatanathoah, Yeah, I do wonder a bit about the idea that abusers always escalate. I was with someone who early on would, very rarely, hit me when she was really upset (some women do seem to have an idea that it’s OK for women to hit men). I did my best to explain to her that I was not OK with that, and over time she eventually stopped doing it. It’s just one instance, but it does make me wonder if the idea that abusers always escalate is based on the fact that the ones who get our attention are the ones who do really bad things, who usually escalated to that point. People who do slightly bad things and then stop (or just stay at the same level and never escalate) would never attract anyone’s attention.
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Nita- I can’t say that I’ve done a comprehensive statistical review. But I grew up reading the Yellow Book of Fairy Tales, and all the other assorted colors. I have read SO MANY fairy tales- you have no idea.
And fairy tales, at least in my experience of the popular Victorian era versions of them, are a lot more gender egalitarian than you might think. The male protagonists may do more questing than the females, maybe. But the way the quests are resolved are the same virtue ethics style morality stories either way.
For example, a common trope is for the protagonist to come across a person or animal in need, and help them out of simple generosity. Later, when the protagonist is stuck, the person or creature he or she helped shows up to save him or her.
Again, I can’t give numbers. And I’m not saying that these stories are actually gender egalitarian on the whole. But as a genre they’re surprisingly advanced for their era. I think people wanted children, regardless of gender, to exhibit generosity, cleverness, kindness, and respect for rules of hospitality.
If you want REAL misogyny, skip the fairy tales and read folk tales.
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@ Patrick
Ah, I’ve managed to lure out a fellow fairy tale reader.
You’re right that “boy stories” and “girl stories” have elements in common, such as kindness and self-sacrifice. For instance, in Beauty and the Beast (both original and Disney), the protagonist saves her father. In some Russian fairy tales, the hero heeds the pleas of various animals to let them live, although he’s starving. And characters who rely on cleverness can be of either gender.
Like I said, I was only highlighting the differences: being nice and doing household chores is more commonly asked of young women, while being brave and performing dangerous feats is more commonly asked of young men. This is pretty much in line with the separation of labour in use at the time (except that most “manly” tasks were more mundane than dragon-slaying).
Also, there is a lot of diversity in fairy tales, even within Europe. The Nice Girl stories (Cinderella, Snow-White, Beauty and the Beast etc.) are only a narrow slice, and it’s a little sad that they’ve eclipsed everything else.
For something completely different, I recommend Kirikou et la Sorcière (the best version is in French with English subtitles).
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“Well, obviously the aim of fairy tales is not to lure people into unhealthy relationships.”
Ha! Well said.
In fact there is a really strong argument that folk tales in general and fairy tales too are a road map for situations and relationships.
The author points out a several stories for instance where breaking a promise that has become unhealthy is the key to surviving and is presented as a positive thing.
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IMO the most important fact to keep in mind when discussing Beauty and the Beast is that Belle didn’t magically change the Beast with the power with the power of true love.
The Beast put in enormous effort to change himself of his own violation.
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As a college student, I regularly participate in spontaneous The Lion King or Mulan singalongs. Disney is a tremendously important part of our collective culture, so we can’t ignore the places where it fucks up. Therefore, it’s important for us social justice types to criticize Disney movies when they fail.
…huh. My natural reaction was “But all right-thinking people already know that Disney, as such a prominent part of mass culture, is obviously suspect; and it’s such a blatantly obvious vector of sexist ideas that anyone of sense is presumably on watch for it already. It’s a huge target with a zillion people going after it already, not an unnoticed danger.”
But this feels like I’m violating something closely related to the Conservation of Expected Evidence; i.e., presumably I am wrong and am thinking backwards; maybe Disney’s sexism really does need to be pointed out more.
Doing so is still pretty uninteresting, however. 🙂
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Oh, wait, I’m being dumb. The sensible response on my end is “You are not the target audience, Sniffnoy!” Indeed, that seems to be the case generally with the NSWATM reposts.
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A bit of a tangent on the conservation of expected evidence (because I just encountered that article for the first time in your comment):
There’s a subtlety here, in that while a strict Bayesian can never go looking for evidence to support their theory under their own priors, they can go looking for evidence to support their theory under someone else’s priors.
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“Disney movies are especially important as sources of childhood socialization, because of how popular they are. Nearly everyone saw at least one Disney movie as a child; most of us have seen most of the Disney oeuvre. As a college student, I regularly participate in spontaneous The Lion King or Mulan singalongs. Disney is a tremendously important part of our collective culture, so we can’t ignore the places where it fucks up.”
I have ignored, am ignoring, and will continue to ignore the way Disney fucks up.
Yes, I’ve seen Disney films, but they don’t really inform my worldview. I’ve seen just as many Ghostbusters films.
Perhaps the real issue here is that people don’t want to think of their Disney fandom as progressively neutral (if not regressive), and they don’t want to have to think about how much energy they are devoting to fandom vs activism, so they try to rationalise the former as part of the latter.
