** For this blog post, I will be focusing on the perspective and experience of girls and/or femme presenting people. However, I also acknowledge, appreciate and hold space for the damage that is done to little boys and masc. presenting people as well. **
Childhood stories and fairytales do a lot more than just entertain us. They quietly build the blueprint and script for how we’re expected to act, look, and feel as we move through the “innocence” of childhood and into the vulgarity of adulthood. Children are depicted as “women” and portrayed in these fantastical stories as helpless, passive, and submissive objects for others, usually men, to enjoy.
They teach us to surrender our individuality, second-guess our own strength and to exist in a world where we are to be seen and not heard. These classical tropes take away the possibility of being a whole person and remind us that we are simply a body without agency or potential. That is unless, we are in the possession, proximity, or pursuit of a man.
This conditioning is effective and becomes the narrative we carry within ourselves, long after the book closes or the movie credits roll. It shapes not only our own unconscious thoughts and behaviors, but society’s as well. It trains us to judge female bodies, both young and old, as physical objects long before we consider their individual ideas, interests or intellect.
We know these social schemas exist in the world, but it’s easy to overlook the insidious nature in which they show up in our everyday life. Recently, I saw a reel on IG that brought this concept into focus and inspired this blog post. I will be using the original creator’s words and a personal selection of images to illustrate this concept through the lens of the historically problematic empire, Disney.
“If I wanted to disempower an entire generation of women, here’s how I would do it.”
I’d start when they were little and make children’s movies.
Where the most important thing a woman could be, is beautiful.
And the greatest thing that could happen to her, is being chosen.
I would teach her that if she is kind enough, pretty enough and patient enough, eventually, a man would come and save her.
I’d make the Powerful women the Villains,
the Angry women the Villains,
the Aging women, the Villains.
And the women who wanted more? I’d make sure they paid for it.
I would teach her that suffering quietly made her good.
And that love requires sacrifice.
I might even make one of the most beloved princesses give up her literal voice, for a man.
Than, I’d end every story at the same place.
She gets chosen,
she gets married,
And they lived “Happily Ever After”.
Before she was old enough to ask what she wanted, I’d hand her a script for what a successful life looks like.
Then, I’d repeat it. Again,
And again.
Until one day, she grew up and mistook the script for her own desires.
Then one day, she might realize that no one ever took her power from her. They just taught her to look everywhere except inside herself to find it.
Creator Credit: @kore.sound
It is nearly impossible to escape the messages that are embedded in these narratives. Not only the overt storylines, but also the subtle tropes, serve as invisible templates that teach us “who to be”. These messages are fed to us over and over again, long before we are old enough to recognize and understand the lies. And these expectations don’t just stay inside our heads. They seep into our bodies, settling deep into our bones. We experience these messages as physical oppression, self-doubt and hyper-vigilance. They dictate how we engage in the world, from the way we stand in line to how we speak in class. Because of this, we move through life and engage with others jaded by this filter and guided by this lens. Breaking these cycles and unlearning this script takes deliberate effort from all of us. We aren’t just passive audience members watching these stories play out. Instead, we are active participants in a complex and ongoing experience of learning, unlearning and reimagining ourselves and the world we live in. We can choose to be the heroes of our own stories, instead of accepting the roles that have been assigned to us.
Wow! This was a great and true read. It really shows how media plays such a huge role in our shaping of ideas, norms, right and wrong etc. The Happily Ever After Stories and sticker book I remember having and reading often. I as a child enjoyed reading of course, but the contents of the book really did drill those ideas of women, beauty, and love even more.
This happens in media in so many ways such as with gender, skin color, what a family should look like, and much more. I really enjoyed reading this and will have to check out the IG account.
I’ve been told I’m naive for this before, usually with an unsatisfying explanation, but I believe our current generation is eroding the gender-constructs of old, even though our brains have been overtaken by technology and AI.
Maybe this trend will reverse in the other direction, but the context of the conversation has shifted to “eroding gender constructs” and has become generally much more self aware; even the reactionary side must now work to discredit the ideas, because the conversation has shifted.
Conservatism is becoming increasingly more “faux”, they may tout the “unnaturalness” of it all, but openly discriminating against gender-non-conforming people is becoming increasingly less socially acceptable.
The work that people are doing to disestablish these ideas and the work we should be doing is working.
I love how you set up and provided qualitative examples. I think the structure of this post provided a lot of insight and perspectives to readers and you developed a good connection to your main argument and point. It is very thorough to read and worded very thoughtfully. The use of “jaded” and “reimagining” were good terms that demonstrated a sense of sophistication in your post towards the conformity of society towards a specific and single-sided story of how women are viewed in fairytales and how it translates to the external world yet gets internalized into a culture for women and how they are viewed or view themselves.
This post was so incredibly powerful! It reminded me of how people have been frustrated with the lack of princes and “traditional” love stories in Disney movies nowadays. We have been so conditioned by these clichés that we criticize anything different from this traditional story. The story tells women that they need a man, beauty, and youth to be happy, and usually they have to sacrifice something in order to achieve this. Some prince eventually comes to save the heroine from danger. Then they get married, and that equals eternal happiness. Happily ever after. And the female villains are villains because they don’t have a man, or fall into the traditional beauty standards, and are evil because they lack these things.
Marriage is the professed ceiling of happiness and purpose for women. Now, even if women become lawyers or doctors or succeed in their professions, there is always this lingering pressure or self-criticism that I should be married and having kids, or I am not “fulfilling my purpose”. I need to be dating in order to have purpose. I need to be put together and attractive every day to have purpose. All of this stems from these innocent fairy tales telling women that this is what true happiness looks like and this is the only way to achieve it.
Despite many Disney princesses starring in movies named after them (Snow White, Cinderella, etc.) they are still the object of men, and are training young women to allow themselves to be objects in their futures. That they should settle for mistreatment, loneliness, and abuse if it leads to your “happily ever after”. I feel like there is a hidden role of these fairy tales in women staying with abusers or leaving later than they should because marriage or male companionship was indoctrinated to us as our main source of purpose. And it’s not even the marriage, but the societal pressures to marry or stay married because of the reinforced ideas in films. I love the idea expressed in your post that the generational continuance of these ideals is not just pushed by people or society, but by the media we consume and continue to consume when we are young and impressionable.
Truly beautiful post!!
As a cis man it really is interesting to see how most media even from a young age pushes women to believe wholeheartedly in a specific outcome. I makes me want to look at the media i watched when i was younger to see how it affects how i act today and how it may still be affecting younger individuals.