Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 1

    Because the consumption of art, even in a capitalist society, is such a personal experience, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how an individual interprets and internalizes the films they are participating in.

    We filter our artistic interpretations through our own personal biases and viewpoints, and this can sometimes lead to a person or groups assigning a reading to a work that the author did not design and may not even accurately reflect the nature of the work they are interacting with (e.g. the alt-right seeing Mel Brooks’ The Producers as somehow affirming their disregard for political correctness when the film is very much lampooning bigotry and Nazis specifically). We often learn as much or more about a culture by the way they react to a piece of media as we do from the media itself.

Anyways, you know where this is going. Let’s talk about Disney Princesses.

Pinning down exactly when Disney Princesses entered the picture is a hard thing to do. While the brand kicked off in 2000, the franchise draws upon films stretching all the way back to the golden age of Hollywood. These days the Disney Princess brand is embraced not only by its target audience of young girls, but also adults--those who grew up with the brand and those who just like watching Beauty and the Beast. In that way, this fandom has a lot in common with something like Pokémon, a franchise designed for little kids that is also widely embraced by adult members who have “aged out” of this demographic.

But in my experience, disclosing that I play New Pokémon Snap almost therapeutically has never gotten me weird looks or threatened my credibility the way sharing my excitement for something like Frozen II ever did. (For further perspective, I have received noticeably more backlash for celebrating Ariel than I have for speaking up for Gone with the Wind, Jurassic World, or that "Power Rangers" reboot.) Somehow, we landed on this idea that Disney Princesses are and always have been "problematic" with a capital P.

    This glitter-strewn battlefield we're faced with today is the culmination of a backlash that had its heyday in the mid/late 2000s. This was an era in which the internet happily traded memes and YouTube videos lampooning the absurdity of the Disney Princess mythology, all under the banner of exposing the Princesses as the bad role models that they actually are.

But what's interesting is that what started as internet memes inviting themselves onto tumblr feeds eventually found itself at the center of a culture war that we are still in the middle of, drawing the attention of not only schooled, paid critics, but The Walt Disney Company itself. Indeed, if the authors of these memes are still around today, I can only imagine how thrilled they are to see just how much Disney has done to legitimize these hot takes they horked out one morning at 3 a.m.

The nucleus of the backlash is that the princess characters are training young girls to submit to the patriarchy. Because of this, it’s okay–even necessary–to rescue these young girls, and the mothers subjecting them to this toxic femininity, from their own nostalgia-fueled blindness. As a result, shading the Disney Princess line has become an easy way of telegraphing that one is not only a feminist, but a boat rocker.

    But when you have been participating in the Disney fandom for as long as I have, you eventually start to notice certain contradictions in how these things get discussed. You start to see just how little critical discernment features into the conversation, and after a while, it just starts to feel like “protecting young girls” is the Trojan Horse that the internet uses to roast adults who still go to Disneyland.

    Now, it’s always essential to bear in mind the diversity of viewpoints and attitudes within any school of thought: it's not fair to cast anyone who has questions about Disney Princesses as these Regina George figures out to shame you for liking the wrong thing. I have had many engaging discussions, both with avid fans of the property and non-believers, concerning my frustrations with the limitations of the brand.

    That said, I genuinely don’t think I’m building a strawman when I speak of a certain segment of the population “hating” Disney princesses, or of how a substantial portion of the pushback errs on the side of elitist, even disdainful. See, for example, one of the most influential pieces of anti-princess literature from bestselling author Peggy Orenstein in her 2006 New York Times Op-Ed “What’s Wrong with Cinderella?”

“As a feminist mother — not to mention a nostalgic product of the Garanimals era — I have been taken by surprise by the princess craze and the girlie-girl culture that has risen around it … I watch my fellow mothers, women who once swore they’d never be dependent on a man, smile indulgently at daughters who warble ‘So This Is Love’ or insist on being called Snow White. I wonder if they’d concede so readily to sons who begged for combat fatigues and mock AK-47s.”

I especially love the subtlety of comparing Snow White and Cinderella to actual weapons of mass destruction. And did she just forget that toy guns are in fact a huge market?

Are Disney Princesses actually harmful? Probably not. But trying to poison the watering hole and shaming happy participants in the brand, that definitely is. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

And because this is America, we're going to do this in three parts. I want to start by turning this scrutinizing eye back on detractors of the brand and look at the composition of the backlash itself. Then we're going to do run an in-depth look at some of the specific issues railed against Disney Princesses. And finally we're going to try to measure the fallout of the anti-princess backlash.

Pencil Sketch by Animator Marc Davis

Even Walt himself had a sort of delineation between which of his films were “princess” movies and which were not. Part of the reason for many of his artistic choices in Sleeping Beauty was because he knew it would be compared specifically to Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs versus films like Bambi or Pinocchio. But for all his marketing master schemes, Walt was actually against bundling up all his princess characters into one brand, fearing it would dilute the individual mythologies of the films. The move to unionize the princesses came much, much later.

