Disney Princesses, Damsels In Distress

Disney Princesses, Damsels In Distress

Disney Princesses: Damsels in Distress
Disney princesses are role models to girls all over the world. Girls grow up wanting to look like and be princesses in the hopes of finding true love and living a happily ever after. With every Disney princess movie, the story is different yet the theme tends to remain the same: a damsel in distress having to depend on the prince or the male figure to save the day. It seems as if women are viewed as a type of commodity. These characters are role models to the children that watch Disney movies and they are reinforcing stereotyped behavior by depicting males as using forceful behavior and females as submissive..making it okay for the children to absorb this type of sexism. The movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) portrays the princess as a sweet, defenseless, young woman who dreams of true love. In Disney’s Mulan (1998), the young woman is portrayed to be a strong and fierce individual, something that Disney movies took a long time to incorporate into their films. These Disney movies definitely reflect the era in which they are made and show how far females have come in terms of how society views them. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the princess is forced to run away due to her evil stepmother’s plans to kill her. She escapes and discovers a cottage with 7 little dwarfs. She immediately begins to cook and clean for them as if she were their mother, displaying signs of being nothing more than a homemaker. She dreams of having her prince charming come rescue her and sweep her off her feet and when she’s poisoned by her evil stepmother, her man comes to the save the day a little while later and awakens her from the coma by true love’s first kiss. This is typical of Disney's movies. Young women are naturally happy home-makers; they wait (like Snow White in her coma) until a man comes along to give them life. This teaches a sort of stereotype where women are unable to save themselves, and only obtain skills that...