On Our Radar: Banned Books, Sex Talk, and Being a Bad Feminist

The Disney Princess video made me cringe actually, it's another list of standards that girls need to adhere to. There's no: "It's OK to be human, to cry sometimes, to be angry sometimes, to fail". It's very much aimed at making girls fitting into one kind of life style. Notice also how the emphasis is on family. But what if you have shitty parents? It has a faux-diversity feel to it, which tries to simulate inclusiveness, but actually leaves out many (fat kids, kids with maybe a scar int heir face, but also kids who might not like their family, who are not so talented etc).

It's the Dove commercial, but then for little girls.

PS: This is not meant as a rant against the girls in the video, they are lovely.

I very much agree with the commenter above; the disney-video shows a faux-diversity. It's constructed very carefully and is really playing into the genre-specific demands of female-empowering texts, stories or videos. It makes it feel fake when they're pulling out all the right moves because we like them, and not because they themselves belive in them.
However - the video is cute!

That Disney video isn't cute, it's nauseating. Preaching empowerment of girls when not a single one of the girls in the video is even close to being of average looks or weight - and I'm asking for average here, not for a variety of representation of looks and body sizes and types, cause that clearly wouldn't ever happen. But so heart warming. I mean girls of way above average looks of the advertising cereal variety are able to shoot arrows and play drums! As if we didn't know that already. And if they're good daddy's little girls they may even get to repair a car. How sweet. Some of them are BOTH Asian AND capable of heartwarming emotional depth. Oh my. Inspirational.

Now the girls who weren't blessed with impeccable bone structure, flawless skin, a slim figure and an all around perfectly "princess-like" physique will know what their lives could have looked like if they were born with a bit more privilege. They can look on, watch princess videos and dream of reincarnation.

The better than nothing approach is not good enough in this case. Children at that age are more aware of the beauty privilege than of race or color. Gender stereotypes have already done some harm for sure, but the beauty privilege is what is actively causing pain and discrimination in primary school yards. Reinforcing that in the name of corporate slacktivism is just... I seriously don't know what the right adjective is there.

Meh. This ruined my morning, mainly because I saw some of the commentary surrounding it. Why are intelligent people willing to buy into this crap?