Please read this article from the Washington Post hereLinks to an external site.
Then please discuss the following with respect, recognizing that different backgrounds will mean different perspectives:
1. What is your initial impression of the article?
2. How has gendered/sexist communication (any experience, not just Disney) impacted your own view of gender?
3. What would be your suggestion for how we as a society should move forward?
Wonkblog
Researchers have found a major problem with ‘The Little Mermaid’ and other Disney movies
By Jeff Guo January 25, 2016
Play Video 1:26
The problem with Disney princess movies
Researchers have found that princesses in Disney movies don’t talk as much as you’d expect. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)
To modern eyes, the classic trio of Disney princess films — released in 1937, 1950 and 1959 — can seem painfully retrograde. Why are characters so obsessed with Snow White’s looks? Why doesn’t Cinderella have any talents or hobbies? And why doesn’t Sleeping Beauty do anything besides get drugged and await rescue?
A generational gap divides Disney’s princess franchise. After 1959’s “Sleeping Beauty,” it took 30 years for the studio to produce another animated princess feature. The intervening decades saw dramatic change. Walt Disney died. Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique.” The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington.
In 1989, when Disney finally released “The Little Mermaid,” critics praised this modern new heroine. Unlike her predecessors, “Ariel is fully realized female character who thinks and acts independently, even rebelliously,” Roger Ebert wrote. The New York Times called her “a spunky daredevil.”
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And yet, in one respect, “The Little Mermaid” represented a backward step in the princess genre. For a film centered on a young woman, there’s an awful lot of talking by men. In fact, this was the first Disney princess movie in which the men significantly outspoke the women.
And it started a trend. The plot of “The Little Mermaid,” of course, involves Ariel literally losing her voice — but in the five Disney princess movies that followed, the women speak even less. On average in those films, men have three times as many lines as women.
The data come from linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer, who have been working on a project to analyze all the dialogue from the Disney princess franchise. Because so many young girls watch these movies — often on constant repeat — it’s worth examining what the films are teaching about gender roles.
“We don’t believe that little girls naturally play a certain way or speak a certain way,” says Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College. “They’re not born liking a pink dress. At some point we teach them. So a big question is where girls get their ideas about being girls.”
The Disney princess research is still in its preliminary stages, but a few weeks ago, Fought and Eisenhauer gave a preview during the nation’s largest conference of linguists. Their goal is to use data to shed light on how the male and female characters in these films talk differently. They started by counting how often the characters spoke. That’s when they hit upon a surprising irony.
In the classic three Disney princess films, women speak as much as, or more than the men. “Snow White” is about 50-50. “Cinderella” is 60-40. And in “Sleeping Beauty,” women deliver a whopping 71 percent of the dialogue. Though these were films created over 50 years ago, they give ample opportunity for women to have their voices heard.
By contrast, all of the princess movies from 1989-1999 — Disney’s “Renaissance” era — are startlingly male-dominated. Men speak 68 percent of the time in “The Little Mermaid”; 71 percent of the time in “Beauty and the Beast”; 90 percent of the time in “Aladdin”; 76 percent of the time in “Pocahontas”; and 77 percent of the time in “Mulan” (Mulan herself was counted as a woman, even when she was impersonating a man).
Part of the problem is that these newer films are mostly populated by men. Aside from the heroine, the films offer few examples of women being powerful, respected, useful or comedic.
“There’s one isolated princess trying to get someone to marry her, but there are no women doing any other things,” Fought says. “There are no women leading the townspeople to go against the Beast, no women bonding in the tavern together singing drinking songs, women giving each other directions, or women inventing things. Everybody who’s doing anything else, other than finding a husband in the movie, pretty much, is a male.”
The older princess films had fewer speaking roles in total, and more gender balance. But “The Little Mermaid” pioneered a new style of Disney movie, modeled after Broadway musicals, with their large ensemble casts. As the number of characters grew, so did the gender inequality.
“My best guess is that it’s carelessness, because we’re so trained to think that male is the norm,” says Eisenhauer, a graduate student at North Carolina State. “So when you want to add a shopkeeper, that shopkeeper is a man. Or you add a guard, that guard is a man. I think that’s just really ingrained in our culture.”
The chatty sidekick is another good example of a role that goes to men by default. This is a staple character in more recent Disney films, and he — yes, he — often gets some of the best lines. There’s Flounder, Sebastian, Lumiere, Cogsworth, Iago, Genie and Mushu. Why can’t any of them be women? Mrs. Potts, the teakettle from “Beauty and the Beast,” is the only example of a female sidekick, and she’s overshadowed by the other castle staff.
After “Mulan” (1998), Disney took a 10-year break before releasing its next series of princess films. These newer films are better at giving lines to men and women equally. In “Tangled,” women have 52 percent of the lines, and in “Brave,” a film about a mother-daughter relationship, they had 74 percent.
