Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 2

    As we discussed in the last section, Disney Princesses are often held accountable for things that did not actually happen in their films--things they did not do. I feel like a part of this is the means by which said scrutiny typically takes place. There is, after all, a sort of stigma around watching "cartoons" as an adult, especially "princess cartoons," let alone watching them intently. And so I feel like a lot of the conclusions people come to about Disney Princesses comes either entirely from second-hand sources, like the memes, or from having it on in the background while babysitting as they scroll through their phone. 

    I'll use an anecdote from my own history as an example: my very first week of film school, the professor drifted to the topic of female representation in the media. This professor dropped a sort of humble-brag that he had actually never seen Disney's Pocahontas, but that he didn't consider this a real omission because he'd learned long ago that those Disney Princess films brought nothing to the table. He made observation that many of these movies were made for girls, yet they had minimal female presence outside the princess characters themselves. (This observation is valid for only about half of the relevant films, and the films with the highest number of female speaking parts are actually Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, but nobody talks about that ...) 

   To prove his point, he polled one of the girls in the class, asking with a very self-assured smile "Well, is there another female character in that movie?" My classmate sort got the hint at the thing she needed to say to get in this professor's good graces, and she responded with, "It's borderline, I'll just say that." This professor then concluded his little bird walk with some take home proclamations about how we can't expect our kids to have a healthy sense of gender with Disney Princesses as the ringleaders of girlhood. 

    I found this specific example interesting because Pocahontas is actually one of those rare '90s Disney movies where it isn't borderline. Pocahontas has a human female best friend character named Nakoma who appears in multiple scenes and makes choices that impact the narrative, and she also has Grandmother Willow who serves as her main confidant and guide. 

    Yet this professor had a lot of confidence in his assessment anyways, which the rising generation of film scholars felt the need to internalize in order to be seen as "legitimate." (For reference, this actually was one of my favorite professors in college. I learned a lot from him, he just didn't know jack about Disney.) And that is how a lot of these ideas get transmitted. People tend to enter this conversation already knowing what answers they're looking for and usually throw their net in just long enough to feel assured of their assessments without ever having to dive in themselves. Again, does that mean these films are beyond scrutiny? No. But there is a lack of honesty in this discussion that needs to be reckoned with.

   By design, most of this discussion will center around the earliest princesses, especially Walt's princesses, since they are the characters who face the most backlash. When newer members like Tiana and Rapunzel face pushback, it is generally in the context of belonging to the princess club as a whole, and we'll look more at their place in all of this in the next section.

A lot of the biggest arguments tossed against classical Disney Princesses take a leaf from the larger conversations surrounding female representation, especially in classic Hollywood. There is validity to the notion that many of the expectations we have about things like female autonomy have only been consistently prioritized in recent years. 

    But the burden of proof tends to fall on fans of the mythology to demonstrate that their fandom isn’t promoting a form of toxic femininity, which takes a lot of things for granted. Skeptics don’t seem terribly interested in looking at these characters in the context of their stories. (Does it really count as such a character deficit for a sixteen-year-old girl who’s been raised alone in the woods since she was a baby to ruminate about how her world would be more entertaining if she had an active dating life? You be the judge.) Criticisms tend to fall into broad phrases such as “all they do is spend their time waiting for a prince to save them,” which make it easy for the lay-viewer to dismiss them.

The evidence cited for this tends to be that every Disney Princess movie has some kind of love song, and that the courtships themselves occur over one or two days or even a single interaction. (Should be noted this entire argument rests on the assumption that of all the magical devices inherent in the fairy-tale cinema, time jumps are not among them, but we don't need to get into that today.) But these motifs are not unique to the Disney fairy-tale, yet it’s only in that context that they receive such vicious pushback. 

