Does disney make you a bad feminist mum??

[MumWithAllTheQus]

I always think about stuff like this when I'm watching Disney with my kids.... but how to be combat it? Chat it out with our kids? Assume it just goes over their heads anyway? Stop them watching it?

www.parentingpod.com/5-fave-disney-heroines/

What do you think?

Sorry that isn't much help, I abhor Disney for a variety of reasons not least the depictions of women. We just didn't do Disney when my kids were little (much easier then as they didn't own fucking everything).

That said I don't think it will do a great deal of harm, sadly kids are going to be bombarded with terrible messages from a million different sources. One more or less wont make a difference.

OOps I messed up the editing of that post. Sorry.

I think the actual heroines these days are OK. But I hate Disney's policy of not bothering to market kick-ass heroines (Rae, Black Widow), to girls because they reckon they've got that market all sewn up with the decorative princesses - their products still even involve some of the old-school princesses (SB, Cind) who don't deserve any further relevance in this generation. But we're still getting them shoved at us.

Ditto/reverse with marketing to boys.

TL:DR whilst some of their actuel filmmaking can be mould-breaking and relevant, the corporation as a whole ruins it with their crappy [sexist, racist] policies.

Love that, so true with the dress up and marketing

Love that, so true with the dress up and marketing

The more recent films are ok. I was totally shocked when I started watching the "classics" with DD though.

Snow White, Cinderella etc. are so incredibly sexist! Peter Pan is sexist AND racist. Funny how I never realised that when I was DD's age.

We do still watch Disney films, but I make sure we have some kind of informal "debrief" afterwards, so DD knows that even though it was in the film, it's not OK for someone to kiss you without consent, that girls can do a lot more than sewing and cooking, etc.

You can blame Disney if you want to, but note that Snow White and Cinderella come from European folk stories, and Peter Pan is more recent but not Disney's idea.

Also, Disney is selling something that a hell of a lot of people want to buy. Who deserves the blame for that?

I love a bit of Disney. We talk about it during/after so I think DS (4) has an appropriate understanding of the major issues with it, and it's counterbalanced with plenty of more agreeable books etc.

I've been deliberately avoiding Snow White (sexism) and Peter Pan (racism), because I think they're both at a level that's so offensive no amount of context and criticism is going to make it ok, and it's not like there aren't hundreds of other, better, films to see and things to do...

NB: DS(6.8) has a range of Disney films, and voluntarily eschews the earlier ones, preferring at least the Menken-era onward. I would like to think some of it is my feminism rubbing off on him (like PPs, we watch in context of chatting about what's fair, good and bad, etc). But, also, some of the earlier films are just boring! (to him, and me, too!) - plotlines less developed, characters less fleshed-out, and the animation has, of course, come leaps and bounds since Snow White!

Of course, that's true of filmmaking in general - modern audiences can process plotlines and nuances faster than previous generations.

But come out of the cinema and look at the toyshelves in the shops and the fancy-dress selection, and you get the rest of the picture: you can watch what you like, but if you're a girl, you have a hard time finding something that doesn't involve a huge sparkly dress.

It's a guilty pleasure, not great but it could be worse. I do provide a running commentary/critique when I'm watching the films with kids, and I remember that the people who did the hard work of making the film and the Disney corporation's ferocious marketing department are two separate entities with two different end goals in mind, and bar the executive meddling in the early stages from said marketing department they have little to do with each other.

Plus the bare bones nature of the early films means the animators spent more time on the slapstick involving the mice/dwarves/fairies who were much easier to animate than the realistic human characters, as sexist as the media was at the time it was also an organic problem.

I consider myself a feminist, more in the economic sense than the mumsnet hard feminist stance I sometimes see and I couldn't give a shiny shite about Disney. My daughter has the princesses.. at least there's one of each colour these days.

Chat it out, even from a young age. This shit is everywhere, not just Disney so it's an opportunity to start the conversation. MIL is totally obsessed with getting the DDs into Disney classics, they find Cinderella etc. dull so I don't encourage it. Some of the modern Disney stuff is better, Brave, Frozen, etc.