“Frozen” breaks with that trend, though. Despite being a story about two sister princesses, men claim 59 percent of the lines in that film.
It’s of course incomplete to judge a film just by the number of words that women say. What the characters say is equally important. So far, Fought and Eisenhauer’s analysis has focused on compliments. They have categorized every bit of praise in every Disney princess film to see how the way that women are talked about has changed over time.
Here is where the trend is positive. The classic Disney princess films were focused on looks. More than half of the compliments that women received — 55 percent — had to do with their appearance. Only 11 percent had to do with their skills or accomplishments. (People could also be complimented for other reasons, like their possessions or their personality.)
Some psychologists counsel parents not to compliment children, especially young girls, on their looks. Even positive comments may lead to body-image problems because they reinforce the idea that appearances are important. Furthermore, studies suggest that it’s better to praise children for their efforts or accomplishments rather than their traits — better to say “you aced that test!” than “you are really smart!” — because children are more motivated when complimented on their efforts.
The “Renaissance”-era princess films, from the ’90s, have a better record in this regard. About 38 percent of the compliments given to women had to do with their looks, while nearly a quarter of the compliments had to do with their abilities or deeds.
In the latest batch of films — “The Princess and the Frog,” “Tangled,” “Brave,” and “Frozen” — the pattern is finally reversed. For the first time, women are more likely to be praised for their skills or achievements than for their looks. On average in these films, 40 percent of compliments directed at women involve their abilities or accomplishments, while only 22 percent involve physical appearances.
(Courtesy of Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer)
Part of this may have to do with the people at the helm of these more recent movies. “Frozen” and “Brave” were both conceived, written and directed by women or a team that included women. Brenda Chapman, who created “Brave,” has said that she specifically wanted to smash the stereotype of the Disney princess movie. “Merida was created specifically to break that mold,” Chapman told an online parenting website. “She was created to turn the regular Disney princess on its head.”
“I think that Disney has responded very well to calls that, frankly, have been a long time coming,” says Dawn England, a PhD student at Arizona State who has published research on how men and women behave in Disney princess movies. She says there needs to be more studies on how children process these films, to understand how these portrayals of gender affect young minds — though that’s hard to do because the images are so widespread.
The studio, at least, has been making visible efforts to inject feminism into its movies. “There’s a long way to go, but there’s been an undeniable shift toward these more androgynous princesses,” England says.
Belle, from 1991’s “Beauty and the Beast” for instance, was designed as a feminist role model. Disney executives brought in Linda Woolverton, the first woman to write the script for an animated Disney film. Woolverton modeled Belle on Katharine Hepburn in “Little Women” — “both strong, active women who loved to read,” she told the L.A. Times in 1992.
Disney is clearly proud of its efforts to modernize the princess movie genre, but it has a lot of work to do. “If you watch the behind-the-scenes documentaries, there’s so much explicit discourse on what the princess is going to be like, and always it’s a feminist discourse in some way,” Eisenhauer says. “They want her to be powerful. But the discourse never, ever, seems to have gone beyond the princess.”
Fought and Eisenhauer’s research reminds us that it’s not just how the princesses are portrayed. It’s also important to consider the kinds of worlds these princesses inhabit, who rules these worlds, who has the power — and even who gets to open their mouths. In a large number of cases, the princesses are outspoken by men in their own movies.
“The Renaissance-era movies starting with ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ were talked about as being not your average frilly princess films,” Fought says. “They have ‘active women who get things done.'”
“That’s fine, but are these movies really so great for little girls to watch? When you start to look at this stuff, you have to question that a little bit.”
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Jeff Guo is a reporter covering economics, domestic policy, and everything empirical. He’s from Maryland, but outside the Beltway.
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Jessica Lindsay
2/7/2016 6:29 AM PST
Did these researchers REALLY, genuinely think Jasmine was meant to be the main character of Aladdin – a film named after the male lead?
It’s a film about a MALE character. Of course most of the dialogue is by men.
And I can’t believe they discounted the songs from each film. The songs aren’t a break from the plot, they reveal some of the biggest plot points and character arcs IN each film. You cannot do a study on a MUSICAL and discount the music.
This study looks like it was performed by teenagers – not professionals at a university.
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Craig N
2/7/2016 3:31 AM PST
Please help me find the research that studied the impact of the growing cast of Disney (and other animated) characters on the trend toward anthropomorphism. I would have to think that a childhood filled with talking animals would have a huge impact on how we view the role of animals in society. I would have to think that when the mouse, the duck and the dog started talking we starting blurring the lines between people and animals. Interesting that we have hundreds of video games where people blow up other people in the name of entertainment and we just put an age warning on it. I’m not a video game person but I don’t see ads for games where the goal is to blow up as many dogs and cats as possible. That might actually offend someone.
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1
Thanny
2/4/2016 3:46 PM PST
You have a typo in the title. You put Researchers where it should be “Researchers”.