It was in the year 2000 that Disney started packaging Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Mulan under the same banner, and they were immediately rewarded for it. The franchise is worth billions and is the undisputed leader in merchandise for young girls. This, of course, makes a certain crowd nervous. 

Legally Blonde (2001)

    Feminist schools of thought have long known that feminine interests and ideals have long been dubbed as lesser in the public eye. Female-branded entertainment especially faces an uphill battle in being seen as legitimate in a way that male-branded properties simply never have to, and this is especially true of media designed for children.

    There is a strand of unease over whether things like "Power Rangers" teach boys to solve their problems with violence, but I don’t think I’ve seen any New York Times op-eds about that. Even in the age of the girlboss, women young and old are just generally seen as being more susceptible to external influences. Society is conditioned to see women as more consumerist and less discerning. And this is part of the reason why it’s so easy to dump on something so inherently girly and come out looking like a feminist.

Academia has also internalized the belief that if this many people like something, it must be at best banal and untextured or at worst infectious and dangerous, especially as it pertains to children’s media. We have looked at this phenomenon in media in and out of Disney across a few essays, including my adaptational study of The Jungle Book. There is a certain credibility among critics if you can flash your disinterest in the Disney library, whether or not you have actually given its function in media more than a passing thought. The franchises’ corner on the market as the leading brand in girls’ merchandise gives a lot of people the confidence that it is safe to dump on this particular form of media. 

    But something that the Disney Princess discourse almost uniformly overlooks is how the brand manifests in two ways. (Actually, it manifests in like a bajillion different ways, but to keep some semblance of organization, let’s say they all fit into two major categories.) You have the films from Walt Disney Animated Studios, and then you have the merchandizing line of dolls, dresses, coloring books, backpacks, etc. featuring the heroines from said movies.

These two branches are generally discussed interchangeably, and what you often get as a result is critics of the mythology using the behavior of the latter to make claims about the former. Perhaps the most common example of this is the argument that because the merchandise pushes hair styling, make-up, and dresses aspect so aggressively, the princess characters themselves have little or no characterization and embody naught but the most antiquated ideas of femininity. 

    This overlooks how many of the princess characters follow storylines that have them reject labels and positions that are prescribed to them because of their gender, things like turning away demeaning marriages or participating in traditionally masculine pursuits like exploring or fighting. Even something like Snow White and Cinderella choosing kindness and hope in the face of opposition is in its way an act of defiance.

The princesses are feminine, yes, but they embody a healthy, optimistic vision of girlhood where femininity is not linked to shame, and this version of femininity covers a lot more than just wedding dresses or tiaras. Characters like Belle, Cinderella, and Rapunzel are champions of kindness and gentleness, traits that, like the women that embody them, are generally deemed secondary or auxiliary. But in this sphere, they are made front and center.

Again, the merchandising line is not always the best at representing this nuance. Mulan is almost always pictured in her matchmaker outfit because it's the pinkest thing she wears in the film, dancing around how Mulan is at her most miserable in this getup.

    This is also where you get things like dolls for Tiana paired with captions about how “all her life, Tiana wished to become a princess, and finally her wish came true,” a statement that outright contradicts Tiana’s characterization in her film. A part of her arc does entail her learning to appreciate the wisdom of fairy tales, and she does end the film as a princess, but she is very much a princess on her own terms, having successfully opened up her own restaurant in New Orleans. Either way, princess-hood is not something she had wished for as a child, and this xeroxing dialogue that people like Orenstein sell their points on has to be what Walt feared would happen if he bundled the princesses into a singular brand.

This also reinforces something I feel like we need to establish very early on in this argument: if you spend just five minutes fact-checking the criticisms thrown at Disney princesses, you quickly find that the princess characters have to answer for a lot of crap that they didn’t actually do. We talked earlier this year about how Ariel, for example, is held responsible for “changing herself to please her man,” which completely distorts the context in which Ariel decides to become human. Rescuing Eric from drowning (itself a plotpoint often buried in the discourse) was a catalyst for Ariel cashing in on a dream she’d held on to for a long time. That’s not something you’d catch onto if you engage only with seashell stickers.

    But by the same token, I also don’t think it marks some sign of arrested development if you’re buying Beauty and the Beast mugs into your forties. The “Disney Princess” brand is just one of many avenues in this nostalgia-laden capitalist ecosystem that we’re all called to walk through, and I think there are a lot of ways to do this responsibly. We could just as easily be having this discussion about "Harry Potter" or "Lord of the Rings."

To that, I also think that if critics are going to earnestly interrogate the function of the brand in this ecosystem, they themselves have a responsibility to consider the franchise in its totality. They have to be willing to look at something like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of like seven movies in the history of cinema that we can actually say changed the artform, and see more than just a shelf full of dress-up dolls. 

