強ければ生き (original) (raw)
I see a lot of commentary, images, and blogs about the things Disney teaches young girls; if you're pretty enough a prince will rescue you from your terrible life; clearly, being rescued by a powerful man is the only way out of said terrible life; love at first sight is actually a thing and obviously you'll live happily ever after.
Obviously.
Okay, I'm going to pause here because these are not things I learned from Disney as a young girl who loved their movies (and cartoons and TV shows). These are things that, looking back with an analytic eye I can pull from the stories, especially the princess stories, but when I was 6, 8, 12, these things were not on my mind. I would like to thank all of my English teachers for helping grow the ability to look at stories and read between the lines, but prior to high school and actually sitting and analyzing the stories I was totally in love with, none of the alleged "problems" ever even crossed my mind.
So was I subject to some subliminal messaging that made me into a swooning damsel in distress? Well, if you consider a girl who was simultaneously in love with Indiana Jones and Spock and whose dreams were either to be an archaeologist or an astronaut a swooning damsel waiting for a knight in shining armor to rescue her from reality, then maybe. Only I don't. Children have limited abilities to actively pursue their goals, but I found every way possible to pursue mine. I joined clubs, youth programs, made my way to space camp, studied everything I could find on aerospace, astronomy, engineering, and history (leaning towards astronaut, still loved old things). But in my non-study time, you bet I was day dreaming about being a mermaid or dancing in a gold ball gown. Of course I was also day dreaming about being a swing kid in Nazi Germany or alternately trying to place myself in the Hitler Youth and understand what that might have been about. I also day dreamed about being King Arthur's daughter (shush, he had one in my day dreams) and having knights compete to win my hand. Those invariably ended up with me kicking their asses in the tournament as the concealed Black Knight.
Did I think any of this was real? No. Did I ever actually think lions, warthogs, and meerkats would play and sing together and not kill each other in the wild? No. But it was nice to think about.
Here's the deal with me. Through high school, even college, I could count the number of people at any given time who might have been friends on one hand. Most of the time it was one, maybe two people. For a few years, notably in fifth and sixth grade, there was nobody. I tried, was in scouts, dancing, tried out for the basketball team, hung out with the cool girls for a few weeks even, and all of it ended with twelve year old me hating every moment I had to be in school. Seventh grade was marginally better in some respects - I had two people who would acknowledge me without being assholes, one I even considered a friend - but overall I had little success with social interactions. For friends, I had my brother, who was busy with his life, and my day dreams.
By seventh grade I was day dreaming that I was a Romulan (alternately Vulcan) exchange student and the earthlings were freaking weird - but it was okay because soon I would go home. Then the school day ended and I got to properly ignore the world by sticking my nose in a book on the bus. Hey, I wasn't too weird. Belle did that too, and of all the characters in that story, she was the only one I actually liked. Why would I want to be, or be associated with, someone like Gaston or his fan girls? Then I would actually get home and play songs from the Lion King or Little Mermaid on the piano. Sometimes I'd sing to them, imagining myself as a prince about to become king with the world in front of me (what a rush!) or that if I sang this song well enough I would actually be part of someone else's world at some point, almost like a prayer (these were my sad days).
Did I expect to be taken to an alien planet? No, which is the same answer as to the question of whether I believed someone would fall in love with me simply because of my voice (which is actually pretty good).
The point isn't what sort of fantasies stories foster. The little girl I was alternated between a hopeless romantic to surprisingly morbid and dark and back to wanting to dress up in ball gowns and dance (not that I would because I was a tomboy and wouldn't be caught dead in a skirt or dress). Any story, or no story at all, was fuel for my day dreams. The point is that even though I spent most of my day in La La Land, it was just that, La La Land.
Reality was different. Reality sucked. Reality is what taught me my life lessons. Would that I had taken from Disney the lesson that some people really do just want to hurt you for the sake of hurting you. Disney got ideas about beauty all wrong, but I didn't get my ideas about beauty from Disney or really from movies at all for that matter. I saw the girls getting all the attention at school and I thought that it must be because they were pretty. To me, their faces looked nasty, probably because whenever they were turned toward me they were making nasty faces or being generally mean, so pretty wasn't in the face. It was the way they dressed; whatever clothing brand was popular (Tommy Hilfiger for elementary, Abercrombie for high school); always neat and spotless, hair always perfectly styled; and instant smiles that everybody seemed to love. That, to me, was my understanding of beauty by the end of elementary school. Disney had nothing to do with it.
Disney didn't teach me anything. It gave me fantasies and escapes. It gave me silly little hopes that someday my prince would come on a white horse, brandishing a sword, or maybe on a motorcycle with an extra helmet for me. I knew these were fantasies. I willfully chose to ignore reality and spend my time in La La Land, knowing full well that dreams in La La Land do not carry over into reality. I wasn't a genius, and it doesn't take a genius to understand that fish don't talk, lions don't make friends with meerkats, tea cups don't serve tea by themselves, and if Prince Charming does exist, he's probably an ass and is definitely not perfect, just like everybody else on the planet.
There are a lot of things that influence kids and how they perceive the world. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on all of them, and I realize some experts point to media as being a big culprit in girls' negative image of themselves. As an adult, I can see this. As a kid, I had other things to worry about. I'm not saying that we should promote more stories like the classic princess tales. While I'm not a huge fan of many of the newer Disney movies, some have been fantastic. I freaking love Merida and love Disney & Pixar for that story. It was like they took one of my day dreams, made my character into an archer, and made a movie about her. Should we attack it and complain that she's too skinny? That it represents a "traditional" family with married heterosexual parents? That in the end she still is going to have to marry one of the guys from another clan? There has never been, nor will there ever be a perfect story that teaches all the right moral lessons. Morality changes, but as long as the good guy still wins and the bad guy gets beaten in the fairy tales, kids have something good to look up to in their fantasies.
Moral of this story: give kids some credit. Let them have their fantasies and assume they're smart enough to figure out the difference between that and reality.