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Pter Molnr
2/4/2016 4:51 AM PST
Let me help you out:
There you go, now you are educated.
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Peter Pardi
2/3/2016 4:11 PM PST
Has to be official research if it has bar charts.
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Tyson Steele
2/2/2016 1:06 PM PST [Edited]
The Lord of the Rings is a story about how much better Orcs are than men, because when the Orcs all yell out at Helm’s deep in The Two Towers, they have a higher ratio of lines than the men at the wall. J.R.R. Tolkien thinks humans are inferior to Orcs. Hopefully we can look forward to a future where kids can see the value of human life.
All joking aside, I agree with the author that Disney movies can negatively influence children, and I like what was said about psychology of compliments. But I struggle with the article using such precise calculations and numerical data to make up literary criticism. It seems so trivial to put so much emphasis on the numbers (which was more or less mentioned, I concede). Take this example: I once read a slave narrative about a black man in the 1700s who escaped the slave trade. In his escape, he saw a lot of white men. If it were a movie, the white men would get a lot of screen time. Is the black character a weak character because he is outnumbered by white men on the screen? No. I think strong characters should be determined by what they were able to accomplish within the social structures they operated in. For the case of Disney princesses, it was about qualities of beauty and finding a husband, unfortunately. Today, that would be a bad thing, but if you explain the background of the situation to kids watching the film, I think they are smart enough to recognize that the characters still have strengths and that those strengths don’t necessarily translate to what we consider strengths today. I think too many critics of film, literature, and art today try to insinuate that the only way to be a strong character is to break the social structures. While I personally believe that breaking social structures is the ultimate heroic act, I believe that it is not always possible for every character, and that should not make that character’s journey any less viable. Sadly, P.C. characters do not reflect real-life human experience.
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isolate
2/2/2016 12:32 PM PST
Two women “researchers” with too much time on their hands and a desire to bowdlerize all cartoons down to a 50-50 gender representation. I can hardly wait until they “investigate” Shakespeare and start demanding revisions to depict equal gender roles.
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bpai_99
2/2/2016 10:36 AM PST
Obviously, the solution is for Disney to incorporate more waitresses, wives, hairdressers and damsels in distress into its plot lines. Problem solved.
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per89
2/2/2016 10:19 AM PST
It’s a frickin’ cartoon, get over it. Nobody cares except people who make a living pointing these things out. All three of my daughters grew up watching all of the mentioned shows and they all grew up to be strong, educated, self-reliant women. I think that the fact that we never steered them to be anything except what they wanted to be allowed them to be their own persons, stupid cartoons not withstanding. They were no more affected by Cinderella’s simple mindedness than we (all parents) were affected by Wylie Coyote’s proclivity for violence.
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Millennial Lawyer
2/2/2016 8:31 AM PST
“They’re not born liking a pink dress.”
This is patently false in the experience of many parents.
There is a ton of diversity in our personalities and everyone’s a little different . . . . But at the same time, there are general differences between men and women.
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P-G
2/2/2016 10:55 AM PST
It’s totally true. The preference for pink is completely culturally constructed, to the point that in the 1920s, for example, pink was considered the color for boys and blue for girls, and there have been other reversals as well as other colors. “Experience” can easily fool you if you don’t pay enough attention.
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surgres
2/2/2016 7:13 AM PST
Instead of looking at the gender distribution by case, look at the number of lines spoken by each character. Having a lot of insignificant male characters with few lines is hardly “sexist.”
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Good for YOU
2/2/2016 6:45 AM PST
Why do parents mindlessly get in line and keep spending their hard earned money on all the Disney trash that pollutes young children’s minds with the lamest of gender and social – society stereotypes?
DISNEY = GARBAGE ENTERTAINMENT!
Great parenting means staying off the Disney track!
Aren’t there at least a dozen other things you could have exposed your children to that were fun, educational, healthy (sports or exercise outside) and stimulated actual thought ?
Instead they got totally useless garbage Disney movies and TV shows wasting valuable learning years…pathetic
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1
L2191
2/2/2016 5:43 AM PST
I won’t argue about the whether the shopkeeper has to be male, but if you look at the era these movies were made in, most professions were occupied by men. This even includes female characters in plays if you look back to the ancient Greeks. So yes, if you want to add a guard, that guard should logically be male.
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Andrew Lynch
2/1/2016 10:06 PM PST
Hey, first off, what a great comment thread. Nearly free of hysteria. Refreshing.
The study itself, as others have pointed out, is marginally interesting. Because it’s about volume instead of context, it doesn’t stand on its own as the basis for an article like the one I just read. Few words that mean a lot always outweigh a lot of words that mean little. A linguistic pass at this study, to go to the level of pragmatics, would be much more interesting. Who cares how much they talked (or sang)? What are they SAYING?
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lisalizzie
2/1/2016 12:53 PM PST
Beauty and the Beast is about how if you just love a violent abusive man enough, he’ll change. Some role model.
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