How the internet sees Walt Disney Animation

    Another one of the great ironies is that even though most of the discourse about The Walt Disney Company centers on their princess movies, those actually make up a small percentage of their output. We’re talking 10-12 movies out of just over 60 films from Walt Disney Animation Studios (plus the one from Pixar). Even if we’re going to choose to overlook underappreciated works like Oliver and Company and Treasure Planet, the lineup of prestigious Disney films counts movies like Pinocchio, The Lion King, or Peter Pan as well as female-led Disney films that exist outside of the Princess brand such as Lady and the Tramp, Alice in Wonderland, or Encanto. The internet tends to fixate on “Princess movies” exclusively and then use haphazard observations to try to make broad statements about the larger body of Disney Animation.

Chris Sanders, co-director of Lilo & Stitch, even mentioned being annoyed over the way Frozen made headlines as this gamechanger in the Disney canon as their first movie to focus on sisterhood instead of romance when his film did that very thing over ten years prior.  

“To be clear, I think ‘Frozen’ is great, but it was a little bit frustrating for me because people were like, ‘Finally, a non-romantic relationship with these two girls,’ and I thought, ‘We did that! That has absolutely been done before.'”

    Compounding the biases against female “princess” entertainment with the distrust the public has toward children’s media, and that leaves the Disney Princesses especially vulnerable to a certain kind of dialogue. This manifested in that deluge of memes and hot takes about Disney Princesses and the bad role models they presented to little girls. For a while in the 2000s and 2010s, proving you were literate in these diatribes was a reliable way to signal one’s social intelligence. Decriers of the brand often flash these microwave talking points in confidence that this demonstrates critical thinking, that they have unchained themselves from the wall in Plato’s Cave and are now carriers of insights about the human condition that lovers of the brand could never dream of. 

But in my experience, if you try to engage with these conversations in-person using evidence based on the films themselves (e.g. “If Ariel really changes herself for a man, then what do we make of Ariel singing about wanting to become a human even before she meets Eric?”) their response is the human equivalent of when you open up too many tabs on your PC and the whole system just freezes. If they ever emerge from this waking coma, their next avenue is usually some under the breath comment about “well what kind of person gives so much thought about Disney Princesses anyways?”

    The closest we have yet come to hard evidence that princesses are bad for your daughter came in a 2016 study published in Child Development led by Professor of Family Life, Sarah Coyne. This study reported that “engagement with Disney Princess culture isn’t so harmless—it can influence preschoolers to be more susceptible to potentially damaging stereotypes.” The reported issues included things like negative body image and stricter adherence to gender roles as byproducts of participating in princess culture. This confirmed a story a lot of people wanted to hear—“I told you, McKenna. If you keep taking Lexi to Disneyland, you’re gonna give her a complex!”

But when Coyne followed up on that initial study some five years later, the results were far less damning than the initial report suggested. The study was now suggesting that Disney princesses actually had a positive effect on kids. The report read,

“Our prior study found that in the short-term, princess culture had a negative effect. But this changes over time. We’re now seeing long-term positive effects of princess culture on how we think about gender.”

“Princess culture gives women key storylines where they’re the protagonist. They’re following their dreams, helping those around them, and becoming individuals who aren’t prescribed a role because of their gender.” 

The data also reported that it wasn’t just girls who benefited from exposure to princess mythology. 

“Boys who are exposed to princess culture earlier in life tend to do a better job expressing emotion in their relationships. Rather than shutting down their feelings or feeling like they should fight someone who challenges them, they can express their emotions in non-violent ways.”

Another study published in The Journal of Children and Media in 2020 looked even deeper at the subject, revealing,

 

“The research identified a shift from other critical discussion on the subject, showing that young girls find personal empowerment through the Disney princesses. 

“These girls are consumers who can discern the messages they are receiving. They are finding these role models, and not just because they are pretty, but because they are receiving the princesses in positive, uplifting ways.”

Maybe one day critics will find their study that empirically proves that Sleeping Beauty is the reason for the wage gap, but I’m not holding my breath. As time goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the pushback against the brand has never really been motivated by anything concrete and has floated entirely on stigma. 

    Not everyone needs to love Disney Princess films or the endless plushies they inspire. People are allowed to hate the brand if they want to, and the internet being what it is, they are allowed to air that opinion all they like. But it's long past time we retire this sentiment that people who hate on Disney Princesses have mastered some facet of critical thinking that lifelong fans of the brand have not. Anyone who says that a masterwork like Beauty and the Beast owes all of its popularity to pretty dresses and plastic crowns is just projecting their own lack of curiosity.

But lest we overcorrect into prepositions that Disney films should never be interrogated, our next episode will have us look at the most common talking points levied against the brand, measured against the films themselves, to see what, if any, merit said criticisms hold.

But I'm warning you here, the results will be very disappointing for a certain crowd.

--The Professor