    I’m reminded of something like the love story between Sarah and Kyle from The Terminator. Kyle comes into Sarah’s life for a very brief time, but we are meant to feel that this love is real, that their time together is going to change not only the course of Sarah’s life, but the fate of the human race as a whole. This is why it hurts so much when Kyle is killed. The fact that they were only together for a day or two obscures the reality that their time together was far too short, and that’s how it feels when a loved one is taken from you, however long you did have together. When you lose someone, it’s always too soon, and when you find love, it might as well have happened overnight. Once Upon a Dream. These ideas are not hard sells for the larger audiences, but embed them in an animated musical with castles and forest animals, and the whole prospect suddenly becomes dangerous.

    Yeah, The Terminator is "for adults," and Disney princesses are "for kids," but I don't think it's a loose comparison. In my experience adults are in many ways more likely to distort the intended readings of their pop media artifacts, especially with something like The Terminator. When people think of that movie, they don't think of the love story at its heart. They don't think of its treatise on the worth of human life. They think of Arnold Schwarzenegger machine gunning the police station and how awesome it was. If we really want to start running formal censuses on the ways audiences are abusing or misreading pop culture, there are perhaps better starting points to this conversation than Disney Princesses.

The weight of the pushback against Disney Princesses tends to hinge on a supposition that romance is the only thing these girls think about, but how accurate is this assessment? Romance typically happens for the princesses, but it's assuming a lot to say that all of their dreams--or even most of their dreams--revolve around a big handsome man. To give ourselves a proper framework, let's quickly scan through the princesses--let's just say those who have been part of the line since its inception in 2000--and verify which of their goals and wants actually revolved around true love.

Snow White: starts the film singing about the one she loves finding her, check. Cinderella: this one tends to trip people up, but her interest is in the act of dreaming itself--even the possibility of her going to the ball is framed more as her getting a night out, and the movie is halfway over before she even mentions the prince, pass. Aurora: sings about someone bringing a love song to her, check. Ariel: borderline, her first stated desires are exclusively about wanting to live among the humans, but it is after she falls in love with one that she finally puts these dreams in motion. Again, borderline, but we'll be generous and say, check. Belle: sings about wanting more than this provincial life and then proceeds to reject a demeaning courtship, pass. Jasmine: again, dismisses multiple unworthy suitors and is more concerned about her autonomy as a woman in a patriarchal system, pass. Pocahontas: yet another princess who spends more time exploring than dating, pass. Mulan: her focus is on having a healthy self-image and she is in fact traumatized by her society's efforts to tailor her into an appealing bride, hard pass.

    Even if we are going to accept Orenstein's claim that singing love songs equates depending on a man, the chances of your daughter's favorite princess landing one of the romantic ones is less than heads or tails. And again, this is not counting the half-dozen princesses added to the line in the time since, which would bring that ratio down even further.

But this argument still rubs me wrong because even in their earliest, most romantic, iteration, the Disney princesses were never blank ornaments for their male love interests to collect. They were the emotional cores of their respective films. We experience the story through their hopes and fears without the mediation of a male lead to legitimize their stories. On that note, I'm also not bothered by how the early princes themselves had little characterization and behaved like little more than accessories to the stories of the princesses, a fact of reality that has more to do with the limits of animation at the time than whether or not Disney understood how relationships worked.

    In the case of Snow White especially, the non-presence of The Prince actually works against that line about the princess having no identity outside her man. The fact that The Prince is absent for much of the story means that Snow White spends most of her film developing and interacting in a system independent of any love object. She sings a couple of songs about a guy? Well, she also has a few numbers that aren’t. You could say she was thinking about her prince, but there are also more pressing matters on her mind (re: how am I going to survive in this dark new world where my stepmother is trying to kill me, and are these seven little fools going to wash their hands for dinner or what?) that she is more actively responding to. 