To put it another way, I’ve never seen this “Disney is a core pillar of our culture and no cultural discussion can ignore it” argument from anybody who wasn’t a Disney fan.
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So, perhaps both inform your worldview, to some extent? Did you watch them as an impressionable child?
Also: Let’s talk about Ghostbusters masculinity! Why does that utter sleazeball get a romantic happy ending? The other guys are so much better 😦
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Well, one got molested by a ghost earlier on, and might not be in a dating frame of mind. Another is a stereotyped nerd and thus an object of ridicule, even if not on the same level as Rick Moranis’ character.
Also, Bill Murray was likely the most recognisable name among the protagonists, so he got to be the traditional main character, complete with obligatory romance subplot.
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Uh, no? The secretary flirts with him, but she’s low status, so it’s played for laughs. If anything, she is an object of ridicule for going after a man out of her league.
I don’t have a problem with that — that is, I wouldn’t have a problem with that if the character wasn’t also a self-centered liar who refuses to leave someone’s home when politely asked to.
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Bear in mind that I’m drawing from memory here, but wasn’t the stereotyped nerd so nerdy and strait-laced that he considers mold exciting and has the social skills of a potato? I got the impression that the humour was meant to be derived from the complete mismatch between the gregarious secretary and the uptight scientist, not that he was out of her league.
Also, Bill Murray is incapable of playing anything without that slight edge of sleaze.
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Ghostbusters Masculinity: Here is an epic team saving the world consisting of two nerdy scientists, one blue-collar “just here for the paycheck” dude, and one sleazy con-artist. This is, like the opposite of the Disney prince-charming and pretty far away from the Disney villain “woman, you are here to amuse me” stereotype. (Yes, Venkman is a weasel. But he’s not the usual kind of weasel.) Is there anything this movie dos not have? 😉
On the other hand, why is it that every time Louis gets laid, it’s either because of possession, or played for laughs? I guess some characters are just too nerdy to be worthy of sex. 😦
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@ Leit
Maybe you’re right about those two. But even with the awkwardness they’re still a better couple than the one we got in the central story.
@ no one special
What’s so unusual about him?
Yeah, I was also sad that the decent-to-the-best-of-his-ability aspie geek is comic relief, while the sleazy asshole is a romantic hero. And people say feminists are mean to nerds. Hmph.
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@Nita:
Comparing to the Disney Weasel — He’s not like Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, say. He seem more like some kind of proto-PUA — he doesn’t act like he’s entitled to have sex and/or a relationship with with any of the women he’s trying to hook up with, but he does push really, really hard for what he wants.
On the other hand, when the possessed Dana tries to have sex with him, he refuses. So, there’s some limit to how far he will go. He’s willing to falsify his experiments to try and pick up one of the subjects, but he won’t have sex with someone enthusiastic, but clearly impaired. (Please note that while this is a standard feminist talking point in 2015, Ghostbusters is from the 80s.)
tl;dr: It’s not an unusual archetype, just not the one we’ve been talking about on this thread.
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I have quite a lot. In fact, I think most critiques of “princess culture” come from people who haven’t seen a Disney movie at all (…otherwise they wouldn’t be arguing that the protagonists are weak and non-agenty…).
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“In fact, I think most critiques of “princess culture” come from people who haven’t seen a Disney movie at all ”
There are a lot of critiques of princess culture that go well beyond Disney. It’s a systemic problem in Anglo culture that predates Walt Disney himself.
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>>>In fact, I think most critiques of “princess culture” come from people who haven’t seen a Disney movie at all
One thing I notice over and over again on the Internet is someone posting a critique of a piece of fiction that seems to demonstrate problematic elements, only for a mega-fan to come along and point out several plot details that the critiquer missed that totally torpedo their thesis.
It seems like critquers tend to jump the gun an awful lot, or that they simply don’t have the ability to notice details on the same level that a highly devoted fan would.
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Yes, it’s called “interpretation” (those other details don’t really matter, see), and according to post-modernism all interpretations are true. Sadly, the post-modernists missed their modern symbolic logic class and never learned that when everything is true, nothing is true…
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I realize that everyone on here dislikes postmodernism, but must we strawman it like this? This really isn’t an accurate description.
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Isn’t The Little Mermaid all about Ariel working hard to get the boy she likes, though. Like, Prince Eric isn’t the one on a quest to wind the heart of The Pretty
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Popular shows on Disney Jr. right now:
“Doc McStuffins” – Little African-American girl is a doctor to her stuffed toys. Mom is a doctor to humans. Dad appears to be a SAHD.
“Sheriff Callie” – Most competent, wisest character is the titular female cat.
Disney is *all about* progressive female role-models.
(The boys get Jake & the Neverland Pirates)
(There’s also “Sophia the First” – sorry, the princess thing just isn’t going away. Princess stuff is like crack to my gender-conforming youngest.)
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I agree movies abotu Mulan are sexist, especiallys econd one, when there is implied that there is nothing wrong with girls beating the shit out of a man because he is lonely and would want to amuse her…
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