And for someone who reportedly can’t be happy without her man, Snow White actually keeps in really good spirits during that whole middle of the film where her prince is out of sight. She’s having meaningful interactions with both the dwarves and the animals, she’s investing time and energy into house projects, etc. she appears to be fully capable of being happy without a boy to tell she’s pretty. That is kind of the point of her character. That is why people actually respond to her story. Not just because she has a fancy dress. Not because the Disney overlords hath decreed it so. Snow White still resonates because in a world where Evil Queens are actively out to destroy the pure and innocent, Snow White’s evergreen kindness and goodness reminds us that happily ever after is possible in any circumstance.

    A recurring theme in these movies is that the kindness you put into the world ultimately comes back to you. The films generally culminate with the princesses caught in some trap only to be saved by their loved ones--a circle that is often much larger than their prince exclusively. Cinderella spent her entire life watching out for the small things of the world, and the climax of her movie has the mice and the birds returning the favor by banding together to get her out of her locked room so she can claim her slipper. That is not a random phenomenon that the patriarchy only bestows upon those it deems pretty. It is a natural consequence of the way Cinderella has decided to live her life and the impact she has left on her world.

And this is another reason why the line about the princes always coming in to save the day irritates me. It’s seldom, if ever, as simple as the princes doing all the work. Sleeping Beauty in particular tends to be hoisted up as an example of promoting female passivity, but in order to make that argument work, you have to ignore how Prince Phillip is only able to perform his heroic true love’s kiss after the three fairies sponsor his jailbreak.

    This is also where you run into some very warped claims about these films literally promoting sexual assault through something like true love's kiss awakening the princesses from their enchanted sleep, an argument that absolutely strips these moments of all their context. Again, the narrative devices of both music and animation allow these romances to develop and blossom over the course of a 75-minute film, typically (though not always) faster than they might develop in romances of the live-action variety; ergo, Snow White and Aurora are understood to be in loving relationships with their respective princes by the time true love's kiss happens. Trying to force a parallel between this and things like the forced underreporting of rape crimes actively harms the conversation around sexual assault by distorting how these things are perpetuated, and we'd all be better off for leaving this talking point in the past. Moving on ...

Something frequently overlooked in discussion of Walt’s princesses especially is the inner strength they exhibit. Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora are all subjected to extreme tribulation at the hands of powerful malevolent forces, and yet they overcome. Fixating on “why doesn’t Cinderella just self-actualize and force her evil stepmother out of her house like a girlboss?” devalues the victory of maintaining one’s values and sense of worth when circumstances feel out of your control (and also reads a lot like victim blaming). Not only do these women survive their ordeals, but they manage to hold onto their light even as the darkness seeks to extinguish them. They are resilient. They are strong.

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

    Is that the only kind of strength female characters should get to demonstrate? Of course not, no one is saying it should. Young girls deserve exposure to a wide variety of role models, not just from those served by the Walt Disney company, but in the larger media landscape. And I also think there is validity to the idea that what little girls needed in 1959 might be different than what girls need in 2023 (and what girls will need in 2067), and so we shouldn’t feel the need to resist new and diverse representations of princess-dom. 

But even as the kinds of strength that women are allowed to exhibit onscreen has expanded, in and out of Disney, the dialogue around characters like Cinderella has not shifted. Young girls over the last fifteen years have grown up seeing Disney heroines on the big screen like Rapunzel, Tiana, Anna, Elsa, and Moana. All of these characters get to exhibit a brand of empowerment that is tailored more specifically to the demands of the 21st century, yet that hasn’t balanced the scale in how classical princesses are discussed. If this pushback was ever just about expanding the range of female characters girls are exposed to, then why is it still so controversial for Disney to premiere a version of Snow White that is romantic?

For how invested these parties seem to be in safeguarding young girls and helping them to have a healthy self-image, it is curious that none of them seem all that concerned about the long-term effects of being told all your life that femininity is weakness. 

This rhetoric is something that Disney fans are used to facing from outside sources. But a relatively recent development has been the way that The Walt Disney Company has started to internalize this dialogue. Heaven knows if that is something we'll ever recover from, but it is something we'll be looking at in-depth in our concluding section.

        --The Professor